Le Corbusier and Costantino Nivola.

Album Nivola I and Album Nivola II: the most informed scholars of contemporary architecture were familiar with Costantino Nivola through the name given by Le Corbusier to Nivola's two albums, the only ones, together with the Album La Roche, that did not have the running header stamped in alphanumeric characters on the co-ver of the pocket-sized notepads that accompanied him in his con-stant travel. Nivola's hospitality led a small and unknown episode that was crucial for Le Corbusier's sculptural evolution as well as for the artistic growth of the young Sardinian artist. This evolution would lead Le Corbusier to define the Modulor and its architectural projection in the espace indicible in Marseille, Chandigarh and Ronchamp. It would also contribute to Costantino Nivola's maturity in his architectural collaboration with BBPR for the Olivetti show-room on Fifth Avenue. With Le Corbusier's lessons in harmony and Nivola's lessons in sand-casting, Nivola's Greenwich Village studio and the East Hampton house on New York's Côte d'Azur, were the physical and intellectual settings for the architect's most ambitious moment. This was the project for the UN Headquarters and the CIAM proposal for a post-war reconstruction and worldwide urban planning, that could achieve the utopia that the United Nations would make possible. This book tells the story of Le Corbusier's New York cosmopolitan family in the context of the American natu-ralization of the European architectural diaspora and in the context of the drive to abstraction of New York School. It contains the last interviews with Nivola's wife Ruth Guggenheim, and with Nivola's architecture student assistant, Peter Chermayeff, as well as excerpts from Le Corbusier's correspondence.

Maddalena Mameli is an architect and a researcher in the history of contemporary architecture, with a focus on the work of Le Cor-busier. She graduated from the University of Cagliari and obtained a PhD in History of Architecture from the School of Architecture at the University of Sassari. She was awarded a scholarship from the Foundation Le Corbusier.