A genius, despite detractors

Le Corbusier Le Grand8217; is doubly well-named. First, the book is the size of two breeze blocks and notably heavier. It is not a coffee-table book but the coffee table itself: all you need do is fit legs to it. He has a point. It is the least wieldy book I have ever been propelled across a room by 8212; it is 0.67m wide when opened, and demands a physical as much as an aesthetic will to be appreciated. This is peculiarly apt, for Le Corbusier8217;s buildings themselves require the attention of every sense you can think of and then some need to be swooned through. They are not comprehensible by intellect alone. Second, this was a great artist, among the greatest of his century. And one who must evidently be judged by what he himself achieved rather than by the 8220;influence8221; he supposedly exerted upon two or three generations of keen plagiarists8230;Why are architects so dismally and blatantly derivative? They are obviously unfamiliar with Montaigne8217;s counsel that the copyist should disguise his sources by following the example of horse rustlers who 8220;paint the tail and the mane and sometimes put the eyes out8221;. Le Corbusier remains, more than 40 years after his death, the hate figure of tectonically blind anti-modernists, though one wonders whether they had eyes to put out in the first place: Le Corbusier was merely blind in one eye8230;

Despite what he himself claimed, he was not a utilitarian, not a functionalist, not a rationalist, not an anti-Romantic. The prescription that form should be determined by function is a nonsense that he toyed with in his writing but didn8217;t practise8230; The problem is that both his detractors and his acolytes want to believe that his written manifestos, urbanistic visions, utopian ideologies and theories are compatible with his buildings. But as a writer he is hectoring, prone to crass slogans, naiuml;ve, pompous and often resentful8230; Le Corbusier, writer, has little in common with Le Corbusier, maker of the century8217;s most profoundly sensuous, most moving architecture. They are different people working in different media.

Excerpted from a review by Jonathan Meades in 8216;The New Statesman8217;