A suitcase found in a closet in Le Corbusier’s Paris apartment at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli after his death contained seventy-three sketchbooks neatly ordered. They include a mélange of sketches and notes: on designs in progress (not only for architecture, but for paintings and sculpture as well), travel observations, rough drafts or outlines for writings or talks, diagrammatic plans for exhibitions, vituperations against those who crossed him, and philosophical musings—all mixed with the jotting of daily routine: telephone numbers, appointments, things to be bought, things to be done. He referred to the sketchbooks as “une chose active.” They are a fascinating record of the day-to-day actions and thoughts of genius on the run, often telegraphic and fragmentary in brusque memoranda and scribbled notation; they also show Le Corbusier grasping a moment free of pressure for rumination and for making elaborate drawings of things seen or imagined.
The handsome four-volume publication of these pocket sketchbooks, the joint enterprise of the Fondation Le Corbusier, which owns them, and the Architectural History Foundation, reproduces each one of the four thousand and thirty-nine pages on which there is so much as a single word or tentative sketch.[1] Those in color appear in color. Printed captions in French beside each page make Le Corbusier’s scrawl legible. These are, in turn, supplemented by English translations at the front of each volume, and by admirably terse but informative introductions to the contents and context of each of the sketchbooks by Françoise de Franclieu.
At least,
