Toward an Architecture - Tapa dura

Even 84 years after its publication, this modernist manifesto remains provocative and revealing. || Toward an Architecture is the most influential book on architecture of the modern era. Perhaps only Vitruvius can match it for influence from any age. So let's make that the most influential book on architecture for about 2000 years. This new translation addresses some of the problems of the original 1927 verison. John-Louis Cohen's introduction is superb on Le Corbusier's devious maniputlation of images to fit in with his theory, and on politics...The republication of this book will help to explain how an entire culture was seduced into modernism. || A professionally dedicated book, no stone is left unturned in this resounding literary opus from the architect Le Corbusier. This reprint also features a lengthy introduction which brings the original into the 21st Century. || A fine rendition of the spirit of the original, avoiding pastiche. Together with the new introduction, explanatory notes, fine printing and paper quality, this seems a definitive version.

Few books in the twentieth century drew as much attention as Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture (1923), published in English as Towards a New Architecture (1927). He urged architects to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Le Corbusier wrote simultaneously as an architect, city planner, historian, critic, discoverer and prophet, and he illustrated Towards a New Architecture with striking images of airplanes, cars and ocean liners, provocatively placed next to views of Classical Greece and Renaissance Rome. His slogans – such as 'The house is a machine for living in' – and his 'Reminders to Architects' changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text that preserves the design and compelling voice of the original, background notes on Corbu's concepts and iconography and a scholarly introduction that reconstructs the production of the book, the origin of its ideas and its reception throughout the world.