Stranger in a Strange Land: A History of Transatlantic Exchange

Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid. By Mardges Bacon. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001. 406 pages. $59.95 (cloth).

The Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier arrived in New York harbor on the luxury liner Normandie on October 21, 1935, on his first visit to the United States, a lecture tour organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The American architectural community, then caught up in a painful transition from eclectic traditionalism to twentieth-century modernism, anticipated his arrival with a considerable range of emotions. Most architects and architecture students, as well as intellectuals and artists who observed the urban scene, were well aware of his purist design work, whatever their opinions of it. They knew his abstract "machines for living" and his plans for vast cities of widely spaced towers from museum exhibitions and from his manifesto Vers une architecture (1923), which gained wide attention in 1927 when translated as Towards a New Architecture. His oracular prose flattered Americans by suggesting that the principles of modern architecture, although stated by Le Corbusier so programmatically as to suggest commandments brought down from on high, actually owed much to the direct functional engineering of American grain elevators, bridges, and factory buildings. And now here was the author himself, come to reflect America back to itself with a European imprimatur. But the architect, unfashionably hatless, wearing odd, thick-framed glasses, and unable to say more in English than a few words of slang that he learned on shipboard, had an even more ambitious intention—nothing less than the reform of American society through the total rebuilding of its cities. Anticipating a celebrity's welcome, Le Corbusier looked around the deck for the press photographers he assumed would greet him. In fact there was no welcoming party. His interpreter Robert Jacobs, a young American who worked for him in Paris, hastily bribed someone to make a show of photographing the architect even though he had run out of film. Thus began a two-month visit the motives, goals, and results of which seemed quixotic even then. Even so, Mardges Bacon, a professor of art and architecture at Northeastern University, succeeds admirably in revealing the complexity of Le Corbusier in America.

Before one has read a word of Bacon's study, the physical and visual characteristics of the book as object suggest a work designed to express self-evident significance. Possessing the heavy paper and rugged binding typical of the MIT Press's architecture books, Le Corbusier in America weighs three and a quarter pounds, thereby proclaiming a need for serious reading in study or library rather than inviting casual skimming. The book's solid boards, end papers, and dust jacket, all in black, offer dramatic conceptual contrast to the image of pristine white surfaces evoked for the past eighty years by any casual mention of the architect's name. When the book is opened, its pages form a spread of four vertical columns whose horizontal sweep extends so far that a reader must slide the book back and forth, especially if a notebook is placed alongside. The physicality of this book alone demands active involvement. What most compellingly attracts the eye, however, are the illustrations, nearly two hundred of them, effectively reproduced and generously scattered through the text. Many are unfamiliar (a blessing in a field that tends to repeat iconic images) and run the gamut from informal snapshots of Corbu and his hosts to aspects of popular culture that attracted his attention, from views of the cities and structures he visited to examples of their influence in his later work, from the large impromptu pastel sketches that he created while lecturing (reproduced in color) to the playful drawings of his private notebooks. An examination of Bacon's documentation suggests exhaustive library and archival research requiring more than fifteen hundred endnotes, many of them discursive, filling seventy-six...