A genius, despite detractors

: Le Corbusier Le Grand’ is doubly well-named. First, the book is the size of two breeze blocks and notably heavier. It is [not] a coffee-table book but the coffee table itself: all you need do is fit legs to it. [He] has a point. It is the least wieldy book I have ever been propelled across a room by — it is 0.67m wide when opened, and demands a physical as much as an aesthetic will [to] be appreciated. This is peculiarly apt, for Le Corbusier’s buildings themselves require the attention of every sense you can think of and then some [need] to be swooned through. They are not comprehensible by intellect alone. Second, this was a great artist, among the greatest of his century. And one who must evidently be judged by what he himself achieved rather than by the “influence” he supposedly exerted upon two or three generations of keen plagiarists...Why are architects so dismally and blatantly derivative? They are obviously unfamiliar with Montaigne’s counsel that the copyist should disguise his sources by following the example of horse rustlers who “paint the tail and the mane and sometimes put the eyes out”. [Le Corbusier] remains, more than 40 years after his death, the hate figure of tectonically blind anti-modernists, though one wonders whether they had eyes to put out in the first place: Le Corbusier was merely blind in one eye...

Excerpted from a review by Jonathan Meades in ‘The New Statesman’