Geoffrey H. Baker

As much as I miss Van Alen Books – the temporary architecture bookstore that followed Urban Center Books after it closed – I relish the books I picked up there, including a used copy of this study of Le Corbusier's buildings that was marked down heavily in the bookstore's closing sale. I was teaching at NYIT at the time, so I saw the book as a handy reference for my students when learning about form, meaning, and precedents. With its landscape format, hand lettering, and many hand drawings, Baker's book reminds me of Francis Ching's books as well as "Precedents in Architecture," which is like a CliffsNotes of architectural analysis. But Baker delves deep, analyzing sixteen built projects by Le Corbusier, ranging from his early villas to such "mature" masterpieces as La Tourette and Notre-Dame-du-Haut. The latter, for instance, is analyzed in diagrams and text across 25 pages, dealing with site, movement, façades, structure, light, meaning, and so on. A last chapter, "Articulation System's in Le Corbusier's Oeuvre," takes a broader, comparative view of the architect's masterful manipulation of form; it's a strong ending to a thorough and passionate study of Le Corbusier's lasting impact.… (mehr)

Prof. Baker's presentation of Le Corbusier's architecture as a series of progressively related formal compositions is comprehensive, extraordinarily clear, and wonderfully executed. The bulk of the book consists of Baker's own drawings and diagrams which lend a consistency and lucidity to his analyses of form. Each project is desrcibed in the same format, with unusual attention to both the physical and biographical context in which it was built or proposed. The investigation of buildings as formal compositions gives a persuasive critical consistency to Corbusier's ouvre from the earliest Swiss villas to the didactic purism of the international style to his later, more mature expressions of the interaction of spirit and matter. This study, in its thoughtfulness and elegance, is invaluable to any student of architecture and will provide insight not only into the techniques of formal composition but into the mind of one of the real heroes of modern design.… (mehr)