Author Description

The publication of Volumes 3 and 4 of the Le Corbusier Sketchbooks brings to completion a major undertaking by the Architectural History Foundation. After more than a decade of searching, the Fondation Le Corbusier found a suitable partner in publication to aid in the practical difficulties of producing the last and most elusive of Le Corbusier's unpublished works. André Wogenscky, President of the Fondation Le Corbusier, has stated that the sketchbooks vividly reproduced in these four volumes "are the most private of Le Corbusier's work, the most spontaneous, perhaps the most significant, encompassing all the others - the work of an entire lifetime."Volume 1, 1914-1948 and Volume 2, 1950-1954 were published in 1981. All the volumes are included in the Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press series. Volume 4 1957-1964 This final volume contains the personal reflections, criticisms of other's work, and self-criticisms of Le Corbusier's maturity. He reassesses many of his works and projects with brutal honesty and his evaluation of Dutch functionalism and American architecture are equally forthright.For all this, however, his creative energies appear undiminished. Drawings reveal the inception of the Philips Pavilion at Brussels, showing an unusual engineering device for the walls; a new art form, the "Electronic Poem," suggested by Le Corbusier for the interior of the pavilion; and the first sketches for his only building in the United States, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.Volume 4 closes with sketches of Roquebrune, on the Mediterranean, where Le Corbusier lost his life a year after making them.