LE CORBUSIER IN AMERICA: Travels in the Land of the Timid. By Mardges Bacon. (MIT, $59.95. 2001)
Review:
- LJ Reviews 2001 November #2
- NY Times Book Review - December 2001 #1-Reviews
- PW Reviews 2001 June #2
Baker&Taylor
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
Prelude
Le Corbusier and Transatlantic Exchange 3 (34)
Part I Public Performance
Le Corbusier Takes New York 37 (22)
The American Lectures 59 (28)
Le Corbusier Takes America 87 (40)
Part II The Search for Authorities and
Commissions
The Enchanted Catastrophe 127 (32)
Housing and the Public Sector 159 (24)
The Private Sector 183 (22)
Part III The Transatlantic Misunderstanding
Le Corbusier's Reaction to the ``Country of 205 (32)
Timid People''
The ``Country of Timid People'' Responds 237 (18)
Part IV Epilogue
The Consequences of Transatlantic Exchange 255 (58)
Appendix A: Itinerary of Le Corbusier's 1935 313 (2)
American Lecture Tour
Appendix B: Itinerary of the Traveling Exhibit 315 (2)
``Recent Work of Le Corbusier''
Appendix C: Le Corbusier's Statement for the 317 (2)
Press, November 19, 1935
Notes 319 (76)
Index 395
商品の説明
Le Corbusier's first trip to the United States in 1935 is generally considered a failure because it produced no commissions. The experience nevertheless had a profound effect on him, both personally and professionally. Sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Le Corbusier promoted his ideas through a lecture tour, exhibition, and press conferences, as well as in meetings with industrialists, housing reformers, New Deal technocrats, and editors. His lectures were watershed events that advanced the cause of European modernism. Yet he returned to France empty-handed and published a bittersweet account, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches: voyage au pays des timides (When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People), which faulted America for lacking the courage to adopt his ideas. In this first major study of Le Corbusier's American tour, Mardges Bacon reconstructs his encounter with America in all its fascinating detail. Through extensive archival research and interviews, she presents a critical history of the tour as well as a nuanced and intimate portrait of the architect. Drawing on the methods of microhistory, she also considers how small ordinary events affect larger biographical, architectural, and cultural developments. Bacon notes that Le Corbusier's dialogue with America was drafted within a spirited European discourse on américanisme. She contends that the trip validated his concept of a "second machine age" that would unite standardized industrial methods with a new humanism. Le Corbusier's subsequent work, she suggests, reflected an "Americanization," evidenced by the introduction of tension structures and the textured skyscraper conceived as an integrated system with functions articulated. She also defines Le Corbusier's role in the debate over New York City high-rise public housing. Appearing here in print for the first time are color reproductions of the pastel drawings that illustrated Le Corbusier's American lectures.
商品の詳細
- Amazon.co.jp ランキング: #82163 / 本
- 発売日: 2001-04-16
- 版型: ハードカバー
- 320 ページ
エディターレビュー
From Publishers Weekly
And for a blow-by-blow of two months in the life of the master, there is now Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid, which chronicles Pre Corbu's fruitless 1935 trawl for commissions. Northeastern University professor of art and architecture Mardges Bacon painstakingly (with more than 195 mostly b&w illustrations) but compellingly follows Corb on the trip that would result in his memoir When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People, from which she cribs her title. Arriving in New York, Le Corbusier made stops at MoMA, Columbia, Yale and Vassar, moving through to Michigan and beyond, lecturing and inciting architectural controversy at every point yet leading, Bacon argues, to a subsequent "Americanization" of his work.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the AuthorMardges Bacon is Professor of Art and Architecture at Northeastern University.
Martin Filler is the architecture critic of The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and House & Garden magazine.
During the worldwide depression of the 1930's, those architects who could afford to travel hit the road not only to broaden their cultural horizons but also to drum up business. The ever-enterprising Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym of Le Corbusier) made several international sojourns during the decade, and this absorbing account of his first visit to the United States, in 1935, is by far the most detailed yet published. Though ostensibly a lecture tour -- he spoke at the Museum of Modern Art, Columbia, Princeton, Vassar and Yale -- his true purpose was to find new commissions and absorb the lessons of the américainisme that was strongly affecting contemporary European architecture.
But it was far from all work and no play. Captivated by African-American culture, Le Corbusier in New York trekked up to Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, heard Louis Armstrong play in a Broadway nightclub and saw at least two performances of what he called opéra nègre: ''Porgy and Bess,'' which had recently opened. And on college campuses he was sexually titillated and more than a bit frightened by the athletic, self-confident coeds he termed ''Amazons,'' developing a crush on one statuesque Vassar student of ''The Group'' era by the name of Alma Clayburgh.
Although Le Corbusier found no jobs in America, he did take home to Paris several new ideas that he would apply in his own work, including the tension structures he admired here and the multifunctional skyscrapers that influenced his later tall building designs. He left a legacy on these shores as well, primarily in the ''tower-in-a-park'' housing projects of the postwar period that took their cues from his visionary urban planning schemes of the 1920's. The sociological problems that later befell those American public housing estates were used decades later to discredit their inspirer, though his own Unités d'Habitation in Europe are still sought-after addresses. Mardges Bacon, a professor of art and architecture at Northeastern University, conveys an authentic sense of the period in this exhaustively researched and engagingly written study of a telling episode in 20th-century architectural transformations.此書作者獻給其師長
William H. Jordy, 79, Architectural Historian
William H. Jordy, one of the first historians to chronicle the rise of modern architecture in the United States, died on Aug. 10 at his home in Riverside, R.I. He was 79.
The cause was heart failure while swimming in his pool, said Mardges Bacon, a former colleague at Brown University, where Mr. Jordy taught.
Mr. Jordy was a revered figure among students of American architecture. His writings on the work of Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other prominent modernists charted the impact of European architects on American design and education in the postwar years. A frequent contributor to The New Criterion and the British periodical Architectural Review, he was esteemed as a stylist as well as a scholar. His essays highlighted the symbolic and humanist aspects of an architectural style once regarded as purely functionalist.
Mr. Jordy was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1918. He was educated at Bard College, New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1948. He taught at Yale until 1955, when he joined the faculty at Brown. At his death, he held the position of Henry Ledyard Goddard Professor Emeritus of Art History.
In recent years, Mr. Jordy had become active at the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. ''He was completely open-minded about developments in architecture,'' said Joan Ockman, the center's director. ''He was completely honest, and could be critical, but he was always constructive.'' The Buell Center plans to publish a collection of Mr. Jordy's essays next year.
Mr. Jordy's books include ''Henry Adams: Scientific Historian'' (1952) and two volumes in the series ''American Buildings and Their Architects'' (1972). He was also co-editor, with Ralph Coe, of an anthology of the writings of the architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler (1961).
He is survived by his wife, Sarah Spock Jordy.
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