Le Corbusier, the Poetics of Machine and Metaphor. (Dialectical Corb).

By Alexander Tzonis. London: Thames and Hudson. 2002. [pounds sterling]15.95

Tzonis has written a refreshingly concise and focused overview of the life and work of Le Corbusier. He establishes a traditional chronological framework, using life events and building projects to explore the nature of Corb's creative process. He looks at the relationship between memory, precedent, analysis and analogy in the formation of poetic objects. Rational modes of thought and critique, and their creation of formal and compositional tools (free plan, pilotis) are thus set against and intertwined with more intuitive processes of analogy. This sets up the titular dialogue between machine and metaphor, which in this book has its climax in the description of the Unite d'Habitation.

The Unite thus combines years of 'patient research' in the 1920s villas with ideas on city design, mass production and social housing to produce a machine for living which is vying for importance with analogies of ocean liners, bottle racks and Homeric landscapes. Tzonis does not shy from exposing the failures of such buildings along with their successes, and suggests that their continued appeal at times stems from their invoked inspiration rather than their imposed way of life. He describes the Unite as a 'monument-metaphor for human life... judgments and inciters are generated [and] like a poem, a story or a play, they frame settings and point to situations of human condition.'

Elsewhere, Tzonis focuses on Corb's dialectical mode of thought, which explored universal and regionalist ideas, and the values of individual creation and craft compared with mass production and industrialization. Critically, Corb's open-mindedness on such matters is placed in a political, social and financial context which looks at his client relationships, self-promotional skills, political affinities, and methods of procurement within interdisciplinary collaborations. If there is a criticism with the book, it is in its somewhat lazy approach to correcting spelling and grammar, but this is more than made up for by its evocative design and breadth of discussion.