We hear a lot that the future of books is in weightless digital downloads. No more bulky volumes cluttering up your apartment. They must not have gotten the news at Phaidon, the art and architecture book publisher. Over the last few years they’ve been going the other way, turning out a few giant books, volumes much bigger than ordinary coffee table books. Some of them could double as coffee tables themselves.
The latest is Le Corbusier Le Grand, which lives up to its name, at least in dimensions. Almost a foot and a half tall and I’m guessing about 20 or so pounds, it’s not the kind of book you curl up with in a hammock. But it’s not a book in the conventional sense at all so much as a giant scrap book, with family pictures, letters, documents, architectural drawings, many period photographs of his projects and lots of pages from his sketchbooks. Text is kept to a minimum, just enough to introduce the events of Corbu’s life from his birth in 1887 to his death in 1965.
Le Corbusier is still venerated in architectural circles, but his reputation has suffered a bit over the last 30 years as part of the general backlash against Modernist architecture and city planning. And it’s true he can be pointed to as a prime source for the Modernist dictums about purity of structure and its taboo against ornament. Even today, when we’re all accustomed to the look of Richard Meier houses, the resolute Cartesian spareness of Corbu’s Purist Villas from the 1920s, their polemical asperity, can be a little startling. All those white boxes resting on skinny columns with long strips of “ribbon windows”, they’re the work of a man simply obliterating the world as he found it. And the much abused idea that a city should be an accumulation of isolated towers and wide plazas is also traceable to him, though in his visions of it the towers are set in parkland of a kind that real cities rarely provided for them.
But the early Modernist Corbu has long since been absorbed into the architectural mainstream (absorbed and sometimes spat out.) It’s the later, more lyrical Corbu who’s more influential now, the one who opened the way to a more sculptural treatment of a building with his chapel at Ronchamps. Le Corbusier Le Grand isn’t as eye-popping as the other Phaidon behemoth in my office, Andy Warhol: “Giant” Size. (Andy’s life was just more photogenic, and he didn’t leave behind as many little scraps of paper.) But the sheer size of the thing does give a kind of cinematic sweep to Corbu’s life and works. And with a few adjustments the cardboard slipcase it comes in could be converted into a comfortable weekend house.
