Le Corbusier

“It’s like no other!”

That is what Le Corbusier wrote about his manifesto entitled “Vers une architecture” or “Toward an Architecture”, which was published in 1923. The book is positively wild and Dadaist in the way in which Le Corbusier makes things collide here: he uses examples and pictorial material taken from cultural and architectural history and from technology and industry. He shows images of ancient temples next to images of cars, passenger steamers next to buildings and shells next to turbines. This allowed him to make surprising comparisons. To Le Corbusier’s mind, the clear, functional forms of machines had an aesthetic power of their own. Engineers with their technical expertise make connections between mathematics and physics on the one hand and nature on the other. Le Corbusier believed that this scientific approach was missing from architecture as the academic architectural tradition ignored the innovations of modern engineering.

In this manifesto, Le Corbusier explained his vision of a contemporary modern architecture for the first time. Architecture had to respond to the needs of the newly emerging modern industrial society:

“A great age has dawned. A new spirit prevails. An abundance of works reflecting the new spirit are to be found in industrial production in particular. Architecture is suffocating under its traditions. Styles are a lie. Style is a fundamental unity which breathes life into all the works of an epoch and emanates from a certain spirit. Our time shapes its style every day. Unfortunately, our eyes cannot discern it yet.”

In his own “patient” research, Le Corbusier deliberately worked against this blindness.

His book is an avant-garde manifesto which challenges and provokes but also sets out his position in a language we can understand. Le Corbusier was not only a painter, architect and designer – he was a theoretician and an author too. His work was accompanied by pamphlets, manifestos and theoretical texts at all times. More than almost any other artist or architect, Le Corbusier tried to record and communicate his attitude and his ideas.