While Le Corbusier's urban projects are generally considered confrontational in their relationship to the traditional urban fabric, his proposal for the Venice hospital project remained an exercise ...in preserving the medieval fabric of the city of Venice through a systemic replication of its urban tissue. This book offers a detailed study of Le Corbusier's Venice hospital project as a plausible built entity. In addition, it analyses it in the light of its supposed affinity with the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. No formal attempt to date has been made to critically analyse the hospital project's design considerations in comparison to the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. Using a range of methodologies including those from architectural theory and history, using archival resources, on-site analysis, and interviews with important resource persons, this book is an interpretation of the conceptual basis for Le Corbusier understanding of the structural formulation of the city of Venice as mentioned in The Radiant City (1935). In doing so, it deciphers the diagrammatic analysis of the city structure found in this work into a set of coherent design modules that were applied in the hospital project and that could become a point of further investigation. Architects and other architecturally interested laypeople with an interest in Venice will find the book a valuable addition to their knowledge. For architectural historians the book makes an important link between modernism and the historically grown Venice.
Dr Mahnaz Shah is a Lecturer in Design Theory at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Contents: Foreword, Robert Maxwell; Foreword, Tim Benton; Introduction; History of the project; The urban context; Analysis of the project; Important findings; Table of important events; Bibliography; Index.
“A Monument's Domain” considers the making of modern monuments between Turkey and France in 1924 by focusing on a short text by Le Corbusier, namely, “Mustapha Kemal Aura Son Monument.” It considers ...some early architectural and sculptural projects for Ankara, their role in the establishment of the territory of the Turkish Republic as well as the changing definitions of the term “monument” in the Turkish language. It also provides a close reading of Le Corbusier's response to Turkish modernization efforts and his calls for cultural preservation of Turkish Islamic monuments by considering some of his other texts along with his earlier sources on architecture. It extrapolates a theory of a modern monumentality in the writings of Le Corbusier, which defines a monument as a condition of interiority as an alternative to urban spaces and modern masses. By placing the development of different modernisms in France and Turkey next to each other, it suggests that the domain of the modern monument lies between the territory of the nation-state and the interiority of modern architecture.
The book describes the story of Clarté, Le Corbusier's first apartment building, continuing the narrative into the 21st century. The steel skeleton building completed in Geneva in 1930/1932 is a ...prototype of the Moderne style and a precursor of the Unité d'Habitation.
The building was neglected for many decades and not listed as a historic building until the 1990s. In 2007 the external envelope was repaired as the first step, followed by refurbishment of the interior, in which building preservation requirements were taken into account in an exemplary manner. The building log book by the architects and structural engineers is illustrated with numerous new and historic drawings and photographs, and has been supplemented with an account of the building's history. The renovated building is presented in large photographs.
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