Le Corbusier's Hospital Project: An Investigation Into Its Structural Formulation

摘要

The genre of the monographic study of an unbuilt project is familiar enough within architectural history that a reader skips almost too quickly past the startling presumption upon which it depends: that the full substance of an architectural thought is decipherable among the fragments of correspondence, drawings, models, and memoranda that remain as its evidence. Not only is it possible to forgive the absence of the physical architecture, it is possible to insist on the paradoxical completeness of the fragments themselves, to insist, that is, that the fragments contain the essence of the architectural thought precisely because they have not encountered fully the compromises and contingencies of the externalities of the project. In this book on one of the well-known unbuilt projects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier's proposed hospital for Venice, the author does not confront directly this underlying theoretical and historical question. But some of its repercussions are present nevertheless.