Scope and content:

This series documents Le Corbusier's architectural projects, including executed buildings, unrealized designs, and conceptual planning projects, through photographic slides and negatives, some of which are accompanied by contact prints. Organized by project, this photographic material was compiled by Lucien Hervé and Le Corbusier, and includes both Hervé's negatives and copies of negatives made by other photographers, including but not limited to, Charles Gérard, Marius Gravot, and Frédéric Boissonnas. Hervé worked closely with Le Corbusier on the selection of images for publication, and he also played the role of archivist by collecting, or creating, copies of existing images of Le Corbusier's early work. Included in this series are many images of pages from the eight volumes of Le Corbusier: Œuvre complète, depicting the publication of photographs and drawings, which again highlights the comprehensiveness of Hervé's efforts. While the majority of the black-and-white images of architectural projects completed during the 1920s and 1930s in this series are copy negatives of images taken by other photographers, it is important to note that they are frequently accompanied by color slides of the same buildings and sites taken by Hervé during the 1950s and 1960s.

Many of the copy negatives present here are assumed to have originally been glass plate negatives and many were numbered, either on the plate itself or on a corresponding contact print. Where these numbers have been identified, they are noted as: "Original negative numbers." The copy negatives are of various sizes and include negatives believed to have been made from interpositives (many on crudely-cut unlabeled film, fogged and slightly warped); negatives made from prints (made on pre-war 4 x 5 in. film, unlabeled process film, and post-war film); and negatives derived from positives of original glass plate negatives. Also included are positives of original glass plate negatives, which are the sharpest of all copies.

All negatives have been rehoused with their original order maintained, with the exception of negatives that were mislabeled. Mislabeled negatives have been integrated into the correct project. Hervé assigned letter codes and a numbering system to each project, but due to a large number of inconsistencies and material without designation, each negative was individually numbered by the Getty Research Institute during the original processing in 2006. The codes and numbering produced by the Getty are inspired by the way in which Hervé labeled material. All project titles, their punctuation, and dates have been taken directly from Le Corbusier's publications Le Corbusier: Oeuvre complète (Volumes 1-8), unless otherwise noted. The dates listed in parentheses are project dates, and do not reflect the dates on which the material was shot or printed.

Many of the black-and-white negatives in this series are accompanied by original annotated paper folders or glassine envelopes, and contact prints. Their presence is noted where applicable.

Additional information: In the fall of 2006, Allan Tomlinson conducted a detailed inventory of this collection. His resulting document contains the same information found in this finding aid, but at a more granular level, often describing the specific views depicted in individual negatives. All negative dimensions in this series were taken directly from this legacy data, therefore the data is accurate, but not always consistently expressed in standard archival nomenclature. Click here to view this original document: 2006 Inventory.

Arrangement:

This series is arranged in chronological order by architectural project.

Contents

Access and use