In Please send this book to my mother, artist Sarah Entwistle dismantles the traditional form of the architectural monograph and artist biography. In 2011, the astounding personal effects of her grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle (1916–76), emerged from a Manhattan storeroom. This book welds together original text fragments and extensive visual material from the collection and Clive Entwistle's years in Paris, London, Tangiers, and New York.
Clive Entwistle described his cardinal points as: Philosophy, Architecture, Intellect, and Sex. He was an autodidact whose unconsolidated practice tackled utopian city plans, product design, structural engineering, formal experimentation, and architectural critique. The one-time translator and collaborator of Le Corbusier, Entwistle's proposal for the Crystal Palace (1946) was described by Corbusier as, “one of the great projects of our time.” However, none of his ambitious proposals was realized, and Entwistle's presence was largely erased from the landscape of modernism.
Sarah Entwistle has constructed an ambiguous portrait, an evocative rendition of an extraordinary life, which provokes questions on the authority of the biographer and the monograph. This publication reaches beyond these genres to resemble an artist's book of poetry and prose fiction.
Published to coincide with Sarah Entwistle's solo exhibition of new sculptural works, “He was my father and I an atom destined to grow into him,” Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, October 23–December 6, 2015.
