Le Corbusier and the Skyscraper Primitives

Abstract

In the field of periodical studies, recontextualisation has produced a fundamental reinterpretation of evidence. Treating America's “little magazines” as primary documents, rather than sources to be mined for works by canonic authors, new scholarship portrays the emergence of literary modernism as an unruly conversation and returns works by “the greats” to their broader context. This essay recontextualises Le Corbusier's manifesto, Vers une Architecture, situating its texts within a dialogue among avant-garde journals, namely, L'Esprit Nouveau, The Soil (edited by Robert Coady), and the expatriate journal, Broom (edited by Matthew Josephson and Harold A. Loeb). Their contrapuntal discourses about machine aesthetics, primitivism, and the skyscraper articulate a complex exchange that shaped transatlantic conceptions of modernist culture, architecture, and urbanism.