Vers Une Architecture – Towards an Architecture – is the most influential book on the design of buildings since Vitruvius wrote his De Architectura in the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus. It is a manifesto for modernism, arguing that the beauty and logic of machines and engineering – of viaducts, ocean liners and grain silos – be applied to the design of buildings. It also promotes its author, the Swiss-born French architect and painter Le Corbusier, as a man uniquely able to bring this new world into being.
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Picasso was to painting, a towering and egomaniacal creative force who transformed his discipline for ever. His buildings have inspired admiration, sometimes devotion. He is an icon, granted the nickname “Corb” or “Corbu” by architects. He has also been vigorously attacked, as a mechanistic fanatic whose ideas inspired inhumane tower blocks and concrete jungles.
Published as a book in 1923, based partly on previous articles, Vers Une Architecture is now 100 years old. Using arresting combinations of photographs, measured drawings and rough sketches, the book shows images of cars and aeroplanes alongside the Parthenon and the cathedral of Notre Dame. It sets out design principles named “the five points of architecture”, for example that buildings should be raised on slender pillars called “pilotis”, so that the ground could flow uninterrupted beneath them. Vers Une Architecture rings with resonant statements, most famously that “a house is a machine for living in”. It proposes new ways of building cities, with 60-storey towers set among vast gardens and sports fields, served by multi-lane highways, also multi-storey blocks of “villa-apartments” where each home has its own garden.
Le Corbusier put his theories into practice with a series of private houses in and around Paris, including the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931, a white horizontal rectangle resting on pilotis. Later in his career, especially after the second world war, he broke with his attachment to clean lines and pristine shapes, exploring rough concrete and stonework and freeform curving forms, especially with his hilltop church of Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp in eastern France.
In this postwar period he designed the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, a monumental block of flats that put his ideas about mass housing into practice, and the Maisons Jaoul, a pair of houses in a Paris suburb built with earthy brick and robust vaults. His monastery of La Tourette is a contemplative community poised on a sloping site near Lyon, with a shadowy church interrupted by bursts of coloured light. The prime minister of newly independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited him to design the main administrative buildings of Chandigarh, the new capital built for the state of Punjab, and to assist with the planning of the whole city. His buildings there, with shapes partly inspired by historic Indian buildings and deep overhangs to provide shade from the heat, form a grand composition with a mountainous horizon.
These powerful buildings sometimes contradicted the ideas of Vers Une Architecture, but still made real its definition of architecture as the “magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”. They had countless imitators. But now that it has hit its centenary, this work about the future is firmly in the past. We asked leading architects of the present what Le Corbusier means to them, and in what ways he is still relevant now.
Frank Gehry: ‘I couldn’t have done some of my work without him’
Architect of the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles
Ronchamp is in my gut and in my head. It is the best thing ever, I think. There was a freedom that he put on the table, and a connection to humanity and nature. It’s released from all the usual geometries of architecture. It’s like a sketch, like drawing, like art. There’s nothing like it, nothing that comes even close. Even myself.
I guess I wouldn’t have done some of my sculptural work in the same way if Corb hadn’t been alive before me. Maybe. I didn’t consciously set out to follow him. It was intuitive, whatever. It was like drawings by Picasso, who influenced all of us, as did [Willem] de Kooning. It opened a door of possibilities. Postmodernists, you know, they went down another rabbit hole.
When I was a student I went on a tour to La Tourette, and that was incredible. To go into that church and the way it was situated inside the monastery, it was very powerful. So we all Corbed one another to death on that tour. Later I went to Paris and I saw the Maisons Jaoul. I loved that project. I visited the apartments in Marseille and I was excited about them, though in hindsight I wouldn’t want to live in one.
I couldn’t get into his writing. His city building stuff was too rigid for me. There were shows at Harvard of his paintings and drawings that fell very flat. I understand that those were part of this search but as objects they were disappointing.
We’re all contributing to the world so whatever we do, if we hit a nerve somewhere and someone picks up on it, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s saying we love you Le Corbusier and we do, we still love him, we love him more.
Favourite building: Ronchamp
Kate Macintosh: ‘After an initial entrancement, I became more critical’
Architect of exceptional social housing projects, including Dawson’s Heights (completed in 1972) in East Dulwich, London
It was in my second year, when I was 20, that I discovered the Corb books in the college library. I was encouraged to look at these by fellow students, not by the staff. I found his presentation very stimulating and his seemingly quite spontaneous sketches pretty riveting, especially given the rather mushy lack of any design theory coming from the staff. But even then I had a sneaking scepticism about his obsession with ships, aeroplanes and cars, since vehicles are not required to relate in any way to any environmental context, whereas in my view the most successful buildings are site specific.
After that initial entrancement, I became more critical. If you take his idea of raising buildings on pilotis to allow the garden to extend beneath the residence, this is obvious nonsense because you can’t have a garden without rainfall and sunlight. Symbolically you could see pilotis as a device for divorcing the building from the ground and a denial of dependency on the earth, and an assertion of dominance and control over nature.
His urban plans were utterly car-dependent – modern movement architecture was predicated on a presumption of unlimited cheap fossil fuel and other finite resources. That this was a fallacy only really broke through into the consciousness of architects like me 50 years after the publication of Vers Une Architecture. Now of course our relationship to nature is our primary, overwhelming challenge for survival.
