The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

Beginning in the “heroic” period of the 1920s, Le Corbusier presented his work to the world in his lectures: in Paris and Rome, Geneva and Zurich, Barcelona and Brussels, Prague and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, as well as at Columbia University in New York.nnIn this volume, the numerous excerpts, preliminary notes, accompanying drawings, and photographs that Le Corbusier produced in connection with his lectures are presented and contextualized by one of the leading experts on the great architect. In them we see modernism at work. Always a great rhetorician and a master at staging his own persona, Le Corbusier takes the arguments and strategies, seminal ideas and most convincing highlights and fuses them into an architectural conception that every advanced architectural position and practice must still come to terms with today.nnAfter presenting the lectures in detail in a series of thematic chapters, the final third of the book reproduces five pivotal lectures from the 1920s and 1950s.nnThe contemporary relevance of Le Corbusier’s work is also underscored by the comprehensive exhibition Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture. Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in cooperation with the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Royal Institute of British Architects, it is scheduled to open in 2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.