The book is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others. Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier. A documentary treasure trove on the life of Le Corbusier Featuring 80 previously unpublished film stills Available as softcover (9783035627282), hardcover (9783035627299) and limited special edition with three photographic prints (9783035627305)

In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect's use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret's attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality. This previously unpublished material is the basis for the publication. It reveals Le Corbusier to be a sensitive and brilliant manipulator of a wide range of photographic styles.

A key publication in the literature on Le Corbusier that offers a new perspective on his creative mind

Photography and architecture have a uniquely powerful resonance - architectural form provides the camera with the subject for some of its most compelling imagery, while photography profoundly influences how architecture is represented, imagined and produced. Camera Constructs is the first book to reflect critically on the varied interactions of the different practices by which photographers, artists, architects, theorists and historians engage with the relationship of the camera to architecture, the city and the evolution of Modernism. The title thus on the one hand opposes the medium of photography and the materiality of construction - but on the other can be read as saying that the camera invariably constructs what it depicts: the photograph is not a simple representation of an external reality, but constructs its own meanings and reconstructs its subjects. Twenty-three essays by a wide range of historians and theorists are grouped under the themes of ’Modernism and the Published Photograph’, ’Architecture and the City Re-imagined’, ’Interpretative Constructs’ and ’Photography in Design Practices.’ They are preceded by an Introduction that comprehensively outlines the subject and elaborates on the diverse historical and theoretical contexts of the authors’ approaches. Camera Constructs provides a rich and highly original analysis of the relationship of photography to built form from the early modern period to the present day.

Lucien Hervé (b. 1910), one of the great architectural photographers of the twentieth century, collaborated with Le Corbusier from 1949 until the renowned architect died in 1965. Hervé approached his subjects seeking not only to document the buildings he was commissioned to photograph but also, especially, to convey a sense of space, texture, and structure. Through light and shadow, Hervé defined the dialogue between substance and form. By delineating a strong contrast between light and shadow as well as placing emphasis on building details, the photographer was able to communicate the depth of a room, the surface of a wall, or the strength of a building's framework. For too long, Hervé the master of architectural photography has eclipsed Hervé the photographer whose career began as early as 1938 and whose subject matter varied widely. Featuring more than one hundred of his photographs in every genre, this book celebrates Hervé's work as an artist, creating images that serve not simply as records but stand as works of a singular imagination.

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

In "Photography or Life," Juan José Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent-it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school. Using the same method in "Popular Mies," Lahuerta looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies's work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era.