Modern Man
In Paris during the Roaring Twenties, a young architect named Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris rebranded himself as Le Corbusier and embarked on a career that would span five decades and shape the future of architecture and urban planning. He wanted to make the home a “machine for living in,” set in cities dramatically streamlined for efficiency. His great achievements include the all-encompassing apartment complex Unité d’Habitation, the serene Ronchamp chapel, and the original plan for the United Nations complex in New York. He was a dandy as well as a genius, known for his trademark bow tie and round black spectacles. During his travels around the world, he had many love affairs, including a shipboard romance with Josephine Baker. Through archival research, new interviews, and visits to Le Corbusier’s most important structures (including his masterpiece, Chandigarh, an entire city built from scratch in India), Anthony Flint constructs a vivid story of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century—a life filled with towering ambition, success and failure, heated clashes, and visions of harmony. Le Corbusier’s legacy persists today: in the debate over how best to house skyrocketing urban populations, in the cult of starchitects like Frank Gehry, in the showrooms of IKEA, and in the backlash against the superblocks and elevated highways that can be traced directly to his original vision. Modern Man is for anyone fascinated by larger-than-life creators, and by how today’s world came to be.
Anthony Flint (Author), Mel Foster (Narrator)
Audiobook
