Lucien Hervé

Acquired directly from the artist

Pierre Jeanneret was Le Corbusier’s cousin and, as a certified French architect, his collaborator who signed all their plans.  Jeanneret was the shrinking violet of the group, but archival spadework is beginning to exhume him as well from the shadows of Le Corbusier.  While Le Corbusier went to India, designed the public buildings of Chandigarh, and went home, Jeanneret stayed for the rest of his life.  He became the chief architect of Chandigarh, the de facto dean of the architecture school there, and a beloved mentor to Indian architects.  Virtually all the furniture originally made for the public buildings of Chandigarh is either by Jeanneret, or was made under his supervision.

In addition to works by Jeanneret from Chandigarh, this catalogue illustrates for the first time photographs and objects obtained from the family of one of Le Corbusier’s model-makers Gianni Rattan Singh.  The  balance of the documents, photographs and objects obtained from the Singh family will be donated to the City Museum of Chandigarh, another Le Corbusier-designed structure which houses and displays an exhaustive archive of the making of the city.  I am also giving a collection of period Lucien Hervé prints of Le Corbusier’s work in France to the Fondation Le Corbusier, whose activities set the standard for archival preservation and dissemination in our field.

--R.R.