Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture

"Taking into account recent scholarship and new theories of architectural change, noted architectural historian Charles Jencks traces the personal and professional development of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who would be known to the world as Le Corbusier, beginning with his family background and early training in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, where he cultivated a regionalist style that would be the first of many aesthetic identities to be exploited and then shed throughout his long career. Soon after leaving La Chaux-de-Fonds for Paris, Jeanneret, in association with the Purist painter Amedee Ozenfant, gained fame in the 1920s under the nom de plume Le Corbusier, publishing the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and four seminal Modernist tracts: Towards a New Architecture, The City of Tomorrow, The Decorative Art of Today, and La Peinture Moderne (Modern Painting). Jencks demonstrates the influence of these classic texts by way of the architect's major projects of the period: Villa La Roche, Workers' Housing at Pessac, the Plan Voisin for Paris, Villa Stein, Villa Savoye, and the steel furniture, including the famed grand confort and chaise longue.". "Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture presents over two hundred illustrations including architectural drawings, plans, and photographs, as well as paintings, sketches, and publication facsimiles. With this illuminating collection of images and his revealing and provocative text, Charles Jencks has produced a compelling and comprehensive analysis of the twentieth-century master who continually stayed well ahead of his followers to reinvent the art of architecture over and over again."--BOOK JACKET.