The two books presented this evening at CIVA will look at some aspects of Le Corbusier's career and work at the turn of the 1930s. One will reveal the content of amateur films shot in his Atelier and the other will look at Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's only realized project in Africa.
Le Corbusier on Camera, by Véronique Boone (Birkhauser)
The publication is based on research into amateur films made by architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera during the years 1929-1933, including at the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Through images from these films, which capture never-before-seen moments of life at the Atelier, the book places them in Le Corbusier's historical and personal context. The booklaunch will be an opportunity to screen and discuss these films, to question their historical interest and their topicality in the context of the life of an architectural firm, its operation, production and the network it builds up.
Villa Baizeau Carthage. Simple Architecture, edited by Roberto Gargiani (Accattone)
This book looks at a villa that Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret built in Carthage in 1929 for Lucien Baizeau, Blanche Thiéblin and their family, a building now occupied by the administrative services of the Tunisian presidency. The many contributions collected and edited by Roberto Gargiani attempt to appreciate its quality and its place in Le Corbusier's corpus of achievements (the Villa Baizeau was one of his favorite models), to grasp both its historical role and to bring to bear a contemporary eye attentive to precarious social forms and changing climatic conditions, in order to think of an architecture capable of entering into a relationship with the environment without wasting resources.
With Véronique Boone, Roberto Gargiani, OFFICE (Kersten Geers, David van Severen, Jelena Pančevac), Anna Rosellini, and Martino Tattara (DOGMA).
Moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch (artistic director CIVA)
