Theoretical and poetical ideas in Le Corbusier's Une - Maison Un Palais

Abstract

Une Maison - un Palais , published in 1928, is at once an extension of Le Corbusier's campaign for his project, and an exposition of his architectural ideas as extended from the private house to the public building and, ultimately, to the city. His view of architecture, as developed through the 1920s, is set out in a highly condensed form in the These , the first section of this tripartite book. Une Maison- un Palais is Le Corbusier's last book of the 1920s, and all his concerns of those years are gathered up and displayed here. But Une Maison is not just a coda to the three L'Esprit Nouveau books. It is a bridge between L'Esprit nouveau and the books and journals of the 1930s; between the Purist houses of the 1920s and the larger buildings of the following decade; between the relatively anonymous geometries of the Ville Contemporaine and the much more site-specific and curvaceous structures of the Algiers projects. The project for the Palais des Nations led Le Corbusier not only from maison to palais but also to a much more developed consideration of the place of the public building in the urban plan.