suburbanrambler's posterous

constructs & contrivances. on. the. quick.

reading

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/books/review/Rybczynski-t.html?_r=1&sq=...

"The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns. We learn about the importance of music when he was a young man (his mother was a piano teacher), and his discovery of Louis Armstrong during a visit to Boston: “It was absolutely dazzling,” the architect recounted, “strength and truth.” Le Corbusier traveled widely for his work, always alone, and while he was an attentive husband, he was not a faithful one. He had several affairs, briefly with Josephine Baker and for many years with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a Swedish-American heiress. (Weber was also given access to previously unstudied correspondence between the two.) His mistresses saw a different man than the pontificating visionary. To Baker he was a “simple man and gay.” According to Tjader Harris, he “was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions.”