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Please Note: WITHDRAWN FROM SALE. [iv], 229 pp. Many plates and illustrations after photographs and drawings and plans. 8vo. Original orange and white printed & illustrated wrappers, housed in custom black cloth slipcase with Plexiglas window and paper spine label. First Edition.

Inscribed presentation copy, signed by Le Corbusier on front flyleaf to Stephan Osusky, the Ambassador of the Czechoslovakian Republic to the League of Nations. In 1926-1927 the League of Nations held an international architectural competition for its new headquarters, to be built on a superb lakeside site in Geneva. The great Swiss-born architect, Le Corbusier, and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret submitted designs for a magnificent, progressive, and practical complex of buildings. Of the 377 entries theirs was one of the few that was 'modern' in style; yet it was so clearly superior to the others that all observers expected it to be selected. But the forces of the old Beaux-Arts style struck back. At the 63rd meeting of the six-man jury, when the Corbu-Jeanneret entry was about to be named the winner, it was revealed that that submitted plans had been printed rather than executed in the Chinese ink stipulated in the rules of the competition. This scandalous news caused the shelving of the Swiss architects' plans, and the jury thereupon declared itself deadlocked. It soon announced that nine first prizes would be granted--including one to Le Corbusier and Jeanneret--but no entry selected for construction; and it asked the League's diplomats and politicians to pick their own architect. The League then appointed a Committee of Five, including the Ambassadors from Japan, Greece, Colombia, and Great Britain, as well as the Czech Osusky, to make the decision. The Committee looked over the nine prizewinning designs and eventually gave its nod to a French Beaux Arts dinosaur who had publicly referred to Le Corbusier and Jeanneret as "architectural barbarians." That architect's entry had been estimated to cost 27 million Swiss francs to build, but the Committee was willing to overlook this minor infraction of the key stipulation in the competition's rules that the project could not cost more than 13 million Swiss francs--a budgetary requirement which the Corbu-Jeanneret entry had met. Not until 1937 was a pompous neoclassical palace built on the site; it is now the European headquarters of the United Nations. Le Corbusier's book here is an eloquent and eccentric presentation of the aesthetic, ecological, and spiritual principles on which his and Jeanneret's splendid, un-built design was based. It also contains a detailed and caustic account of the fiasco of the competition. The author's bitterness is matched by his heavily sarcastic inscription to Osusky: "a Son Excellence / Dr. Osusky / Ministre a le S. d. N. / Membre du Comite de Cinq. / cette etude desinteressee d'un / probleme contemporain / et ma reconnaissance pour / son attachement a l'esprit / moderne / Jeanneret / nov 1928." ("S. d. N." is an abbreviation for "Societe des Nations," i.e., League of Nations. Le Corbusier's signature is a graceful, illegible, unmistakable series of swirls.) While there is no indication that Ambassador Osusky ever even opened this volume, it remains a unique memento of a last-ditch victory of hidebound traditionalism over the forces of progress within the context of the most important architectural design competition of this century. It also reminds us of a great complex of buildings that exist only on paper.