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Le Corbusier has been the subject of countless monographs, mostly aimed at architects and academics. Now Phaidon has entered the field with what appears to represent, because of its staggering dimensions, the ne plus ultra of Le Corbusier books. The book is reminiscent of the huge commemorative monographs published by architects for their clients in the 1950s and ’60s to mark the inauguration of a building project or a career retrospective. If it were put on display in a museum, this book’s wall label would read:

PHAIDON PRESS
LE CORBUSIER LE GRAND
INK ON PAPER AND CARD
17 X 13 X 2½ INCHES

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1887. He practiced architecture in Switzerland and Germany before establishing an office in Paris and becoming Le Corbusier, the prolific and influential architect, writer, and painter. The architect’s ideas, mostly developed early in his career, radically changed the architecture of the 20th century. For example, his Domino principle, developed at the impressively early date of 1914, prescribed the replacement of traditional load-bearing walls with a column-and-slab system, freeing up exterior walls for larger windows. (This radical innovation will be familiar to anyone who has glanced at a construction site in the past 80 years.) However, it was Le Corbusier’s ideas on urbanism that first brought him to the attention of the public, in particular his Plan Voisin scheme, in which he proposed tearing down a significant portion of central Paris and replacing it with a grid of high-rises and housing blocks. This and similar projects — caught somewhere between serious proposals and publicity stunts — started to turn public opinion against the architect.

Later, the architect’s legacy was associated with poorly planned post-war housing complexes, which further damaged his reputation. For certain critics of modernism, notably Marshall Berman, the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Le Corbusier is the prototypical modern architect-as-mass-manipulator, who displayed little regard for his buildings’ human inhabitants. Berman focuses on, among other declarations, Le Corbusier’s scandalous call to arms: "We must kill the street!"

Le Corbusier Le Grand commemorates the architect’s reentry into the public imagination as something other than the scapegoat for the failures of modernism. The book, directed at the nonacademic reader and published in a text-light/image-heavy scrapbook style, strives to humanize its subject with a massive amount of biographical documentation; it is as much an analysis of the man’s personality as his architecture. It shows us an image of a kinder, gentler modern architect who, in his own words, "can be horrified by the disorganization of the urban phenomenon or delighted and overwhelmed by the attention given to specifically human needs." In short, Le Corbusier is presented as a human being seeking order in the world while striving to maintain its humanity.

Phaidon brought in two leading Le Corbusier scholars, Jean-Louis Cohen and Tim Benton. Cohen’s introduction, "The Man with a Hundred Faces," sets the tone for the book’s intense scrutiny of the subject’s personality, and Benton’s short chapter introductions provide a light skeleton on which to hang the mass of documentation. In fact, the book’s real value is in this extensive documentary material. Especially notable is the reproduction of his writings. For a young architect in 1920s Paris, the struggle to have his first projects built was accompanied or even preceded by a campaign to broadcast his design philosophy to the world. Thus Le Corbusier, from his first days in practice, used books as essential tools in his campaign for his New Architecture. Over his career he published 40 books, each composed in his distinct style, made up of manifesto-like declarations and prescriptions. Many excerpts are included in luxurious reproductions, which bear the architect’s gorgeous graphic and color sense.