‘Complications and attacks on the beauty of unity’: Le Corbusier and Louis Soutter

Abstract

The sources of Le Corbusier’s status as the most influential architect of the twentieth-century may be traced above all to his theoretical writing, as communicated in his own carefully supervised book publications. A detailed and profound response to them comes in the form of unique artist’s books made from several of these works by the architect’s own cousin Louis Soutter, an artist often categorized as an ‘art brut’ visionary. This essay examines the ways in which Soutter’s dense figurative and decorative marginal drawings on the books emphasize the ambivalent tensions and exchanges between the two men and their apparently contradictory but equally complex world views.