Le Corbusier is well known as an architect,urban planner,and entrepreneur,and also as a publicist,theorist,writer,and photographer,and even as an artist who produced drawings,paintings,and sculpture.Yet there is one activity,related to all these others but not subsumed by any of them,to which Le Corbusier tirelessly devoted himself right up to his death in 1965:the production of books.This activity merits greater attention since Le Corbusier conceived of his books not only as intellectuaI projects but also as concrete works that he intended to master from A to Z.The quantity of books he published iS revealing in itself:thirty-five titles(according to the bibliography that concludes his Iast book,L'Atefier de la recherche patiente'),not counting his contributions to general books on his work nor his countless articles.
MAN OF LETTERS,MAN OF BOOKS
THE PUBLISHING EDlFICE
The Printed OEuvre
A nonstop process
A sprawling,composite output
Bibliog raphic hesitations
A bookish life
Author and Partners-Under tight supervision
Publishing houses,Ltd.
All—powerful author
The uncertain role of literary agent
Younger partners“hot off the press”
MAKING A BOOK
Layout and Typography,From Didot to Dada
A unique-if conventional--image
Dada spirit and Romantic tradition
The parallel message of pictu res
Modernist influences
Typography:Didot and antiques
Stencils
Anti—bibliophile
Unifying an EEuvre through Publication
From laying out the art to the art of layout
Book as metaphor
AutObiographical angle
Jean Petit'S elaboration of a“Corbusier”style
Machine-Age books
Synthesizing the arts:the proof is on the page
An object,a work,a product
Le Corbusier as“reformer”?
Bibllographies
Bibliography of books by Le Corbusier and Jean Petit
Selected bibliography