Présentation de l'éditeur :
Le Corbusier (1887-1965) has been one of the dominant forces in twentieth-century architecture, and many of the forms he created have become archetypes of modernism. But he was also a social visionary and a writer of polemics, whose ideas have generated intense and partisan controversy. Now available for the first time in paperback, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms provides a comprehensive and unbiased survey that puts le Corbusier in a more balanced perspective.
Making full use of the Le Corbusier archive, the author documents individual projects in detail, whilst linking the imaginative activities of the artist to his philosophy of life, to his urban visions, to his art and to the cultural predicaments of his times. He analyses Le Corbusier’s phenomenal powers of abstraction and synthesis, showing how he created a potent architectural vocabulary based on a limited range of types and elements, and how he used it to generate architectural forms of compelling force. Close study of all Le Corbusier’s major buildings, from first sketches to final achievement, reveals the artists struggle to reconcile the ideal and the practical and to give institutions and ideologies a suitable symbolic form. It is also reveals how this most ‘modern’ of architects constantly found inspiration in nature and in architectural tradition.
William J R Curtis studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Harvard University, and has taught the history of architecture and theories of design at universities in England, the United States, Australia and Asia. His books include Le Corbusier / English Architechture (1975) and Le Corbusier at Work (1978). His best-selling Modern Architecture since 1900 was first published by Phaidon Press in 1982 (third edition, 1996). He received the Founder’s Award of the Society of Architectural Historians (USA) in 1982. In 1985 he was the recipient of both the critics’ award of the Comité Internationale des Critiques d’Architecture and the CICA award for best article of architectural criticism world-wide in the period 1982-85. His monograph Balkrishna Doshi: an Architecture for India won him a silver medal at the world Biennale of Architecture in 1989.
nos livres 
