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Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid

by Mardges Bacon.
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, U.S.A., 2001.
ISBN 0-262-02479-9.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
2022 X Avenue, Dysart,
IA 52224-9767,
U.S.A.
ballast@netins.net

It goes without saying that American art and architecture were profoundly influenced by European Modernism, most famously by the Armory Show of 1913. It is less evident that certain aspects of European Modernism, architecture in particular, were inspired by American paradigms. Frank Lloyd Wright?s City National Bank in Mason City, Iowa, for example, is said to have influenced the work of Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius, while American grain elevators were of enormous interest to both Gropius and Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Gropius eventually emigrated to the U.S., but Corbu (as he was called) remained in Europe. He spoke little English, but he did develop friendships with various Americans in Paris, among them Gertrude Stein?s brother Michael, the American Black performer Josephine Baker, and a wealthy American writer named Marguerite Tjader Harris, with whom he was later romantically linked. According to this book, such ?enlightened? Americans convinced him to visit the U.S. for the first time in 1935 (later, he returned briefly to contribute to the United Nations Headquarters), with the expectation that, in so doing, he would be given avant-garde architectural commissions. As it turned out, the trip happened but not the commissions. Sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, Corbu toured the country giving lectures, holding press conferences, and meeting with architects and industrialists. His lectures, delivered in French, were illustrated by freehand pastel drawings, some of which are published here for the first time. The experience changed (for good and bad) his understanding and appreciation of the U.S. In the end, he left empty-handed, with the result that he wrote an unfavorable book, titled When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People, about the inability of most Americans to understand and support his ideas. All this is covered in great detail in this illustrated study, which is a dense academic treatise, but one that is often enlivened by surprising information from anecdotes, eyewitness reports, and contemporary news articles.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 17, No. 1, Fall 2001.)

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Updated 5 December 2001.




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