Le Corbusier. Ideas and forms. Ediz. illustrata

Published in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death, the book has been rigourously rethought, reworked and redesigned to include new scholarship, to integrate the author’s research and to extend his insights. The text, notes and bibliography have been expanded, the number of illustrations more than doubled, and an entire section of four chapters, ‘Principles and Transformations’, has been added at the end. These focus on the architect’s spatial imagination, the genesis of his forms, the generic features of his style and his impact upon world architecture. This new and updated edition of Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms presents a full and illuminating account of the architect’s buildings and unrealized urban projects while also revealing broader features of his creative universe. Continuing the standard of the highly praised original edition, this book by eminent and award-winning architectural historian William J R Curtis documents individual projects in detail while also linking them to the architect’s philosophy, utopian vision and activities as a painter, sculptor and author. It explores Le Corbusier’s processes of invention in diverse media while placing his work in the context of the cultural and political predicaments of his time. It demonstrates how the artist transformed his experience of the world into a new architectural vocabulary based upon a limited set of types and elements, and how he gave shape to images and ideas in forms of compelling force.