Ivan Žaknić
Ivan Žaknić is professor of architecture at Lehigh University.
Žaknić, Ivan
Žaknić, Ivan
United States of America
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Description: The Final Testament of Père Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au...
1887: Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret on 6 October, 38 rue de la Serre, La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. His mother is Marie-Charlotte-Amélie Jeanneret-Perret, a musician and piano teacher. His father is Georges-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker and clock-dial painter. He has one older brother, Albert (1885–1973), later a musician. …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00134.006
Description: The Final Testament of Père Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au...
Le Corbusier’s final piece of writing is a brief text of meditations known as Mise au point. It did not see the light of day during its author’s lifetime; Le Corbusier annotated the manuscript in July 1965 and died several weeks later while swimming in the Mediterranean. By strange coincidence, this “omega”-narrative of his life shared a common fate with the “alpha” of his career, the travel journal he wrote in 1911, Le Voyage d’Orient (Journey to the East). Both texts were in his …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00134.003
Free
Description: The Final Testament of Père Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au...
Le Corbusier’s Mise au point (Into Focus) is presented here as more than a simple translation. I hope this edition will appeal to an audience of architectural historians, architects, readers of biographies, students of modernism, and—in a special group—those interested in the final, triumphant and embittered years in the lives of great creative minds, in this case, one of the giants of twentieth-century architecture. …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00134.002
Description: The Final Testament of Père Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00134
Le Corbusier, the most influential architect of the twentieth century, died in 1965 only weeks after completing Mise au point, his last opus in the form of autobiographical reflections. Published posthumously, it is a curious and cryptic text, yet it sheds an important light on the great artist’s mind and temperament. This book is the first English translation of Mise au point, the first illustrated critical bilingual edition, and the first attempt to integrate this document into Le Corbusier’s life as a whole, especially its final embittered years.

In an insightful introduction and in annotations, Ivan Žaknić shows how the themes of the text echo the contradictions of Le Corbusier’s personality: determined to rebuke society and yet constantly courting its approval; devoted to serving the public and yet returning again and again to a solitary monastic ideal; distrusting professional institutions, the academy, and the government and yet stung by their willingness to pass him by. Žaknić links the themes of this text with Le Corbusier’s passion for certain literary works, especially Don Quixote, and emphasizes the architect’s many philosophical formulas for coming to terms with death—first that of his beloved wife and then his own. Including a revealing interview granted by Le Corbusier in the final months of his life, the volume is important for students of Le Corbusier’s art, architecture, and urban planning, as well as by those interested in modernism and twentieth-century culture.
Author
Print publication date August 1997 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300063530
EISBN 9780300226898
Illustrations 124
Print Status in print