DISCOVERIES

Le Corbusier

A Life

Nicholas Fox Weber

Knopf: 848 pp., $45

“Until now,” writes Nicholas Fox Weber, “there has been no substantial biography of Le Corbusier.” The leader of Modernist architecture left scattered print remains in his wake -- memoirs by those who knew him, descriptions of his work and books and essays about architecture by Le Corbusier himself, but this is the first attempt to capture the man in the full context of his personal life. Weber relies on letters the architect wrote: to his friend, the music critic William Ritter; to his wife of 37 years, Yvonne; and, most heavily on letters to his mother, who died in 1960, just five years before Le Corbusier.

Born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, Le Corbusier changed his name in the 1920s and his nationality in 1930 to French (his ancestors were from the French region of Languedoc). He designed his first building in 1905 when he was 17, just outside his home town. At 19, he left home for Italy; the author credits his time spent there with nurturing his “instinctive feeling for color and nature,” and with his insistence on designing buildings “in close relation to their surroundings.”

In his travels around the world, Le Corbusier was always drawn to simple, traditional architecture and monastic interiors. From the 1920s he became famous for his sculptural, airy creations in glass and steel. Weber captures the extremes in the architect’s very personal work: the humanist who invented the Modular scale and the fanatical builder.

While two world wars raged around him, Le Corbusier’s “political philosophy was opportunism.” His willingness to work with the Vichy government was harshly criticized. There is only one building in the United States by Le Corbusier -- the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, built in 1963, and it has always been controversial.

In his effort to create a whole person, Weber writes a great deal about the architect’s relationship with his Yvonne, a woman with a reputation for vulgarity who struggled with and eventually died from alcoholism. Weber describes a saintly husband who loved his inappropriate wife to the very end. His Corbusier was also a man tied way too long to his mother’s apron strings, a man who fought for her approval all his life and never got it.

LeCorbu, a fantastic swimmer all his life, drowned in waters near his county home in the Cote d’Azur in 1965, a death many suspected was suicide. Controlling, depressive, volatile, brilliant and long-suffering -- this is Weber’s portrait of the artist.

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On Architecture

Collected Reflections on a Century of Change

Ada Louise Huxtable

Walker & Co.: 464 pp., $35

It’s a crash course on the architecture of the 20th century, written by a master. Huxtable never loses sight of the fact that the true test of a building is how livable/usable it remains decades, even centuries, after its creation. She is a generous, humble critic in a field littered with egos. She is in love with buildings. This is important -- after decades of writing for the New York Times and, more recently, the Wall Street Journal, she never loses her enthusiasm for the art form.

Huxtable saves her scorn for poor urban planning, like Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. In this collection, she walks us through five decades of Modernism and Postmodernism (“when history and theory, once considered irrelevant, became central to the practice of architecture again”).

The influx of preservationists in the 1970s and the “return of ornament” in that decade sealed the fate of Modernism. She walks us through major works by the giants of Modernism: Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright and the successors who threw off the straitjacket of modernism.

Huxtable has definite opinions and stands by them, half a century later, but she is, from time to time, torn between love and hate -- as in the case of the work of Robert Venturi. She reserves her highest affection for Philip Johnson, especially the Glass House.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com