The Open Hand

The Open Hand

Essays on Le Corbusier

Edited by Russell Walden

Foreword by André Wogenscky

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

The following figures © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020: 1, 3, 4, 7-9, 12, 18, 22-24, 31-38, 43, 45-51, 54-55, 58, 61-73, 83, 86, 98, 100-101, 108, 117, 120, 123, 129-131, 133, 138, 140.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Subject to such license, all rights are reserved.

Over this passage on page 8 of his 1908 French translation of Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Le Corbusier wrote in 1961, “La main ouverte.”

^{See! I am tired of my wisdom, like a bee that has collected too much honey, I need hands which stretch out for it.}
^{I should like to give it away and distribute it until the wise among men become happy again in their foolishness, and the poor happy in their riches.}

Le Corbusier, Le Poème de l’angle droit.

^{Pleine main j’ai reçu pleine main je donne.}

by André Wogenscky

Foreword

by Russell Walden

Acknowledgments

Introduction

by Russell Walden

For architects who have an individual approach to design in modern architecture, and for scholars whose experiences are sufficiently broad to appreciate the difficulties involved, it is time to look objectively at the work of one of the important architectural masters.