Concrete poetry

Architectural Review, The, August, 2005 by David Wild

LE CORBUSIER ARCHITECT OF BOOKS 1912-1965

By Catherine de Smet. Wettingen: Lars Muller. 2005. [euro]35

CORBUSIER'S CONCRETE--CHALLENGES OF CONSERVING MODERN HERITAGE

Edited by Kiran Joshi. Chandigarh: Chandigarh Perspectives. 2005. US$40 (includes postage)

While the cover of this attractive book appears to have been made by cutting Le Corbusier's original jacket designs into ribbons, Catherine de Smet chips away at the great man's publishing edifice more carefully. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Le Corbusier claimed to have written and designed over 40 books; a staggering amount for someone running a practice, painting every morning, as well as travelling the seven seas, sketching as he went. Vers une Architecture alone, with its extraordinary juxtaposition of images, poetic text and polemic--an immediate success in 1923 and still in print today--would have been enough to secure a place in history.

Criticised at the time for his 'sportswriter style', this now seems just another aspect of his attack on the stuffy academies. Considering that he spent so much effort tilting at these institutions, it is still a bit of a shock to discover that he had his copy of Don Quichotte bound with the hide of his dead dog. Illustrated three times (with one of the dog) it is hard to see how this ties in with Catherine de Smet's hypothesis that much of his work was developed in book form by looking at what Paul Valery called the book's 'second virtue', its object quality. Banal at first, and lagging behind the typographic and political radicalism of his contemporaries, the postwar books, following the short stay of Pierre Faucheux in his atelier, finally arrived at a distinctive, personal style. Coloured overlays, combinations of drawing, photograph and handwritten notes give a pleasing informality: the little book on his mother's house a perfect example.

All the covers are faithfully reproduced here, together with page layouts and spreads. This makes for an interesting and engaging catalogue; but in the absence of direct comparison with Le Corbusier's other creative work, the author's thesis is unconvincing. This narrowing of focus is illustrated at the outset by the uncredited use of Brassai's portrait of the artist at work, cut in half: so the stack of books remains, while paintings, sculpture and the objets trouves on the mantelpiece are cropped out.

Corbusier's Concrete edited by Kiran Joshi, at first sight a rather dull and tedious record of a seminar on conserving Le Corbusier's buildings held at Chandigarh three years ago, proves far more important, as well as a source of invaluable technical advice. The conservation of modern buildings is in its infancy, and the debate surrounding its objectives is well covered in this concise volume. In the introduction to Lucien Herve's Le Corbusier--the Artist, the Writer, Marcel Joray quotes the man of genius: 'I have given my life to concrete'. Sadly, a substantial portion of this concrete turned out to have an even shorter lifespan. For all its 'Brutalist' appearance, it has often proved vulnerable: especially when used in too thin precast panels. Bernard Bauchet's story of the rehabilitation of the Brazil Pavilion in Paris combines social, technical and aesthetic issues in a fascinating study, while Remi Papillaut's paper on Le Corbusier's founding philosophy and the attempted synthesis of 'Abstraction against nature', 'matter versus abstraction' and 'modulor and raw concrete' carries more weight than a study of the printed page. Forty years after his death, academic interest in the man and his work continues. Meanwhile, as this useful little book attests, the practical architects of the Fondation Le Corbusier are stopping bits from falling off his buildings.