?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
"ITALY IS WAKING UP TREMENDOUSLY, ARCHITECTURE . . . BURSTING OUT EVERYWHERE" LE CORBUSIER. Typed Letter Signed, to Baroness Catherine d'Erlanger ("Dear Madam and Friend"), in French, agreeing to design an aquarium for Venice, expressing interest in designing a residence in Venice that would take into account the history and present of that city's architecture, offering to advise Count [Giuseppe] Volpi concerning [industrial?] housing, expressing excitement about Italy's recent renaissance in city planning and architecture, and promising to send a copy of Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. 2 pages, 4to, written on the recto and verso of single sheet; folds. Paris, 12 September 1934
". . . Your letter contains positive things: the first is the idea of building an aquarium in Venice. Obviously this idea interests me a lot. I know the London aquarium, which the director of the Zoological Garden showed me during Pentecost. It's very interesting to make an aquarium, I couldn't ask for more. It will even give me great pleasure. The difficulty is to make architecture as beautiful as some of the fish in the Adriatic Sea . . . . "But what would interest me much more . . . would be to try to make a modern house in Venice (an ordinary house, the house of an honest man) in keeping with the splendours of the architecture of the past. And by splendor I mean just as much the modest house as the Palace. . . . The question is . . . to find a harmony between today and yesterday . . . employing the techniques of today with, if possible, as much brilliance as the Venetians of yesteryear . . . . The more I travel, the more I find that it is the contemporary spirit which constitutes, generation after generation, the chain of kinship, human harmony, and a fundamental unity. Any look back creates a lie and a hiatus. "The . . . point about . . . the contact to be made with Count VOLPI about . . . the new industrial Venice. You encourage me to intervene. When I was in Venice, I was also full of fire and indignation, and I felt it my duty to inform a man of Count VOLPI's worth about the present state of ideas . . . in matters of housing. . . . I will send Count VOLPI a note . . . . The only thing that worries me is that he does not have time to read these and that my intervention is therefore of the nature of a mosquito bite, and nothing more. "Italy is waking up tremendously, architecture and town planning are bursting out everywhere. The welcome I received in Rome and Milan is such that I can, without boasting, admit a part of paternity in this Italian renaissance (how pretty the word is!). If Count VOLPI wanted, as you say, to appeal to people from all over the world and ask me to explain to him what application can be made in Venice of the architectural and urban revolution in the field of housing, I would be charmed. I've reached an age where you almost start to get tired of always knocking on other people's doors and where you would like someone to call you from time to time. . . ."
