Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier - Biography of the Visionary Architect | Perfect for Architecture Students & Design Enthusiasts

The author of this breezy biography of infamous architect Le Corbusier acknowledges as much in his thoughtful summing up of his subject's mercurial life. Le Corbusier (the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) was a Parisian architect born in a watchmaking town in Switzerland at the end of the previous century. He was brilliant, driven, creative, disruptive, frustrating, infamous, and, for better and worse, he left his mark on architecture and urban design all over the world. A quick internet search will turn up countless images of his more iconic works, from domestic spaces that presage the tiny house movement, to giant and brilliant apartment buildings that foreshadow failed urban redevelopments based on poorly understood imitations, to ground-breaking homes and at least two brilliant churches. His one original building in America is the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, but his influence on American architecture and urban design is both celebrated and vilified to this day. Anthony Flint endeavors in this brief and complex overview to indroduce Le Corbusier to the people who know little or nothing about him, but the book serves also to give a broad context to others seeking to know something about the story behind the buildings. Rather than give us a straight linear narrative, Flint provides chapters that capture themes in Le Corbusier's life, each based on a particular project (i.e. the Chandigargh city plan, or the United Nations building) or period of his life (such as his disturbingly opportunistic collaboration with the Vichy government of World War 2). So the chapters overlap in time, but create a layered impression of this very busy artist. And there is a lot to be said about him. A collection of his complete works runs to eight volumes and over 1700 pages. Flint gives us the highlights, and tries to capture a sense of who the man was, a young artist devoted to his difficult-to-please mother, to the world-renowned starchitect. And to that end, Flint succeeds out of proportion to the size of the book. Le Corbusier comes across as a lively and driven individual, arrogant at times, but modest as befits his Calvinist background. His devotion to a small cabin on the coast of France seems almost cozy and quaint. And yet some of his buildings are among the most monumental of his century. The story is compelling.