Hardcover, cloth bound with dust jacket. From the "New Vision" series.

"The Studio has informed me of its intention to publish a book on Aviation, the desire of the publishers being to inform the general public, questions of technique apart, as to what stimulus there may be in it for contemporary society, divided at the moment between a desire to retrace its steps and to embark on the conquest of a new civilization.

I accepted the task and so that there should be no ambiguity I headed the opening pages with this modest sub-title : ” Frontispiece to Pictures of the Epic of the Air.” Being neither technician nor historian of this amazing adventure, I could only apply myself to it by reason of that ecstasy which I feel when I think about it.

This ecstatic feeling dates from the first Aviation Exhibition at Paris after the War, at which time I was helping to run the Esprit Nouveau, a review which strove to remove the veil which still largely obscured the new era of machine civilization. We gave out labours this confident heading : “A great period has just begun.”

During the publication of L’Esprit Nouveau, i used with a timely impatience the phrase “Eyes which do not see !…” and in three articles I cited as evidence, steamships, automobiles, and airplanes.

The point then was that our eyes did not see… Did not see the budding of a new feeling for plastic beauty in a world full of strength and confidence.

But to-day it is a question of the airplane eye, of the mind with which the Bird’s Eye View has endowed us; of that eye which now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be.

And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming. The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse." (Le Corbusier in the preface)