Le Corbusier le Grand
Introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen
Phaidon £100, 768 pages
Giant tome on the Swiss-born master of architecture. Letters, photos and sketches make this a more personal and intimate survey than most but it is crushed by its own weight. Read it in bed and you’ll get a sore ribcage – it’s more suitable for a (sturdy) modernist coffee table.

Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence
By Styliane Philippou
Yale University Press £35, 256 pages
Serious, heavily illustrated study of the last of the great modernist architects, who was born in Brazil in 1907.