In June 2013, The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) presents the largest exhibition ever produced on Le Corbusier’s prolific oeuvre, encompassing his work as architect, interior designer, artist, city planner, writer and photographer.
Over a six-decade career, this towering figure of modern culture constantly observed and imagined landscapes using all the artistic techniques at his command, including watercolors, sketches, paintings, photographs and models.
LE CORBUSIER. An Atlas of Modern Landscapes is the accompanying publication, appearing 25 years after the Centre Pompidou released the seminal catalogue Le Corbusier, une encyclopédie, aspires to become a new sourcebook, giving an account of research developed worldwide in recent decades. Reflecting the geographic extension of his designs and built works as well as his indefatigable wanderlust, the book is structured as an atlas, with topographical entries allowing for the discovery of the major sites and cities where Le Corbusier worked.
Le Corbusier is often remembered as having been aggressively indifferent to the sites in which he placed his buildings and plans. However, new research, analysis and interpretation reveals that, in keeping with his proposition that ’the outside is always an inside’, all of Le Corbusier’s projects responded emphatically to specific geographies. His sketchbooks, letters and publications confirm that he was deeply involved with both optical and physical relationships to landscapes – in observing them, rendering them and building them.
This book examines Le Corbusier’s relationship with the landscapes of five continents, in forty essays by thirty of the foremost scholars of his work.
