Time: 3.30pm, Friday 4 April 2008
Location: Freind Room, Christ Church College, Oxford
Le Corbusier's seminal book, 'Vers Une Architecture' (1923), first published in English translation in 1927 as 'Towards a New Architecture', is the subject of a talk by Charles Knevitt, Director of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Trust, at this year's Sunday Times Literary Festival in Oxford.
The talk coincides with the publication of a new translation of the book by John Goodman, under its original title Toward an Architecture, and published by Frances Lincoln. It has a foreword by the Le Corbusier scholar Jean-Louis Cohen.
"In terms of its impact and influence, it was the single most important architectural book of the twentieth century," says Knevitt. "It was only one of 34 books he wrote, but its polemical style and juxtapositions of modern machines next to classical temples were an exhilarating counterblast to the prevailing climate of eclecticism and ornamentation."
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) took the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920, based on the French word for crow. This is appropriate, Knevitt charges, because of the architect's ability to collect other people's ideas and aphorisms and claim them as his own.
"Le Corbusier was a magpie (a prominent member of the crow family) when it came to proselytizing through his articles and books. Recent research suggests that some of his buildings were not the 'immaculate conceptions' he led everyone to believe either, but reinterpretations of earlier work by others," Knevitt says.
The RIBA Trust is staging the UK premiere of the major new international exhibition, Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture, in Liverpool, European Capital of Culture in 2008, in the Crypt of the city's Metropolitan Cathedral, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It opens to the public on 2 October 2008 (until 18 January 2009), before moving on to the Barbican Art Gallery, London, from February until May 2009.
Ends