Le Corbusier, the builder

Roberto Gargiani & Anna Rosellini, Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision, Lausanne, EPFL Press, 2011.

As the sophisticated inventor and stimulator of strategies for galvanising architectural discussion, Le Corbusier inspired, after his death, unparalleled editorial production in the field of architecture, in its many genres and forms. Fragmentation and unity, dissipation and synthesis of the person and his career are gauged also on the basis of this phenomenon, and not only by the uncontrolled multiplication of literature on him. The task of producing an increasingly difficult to achieve overall view on the architect has been variously addressed in recent years. The most spectacular example is 2008's Le Corbusier Le Grand, published by Phaidon, a colossal visual history and atlas of both a cultural figure and a newly invented publishing form (as far as architecture is concerned, at least). The volume also included an introductory essay by Jean-Louis Cohen, which was an exercise in textual synthesis conducted with masterly ease. In 2009, adopting a very different publishing principle, 010 republished the founding father of overview studies that followed the architect's death, Le Corbusier. Elements of a Synthesis, by Stanislaus von Moos, originally published in German in 1968.

Le Corbusier. Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965. Surface Materials and Psychophysiology of Vision raises, once again, the issue of general Le Corbusier studies in the strictest sense, i.e. an essay work produced by a single author although, in this case, there are two, Roberto Gargiani and Anna Rosellini. This book is the first in a trilogy on all the Swiss architect's works, to be completed with books entitled Ornamented Construction and Optical Illusions, 1902-1919 and Polychrome Cladding and Plan Libre, 1920-1939. When all are published, the trilogy will constitute the most extensive study on Le Corbusier ever produced, at least among non-anthological ones (the volume published runs to just under 600 pages in octavo format).

Exactly which Le Corbusier do Gargiani and Rosellini want to show us? The subject of Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965 is Le Corbusier's building work, which focused on and is summed up in the material texture of the building (actual or potential in the case of unbuilt projects); it also brings in the urban designer and artist and, more importantly, links his work on the building material and his theoretical thought, as announced by the two parts of the subtitle.

As is the norm with Gargiani, the book has no preface and the two notions are left to provide conceptual keys to the historiographic intentions behind the authors' work (the first notion is drawn directly from Le Corbusier, the second is an interpretation). Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965 adds nothing itself, lacking anything but a fleeting theoretical focus and argumentative verve; indeed, it does not even explain why 1940 marked the beginning of the final phase of Le Corbusier's career or that 1940-1965 is a sufficiently consistent period to be treated as a whole.

The book is based on the concept of the neutral and objective account, set in a process that proceeds quietly and organically via the addition of information, with no marked beginning or end. Gargiani and Rosellini propose a sort of internal anatomy of Le Corbusier the builder, rigidly founded on corroboration found in his works, demonstrated in two ways: firstly, via the architect's theoretical writings and a remarkable number of previously unseen documents, that surface in the book and are spread through its eight chapters; secondly, via a direct study of his buildings. Accordingly, the great majority of the book's 1300-plus illustrations are reproductions of archive documents and recent photographs of his buildings.

Tabula rasa is another dominant principle of this book by Gargiani and Rosellini and is crucial to its understanding: no bibliography, few references to Le Corbusier literature and rare citations from other studies — only once is someone else's interpretation discussed (in a note mentioning Colin Rowe's comparison of the Chandigarh Parliament and Schinkel's Altes Museum). The relationship with existing literature is a benchmark in itself and in the case of Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965 its absence makes much more impact than the originality of the study and its terse historiographic style. Which brings us back to the original question asked: Exactly which Le Corbusier do Gargiani and Rosellini want to show us? Which Le Corbusier is behind all this analysis and reorganisation of his built works, when no conceptual synthesis is produced nor is any drawn from studies already published?

There is no answer, although Béton Brut and Ineffable Space, 1940-1965 closely resembles the genre of the comprehensive monograph on an architect or the artistic biography. The Le Corbusier in the main title is but a semblance. Aimed at performing an internal anatomy on certain organs in Le Corbusier's cultural body, Gargiani and Rossellini's book does not then relate them to those not in the analysis (e.g. the organ of formal thought that accompanies the organ of constructional thought) nor does it refute the persisting impression of an overall identity left impossibly alone to become an empty shell. With no desire for synthesis, a book that helps observe the figure of Le Corbusier part by part belongs to the artistic-biography genre only in name.