Le Corbusier - Les Plans de Paris 1956-1922 - 1956

This important book is not only an outstanding example of graphic design and bookmaking, but it also provides an important insight into how Le Corbusier viewed his earlier designs for Paris with the benefit of hindsight. Elements from L'Oeuvre complete and his seminal La Ville radieuse are reproduced in this book alongside his comments about his earlier designs in his own handwritten text.

Les Plans de Paris came out in October 1956, almost two years after Le Corbusier began to work on it. By this time, Le Corbusier and Éditions de Minuit had already been in regular contact for several years, and the evolution of their various collaborations is not without bearing on the final form of their first completed publishing project. It would appear that Les Plans de Paris answers to certain suggestions from Jérôme Lindon regarding a reedition of La Ville radieuse. Lindon proposed to "remodel" the 1935 book by, among other things, adding three chapters: "New American architecture, Marseille, and India". The proposed chapters are indeed in the 1956 book, together with many chapters from La Ville radieuse. We can consider the principle of this book, built from preexisting elements, as a literal application of the recommended "remodeling".

Writing in her definitive catalogue raisonné of Le Corbusier's book works, Catherine de Smet notes that "handwritten comments are... accompanied by green shapes all through the book, forming what Le Corbusier compared to a trail, a kind of 'green lane' running throughout the volume. Les Plans de Paris was thus constructed in the image of the subject it addressed: the successive layers of the fabric of urban society are reproduced as the reader leafs though pages superimposed on one another, discovering publications from various periods. Hence the reader can adopt the role of a visitor invited to take a quick tour of the premises before diving into a deeper experience of it."
(See: Catherine De Smet - Le Corbusier: Architect of Books, pages 102-105)

Condition:
Very good first edition copy. Fresh and clean copy. Tight binding. Small bump to edge of top corner and small wear to lower cover. Binding tight. Pages clean and undamaged. Please examine listing photos carefully.