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Title: Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier ISBN: 0-486-25023-7 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 February, 1985 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Where it all began
Comment: Probably the most important book in Modern Architecture. Certainly the most villified over the years, especially since the death of Le Corbusier. In it he laid the ground work for Modern Architecture, extolling the virtues of an architecture that was the product of the machine age rather than a pastiche of historical styles.
Le Corbusier illustrated the principles which he felt should govern architecture, drawing from historical references such as the Parthenon, but stressing the need to come up with a new proportional system reflective of concrete construction. He had developed the Dom-ino system by this point and had designed a few villas along these lines. Included are wonderful sketches and models of his Citrohan House, which he hoped would be mass-produced like the automobile. He even approached the French car maker, Citroen, in this regard.
He explored low-scale housing solutions based on what he called the "Honeycomb" principle, porous housing blocks that allowed light and air to pass through the buildings for better ventilation and more airy courtyards. He forsaw many of the environmental concerns architecture now faces, despite the many attacks to the contrary.
Le Corbusier would reshape many of his ideas over time, but this book outlines his early view of architecture in the machine age, which led to the quote most often taken from this book, "a house is a machine for living." But, Le Corbusier saw it in much more human terms than his critics have.
Rating: 3
Summary: Historically important, but not to be taken as gospel
Comment: First of all, the guy that wrote that corbu's architecture is anti-human is wrong about that point. But he's right about everything else. Le Corbusier's theories about urban planning and architecture have done terrible damage to the built environment since they were adopted by practitioners. However, if one doesn't learn about the errors of the past, one risks repeating them. It's a good book for philosophical debate, and a good book to learn about for history's sake, but don't take the theories to heart.
Rating: 1
Summary: Biggest Oops of Architecture Ever
Comment: I should probably come clean and say I'm not a big fan of Corbu right off. Something about a man who has the pomposity to change his name, and publish a magazine pushing his own ideas, then quote from the same magazine in his own book just irks me a little bit.
But I thought I'd give him a chance, after all, my professors seem to think this Corb guy is important in the history of Architecture. That is- he completely destroyed what many previous writers have defined as architecture. This indeed establishes his importance.
All architectural students should read this book- its very quick and easy. Corb didn't use very complicated language- though he shows some traces of being the father of today's ArchiSpeak gobbledegook when he uses a word like "modalities."
Corb idolizes the Parthenon (rightly so), but twists his love for it to fit his ideas of what 'architecture' is. He has a deep fasciniation with 'pure' forms, and believes that the use of pure forms and geometries will arrive at beauty. In a nice paragraph, he dismisses Gothic architecture as "not very beautiful" because it uses muddled complex forms that don't fit his dictated palette. So in order to consider the Parthenon (which uses subtle complex forms to achieve its beauty) beautiful, he likes to call the columns 'cylinders,' turning a sculpted, crafted element with entasis into one of his 'pure' forms. In actuality, the Parthenon is strongly rooted in artistic sculpural expression and cultural tradition, not an attempt to achieve 'pure' forms as Corb would like to see.
Its little contradictions that abound as well- He praises the Acropolis's use of interesting site planning and progression to create angled views rather then flat on views, and then on the next page he cries for ordered, rigid compositions in his cities.
And then there's the whole fascination with the Engineer and Industrial-designed objects. Unfortunately grain silos, WW1 bombers, and automobiles are nothing like buildings. Attempting to make a house a 'machine for living.' Bleah. Who wants to live in a machine? A machine has no soul, humans can't define themselves in a machine. Corb has crazy notions like you should hide all your paintings in the closet and take them out one at a time rather then clutter up your modernist, pure, architecturally designed walls with them. How dare an inhabitant of a house try to express themselves in a way that detracts from how the architect is trying to express himself! It all slips out on page 142: "... a chair is in no way a work of art; a chair has no soul; it is a machine for sitting in." So by simple reasoning, Corb's machines for living in have no art, and no soul. He recognizes this lack of soul with his little mantra:
"We must create the mass production spirit.
The spirit of constructing mass-production houses
The spirit of living in mass production houses
The spirit of conceiving mass production houses."
Since there was no love for modernism when he was writing, Corb recognized that he must create it. And the whole boook is an attempt to do so. There is a danger to trying to create something the ramifications of which you don't fully understand. Jane Jacobs does a nice critique of Corb's "City for six million" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities- his city planning was dangerously influential, and his architectural ideas have had an impact of similar magnitude on the Western world's built environment. (much for the worse, IMHO :)
If anything, this book is pure propoganda for modernism. He upright tells you that cities of today (well, cities of then) do not work, that people hate their old houses, and that his architecture and city planning will solve everything. It also fits the propoganda mold by being incessantly repetitive. He must think his average reader has a brain the size of a pea- passages are repeated SEVERAL times, when there is no logic, try repetition to hammer your ideas into other people's heads.
All said and done though, every student of architecture should nab this book and have a read through it. Le Corbusier, along with Mies Van Der Rohe, Adolf Loos, and Walter Gropius were the big guys of Modernism, but Corbusier was definitely the man that had the biggest impact. The text is nice and big, and there are lots of illustrations, so it goes quickly.
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Title: Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius ISBN: 0486206459 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1960 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi ISBN: 0870702823 Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown ISBN: 026272006X Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 1977 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture by Ulrich Conrads ISBN: 0262530309 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 15 November, 1975 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Modern Architecture: A Critical History (World of Art) by Kenneth Frampton ISBN: 0500202575 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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