‘Don't kill Venice, I beg you’, wrote Le Corbusier in 1962 in a letter to the mayor of Venice, Giovanni Favaretto Fisco. Fisco had contacted the architect to work on a design for a new civil hospital for Venice. Le Corbusier, however, strongly opposed the possibility of building a high-rise structure, exclaiming ‘I am distressed thinking that Venice is able, through the invasion of excess, to become an atrocious swamp similar to all the cities of North America, South America, and now Europe. Yes, I have created skyscrapers 220 metres tall, but I have placed them where they had to be placed’ (p. 12). Mahnaz Shah's account of the project, Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project: An Investigation into its Structural Formulation, sheds light on precisely this aspect of the architect's iconic work for the city of Venice: its sensitivity to the urban environment.

The Venice Hospital project was never finished. Developed in the years between Fisco's invitation and Le Corbusier's sudden death in 1965, the hospital was to be situated in a peripheral area of the city, in the quarter of San Giobbe, next to the train station. The design consisted of three levels; an arrangement of three volumes that, combined, maintained the same height as that of the neighbourhood. The lowest level was a continuation of the public space of the city, creating flexible environments, diffusing the barrier between the inside and the outside through a repetition of courtyards. The architect and Le Corbusier's former assistant, Giullermo Jullian de la Fuente, continued with the commission until 1970, though he was never able to realize the drawings in concrete forms.

Shah's excellent chapter on the urban context points out how the design for the Venice Hospital reflected and extended the medieval fabric of the city and its specific pattern of circulation with its multiple calli (streets), bridges and canals. Or, to use De la Fuente's words, ‘it is very important to remark that the idea was not to create a block or a wall towards the city. . .In Venice there is this special characteristic. . .that is the way buildings, water, and light merge into a completely different condition where they are not single buildings anymore but a whole architectural compound.’ Yet, according to Shah, the Venice project is more than a mere reflection of the existing urban condition; it is a ‘set of memories’, she writes, an amalgam of Le Corbusier's impressions of Venice since his first trip to Italy in 1907. His reading of the city was thus ‘constructed over time’ (p. 14). It does, however, remain unclear how this might have altered his perception and, subsequently, changed the structural formulation of the hospital.

Why another monograph on the Venice Hospital project? The interest of this new book resides in Shah's disagreement with the general interpretation of the Venice Hospital as a so-called ‘Mat Building’, as postulated by authors such as Alexander Tzonis, Kenneth Frampton and, more recently, Hashim Sarkis. Rather, according to Shah, the design is a ‘façade sans façade’; it is not the external structure that is significant, but its internal mechanism; the replication of the circulation system found in the city of Venice. Moreover, the project introduced a new phase in Le Corbusier's thinking about urbanism, Shah contends, a phase in which the architect – primarily known for his ‘machines for living in’ and ruthless city plans – was concerned with urban problems on an urban scale rather than single buildings, and with designs rooted in the environment. Yet, as the recent exhibition ‘Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes’ in the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, showed, attentiveness to the genius loci – albeit often the geography of the site rather than the historical parameters – was arguably already apparent in the architect's earlier works. In Corbusier's model for a Palace of the Soviets (1931–32), or the plan for St Dié (1944–46), one sees a sensitivity towards the environment that might be recognized throughout his career.

Notwithstanding Shah's noteworthy analyses, the text is interspersed with long quotes, correspondences and entire emails from de la Fuente to the author herself, all of which make it somewhat difficult to read. The first chapter, for example, presents the entire correspondence between Le Corbusier and the Venetian administration. Similarly, a book devoted to the ‘structural formulation’ of a design project could have benefited from higher-quality images. This, however, does not contradict the fact that Shah's book provides an important impetus to study Le Corbusier's projects in relation to its urban context, moving from a formal analysis of architecture to an analysis of the urban ramifications.