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Mahnaz Shah , Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project: An Investigation into its Structural Formulation . London : Ashgate , 2013. xxv + 222pp. 133 figures. £65.00 hbk.
Review of Books
'Don't kill Venice, I beg you', wrote Le Corbusier in 1962 in a letter to the mayor of Venice, Giovanni Favaretto Fisco. Fisco had contacted the architect to work on a design for a new civil hospital for Venice. Le Corbusier, however, strongly opposed the possibility of building a high-rise structure, exclaiming 'I am distressed thinking that Venice is able, through the invasion of excess, to become an atrocious swamp similar to all the cities of North America, South America, and now Europe. Yes, I have created skyscrapers 220 metres tall, but I have placed them where they had to be placed' (p. 12). Mahnaz Shah's account of the project, Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project: An Investigation into its Structural Formulation, sheds light on precisely this aspect of the architect's iconic work for the city of Venice: its sensitivity to the urban environment.
The Venice Hospital project was never finished. Developed in the years between Fisco's invitation and Le Corbusier's sudden death in 1965, the hospital...