Le Corbusier: The Built Work,Used

Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Attempting to take Le Corbusiers entire work into account in a single publication is not without precedent. As early as the 1920s, he himself was already committed to publicizing his projects and buildings in a serial and systematic fashion. The first of such publications were the seven collections of plates published between 1927 and 1933 under the aegis of LArchitecture vivante and Jean Badovicis editorship. These publications were subsequently followed up by the concept of an uvre complete, initially suggested by Christian Zervos, the founder of the review Cahiers dArt, and undertaken by the young architects Willy Boesiger and Oscar Stonorov, released in 1930. The publication of uvre complete was set in motion by the Zurich publisher Hans Girsberger, and eight volumes covered his works from 1910 to 1968. Long after Le Corbusiers death in 1965, the drawings held by the Fondation Le Corbusier, which had been established during his lifetime, would be addressed in a systematic manner in thirtytwo volumes published by Garland in New York. With the digital revolution, another comparable enterprise was completed at the beginning of the twentyfirst century in the form of sixteen DVDs that included highresolution color reproductions of the same documents, accompanied by historical captions that were, for the most part, extremely rigorous.But if the drawings by Le Corbusier, his associates, and his employees can be accounted for accurately and completely, can the same hold equally true of his buildings? These were copiously photographed as soon as they were completed, sometimes even during the course of construction, and their images were reproduced in reviews and publications under Le Corbusiers strict and vigilant control. His close attention to the choice of views, including the framing and lighting of the shots, is well known; his relations with photographers were narrow and demanding, as his correspondence and the recollections of Lucien Herve and Rene Burri clearly attest. One can legitimately claim that he practiced a veritable architecture of photography, interacting with the photographers sent out to shoot his buildings and discussing intensely the images they brought back. This aspect of his work has in fact been the subject of numerous interpretations, and the 2012 exhibition in La ChauxdeFonds, along with the scholarly conference organized around it, marked a benchmark moment in that process.In addition to the analysis of Le Corbusiers relation to photography and to photographers, the buildings themselves have never ceased to draw the attention of contemporary photographers, who have produced a wide range of images. One has only to compare the mysterious blurriness of Hiroshi Sugimotos photographs of the Villa Savoye and Ronchamp with the icy mechanical dullness of Cemal Emdens more recent reproductions of the same projects in order to apprehend the spectrum of possible ways of seeing them. It was certainly not by chance that the latters views were chosen to illustrate the dossier of buildings proposed for inclusion in the list of UNESCOs world heritage sites and adopted in 2016. A decision of that scope was unprecedented in the history of the organization, which had never agreed to include so many works located in so many countries, and it is a gauge of the extent of the recognition of Le Corbusiers built work, fifty years after his death. Yet none of these efforts should ossify the understanding of his work into a fixed frame of documentation that would render the work almost academic. Although it is necessarily a partial and fragmentary view, the pages of this book give us a glimpse into Richard Pares very different projectto indicate what a vision informed by the history of photography and imbued with an authentic empathy for the architecture can reveal about modern buildings that have so often already been reproduced, yielding in t