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I tried recalling my earliest memories of him – that walk along the river, my first day of school. I tried conjuring earlier events, but the images grew hazy, lost within the nothingness of infancy. I found this strange void troubling, this life I’d lived yet couldn’t recall. To me it seemed as though the world began with my earliest memory of it, that it was born fully formed the moment my recollection claimed it and that prior to that moment there had been no life, no earth, no planets, no sun or stars – just emptiness.
We often find ephemera lost or long forgotten between the pages of the old books we buy. In this instance a man discovers a photograph hidden within his father’s copy of Le Corbusier’s “Toward a New Architecture”, a photograph of his father as a child. With him in the photograph is the architect Le Corbusier himself. A note on the back of the photograph, added later by Le Corbusier, identifies the location as Ronchamp, in France. This discovery sparks an investigation into his father’s hidden life. When we go digging into the past we often learn that the things we thought we knew, we didn’t know quite as well as we thought. In this story, the photograph found between the pages of Le Corbusier’s book could, on the surface, suggest an architectural legacy dating back to Napoleonic France, or it might simply be an indication that he and his father often lived in different, often separate worlds.