Editorial Reviews

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-born Frenchman better known as Le Corbusier, may well have been the 20th century's greatest architect. He was also a capable painter, a brilliant theoretician and polemicist, and a terrible city planner. This book does not offer the usual analysis of Le Corbusier's work or his place in history; rather, it is the result of the interaction between Corbu and René Burri, a young Magnum photographer who documented a bit of the architect's life and a few of his buildings between 1955 and his death in 1965.

It's a human story as much as an architectural one, giving clues about how Corbu lived, worked, and related to people in his later years, and how people lived in and used his buildings. This is a wide-ranging work of photojournalism that stands up well decades after its inception. It also provides a look at seven of the designer's structures, including landmarks such as Villa Savoye, the Ronchamp Chapel, La Tourette monastery, and the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles.

This large, horizontal-format book of 184 pages contains hundreds of photos, mostly black-and-white, and they give people as much prominence as the structures, bringing the architect, his clients, their buildings, and the buildings' occupants to life in a way that conventional architecture tomes do not. A fascinating, one-of-a-kind book that forms a valuable supplement to the standard works on Le Corbusier, it should appeal equally to those interested in documentary photography, architecture, and major cultural figures. --John Pastier