LE CORBUSIER PIERRE JEANNERET BOOK

This beautiful and comprehensive volume documents Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's enormous Chandigarh project: the buildings and furnishings (now considered masterpieces of 20th century architecture and design), the plans, sketches and models, as well as reproductions of both archival and contemporary photographs. In 1947, shortly after India gained its independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru initiated a vast modernisation plan, during which Chandigarh became the administrative capital of the province of Punjab. Nehru commissioned Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to build this capital from scratch, with the sole instruction that they should be expressive and experimental and not be held back by tradition. Illustrated with photographs dating from that time to the present, this book documents the architectural project and the production of the furniture, providing a definitive summary of this epic modernist enterprise. Another chapter is devoted to the work of Lucien Hervé, the famous architectural photographer who portrayed the city extensively. The architect, urban planner, painter, writer, designer and theorist Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was born in Switzerland in 1887. In 1922, Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret opened an architectural practice in Paris, inaugurating a partnership that would last until 1940. They began experimenting with furniture design after inviting architect Charlotte Perriand to join the studio in 1928. After World War II, they sought efficient ways to house large numbers of people in response to the urban housing crisis. In the 1950s a unique opportunity to realise their concepts on a large scale presented itself with the construction of Chandigarh. Before his death in 1965, Le Corbusier established the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris to care for and make available to scholars his library, architectural drawings, sketches and paintings.