Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage ─ Toward an Archeology of Modernism

This revelatory study is the most unexpected and vital piece of Le Corbusierscholarship to appear in years. Adolf Max Vogt looks to the early, formative years of thearchitect's life as a key to understanding his mature practice, taking aim at such fundamentalriddles as "Where did his design vocabulary come from?" and "How was his aesthetic senseformed?"Vogt's investigation of LC's early life and education not only reveals important, previouslyunacknowledged influences on specific projects such as the League of Nations headquarters and theVilla Savoye, but also suggests why LC throughout his career preferred to lift buildings above theground, to give them the appearance of "floating." By uncovering crucial dimensions of LC's earlylife and resurrecting primary documents and source materials overlooked by other scholars, this bookchanges the face of LC studies.