Jean-Louis Cohen
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, English
Nonfiction, Architecture
9.5 x 12 inches, hardcover, 400 pages, 500 black-and-white and color illustrations
ISBN: 9780870708510
Suggested Retail Price: $75.00

From the Publisher. In June 2013, The Museum of Modern Art will present the largest exhibition ever produced on Le Corbusier, encompassing his work as architect, interior designer, artist, city planner, writer, and photographer. Over a six- decade career, this towering figure of modern culture constantly observed and imagined landscapes using all the artistic techniques at his command, including water- color, drawing, painting, photography, and model making.

Reflecting the geographic extension of Le Corbusier’s designs and built works as well as his indefatigable wanderlust, the publication is structured as an atlas, with topographical entries allowing for the discovery of the major sites and cities in which the architect worked. Appearing 25 years after the Centre Pompidou’s landmark catalogue Le Corbusier, une encyclopédie, it is a new sourcebook, giving an account of research developed worldwide in recent decades. Featuring essays by a range of international curators, scholars, and critics, and a trove of archival images and materials from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, this lavishly illustrated volume presents a wholly unique way to explore the life and work of one of the most important visionaries of our time.

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Mark Lamster

This book accompanies an unwieldily scattershot show that was not successful in defending its thesis that Le Corbusier was “profoundly rooted in nature in landscape,” except in the most anodyne reading of that phrase. The catalogue is similarly unwieldy, but in this case diversity is a strength.

A great omnibus of Le Corbusier scholarship, it presents nearly 75 essays on the master’s works, organized in “atlas” form. (Each continent is represented with a wonderful graphic showing built and unbuilt works, and the architect's travels.) The essays vary in relative interest and brio, but the whole makes for an indispensable and handsome resource to be sampled with great pleasure.

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