Favourite building: Maisons Jaoul
Denise Scott Brown: ‘I love his houses – but he didn’t understand how cities work’
Pioneer of postmodern architecture and architect, with her late husband Robert Venturi, of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London
My mother studied architecture and she was an ardent disciple of Le Corbusier. She hired an architect called Norman Hanson who was inspired by him and we grew up in a very modern Corbusian house in Johannesburg. There was a spiral stair and I could swing around on it. I was sorry we didn’t have an attic but we had a whole flat roof to play on. There were great wonderful windows and portholes that cast light on an eastern wall, that went from circles to ellipses as the sun went lower.
I love Le Corbusier’s houses. I love Ronchamp – the way he brings in light to get a religious sensation is admirable. I admire the Unité d’Habitation for the thoughtful details. But he didn’t understand how cities work.
He looked at New York and said that when the streets are straight the mind is clear. I adore that, but when he gets to saying that everything must be rectangular that’s plain wrong. He didn’t know how to relate anything to anything, he didn’t know how systems of movement worked.
Le Corbusier wrote that the cities of Europe were built by donkeys – the streets were shaped around their tracks. He insults the donkey, says he’s lazy and goes round in circles when he should go straight. But the donkey goes the way that makes sense, going round a rise in the ground for example rather than going over it, which is how you get the lovely patterns of old cities. He’s not lazy, he’s a functionalist. Le Corbusier was an ass.
But he admitted later that he too had a weakness, that he loved beautiful things. He couldn’t help it.
Favourite buildings: Ronchamp, Villa Savoye
Jayden Ali: ‘Sometimes we like things that are not good for us’
Principal of JA architects. Designer of Fashioning Masculinities exhibition at the V&A Museum and co-curator of the British Pavilion at the current Venice Architecture Biennale
I made a film with my partner, the artist Lotty Sanna, called A Machine for Living In. It compared the idealised modernist aesthetic of the Unité d’Habitation, and the unattainable home life projected by Kim Kardashian, with the realities of childbirth and the diversity of people on the beach in Marseille. It was about the power of idols and images.
What Corb does with Towards an Architecture is to say “I do this” and to be definitive about that self-expression, that searching for a set of rules so you can break them later on in life. I love the power of the image and of mass media that allowed his ideas to be presented to the world. Just as we know that Kim Kardashian as an entity is probably not the thing that’s going to get you through life but we’re all seduced by it. Sometimes we like things that are not good for us, that’s the joy of life.
We lived in the Barbican in London, which was very much inspired by Le Corbusier. I loved it. It was incredibly complete and controlled and peaceful. However, the infuriating thing is that you sometimes feel that you are living in someone else’s vision. I also lived in a version of the Unité in Bethnal Green, a classic postwar 12-storey housing block. The journey from the street to your front door was like hell – a local authority car park, then not knowing whether you’re going to step over faeces or something or someone pissing in the stairwell. It just didn’t have the poetics of space to it, didn’t have those moments of drama. My critique is not necessarily about the originals, it’s also about the cheap imitations.
I think we have a modernist sentiment. We’re not anti-Eurocentric. We’re informed by that canon and that canon quite clearly goes back to Corb, however we wouldn’t churn it out now. I would always side with some form of eclecticism and diversity over homogeneity and that’s why his later works are really interesting. He’s saying I’ve had enough of the shackles I gave myself. That’s no way to live.
Favourite building: Unité d’Habitation
Grafton Architects: ‘What an incredible achievement, to be timeless. Like a shark’
Led by Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, the Dublin-based winners of the Pritzker prize, the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and the Stirling prize, their projects include the Marshall Building at the London School for Economics
SM: He’s accused of not being humanist but there’s feeling and emotion in Vers Une Architecture. There are extraordinary descriptions of the Parthenon, amazing words that he uses about combining violence with tenderness and the brutal nature of beautiful things as well as the poetic.
YF: There are fantastically powerful photographs and images and some of the words, and some of them are like going back to nursery rhymes. “Architecture is the masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.” “A house is a machine for living in.” “Passion can create drama out of inert stone.” They were like T-shirt statements. As students, they fed us.
SM: I couldn’t get as a student how someone would be able to combine the lessons of Rome with the Citroën car. It has probably taken all my architectural life to understand the connection between the archaic and contemporary. He could bring them right up together.
YF: There’s an old photograph of one of his houses where it looks contemporary and the car in front looks old-fashioned. What an incredible achievement, to be timeless. Like a shark.
SM: He seemed to understand how people could live together. He didn’t do boxes in the air, he designed virtual villages with community life and hanging gardens. He believed that every apartment should be like a villa. He created amazing machines for living in a collective way.
Favourite buildings: Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh. “It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.” (Shelley McNamara); Ronchamp. “It’s a piece of architecture that anyone who visited it would really respond to.” (Yvonne Farrell)
Jacques Herzog: ‘Modernists had to believe. There is no sense of doubt’
Partner in Herzog and de Meuron, architects of Tate Modern in London and the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing
He was a very inspired person and he did some unbelievable buildings, much more in his later phase. He wrote some really terrible, racist and horrible texts. I don’t think there is any one of the younger generation who is still inspired by his books. I was always more inspired by the thinking of artists – they were more conceptual, less stylistic – for example what Donald Judd was saying in his article Specific Objects.
A book can be very helpful as a weapon for the author. It expresses your take and spreads it. It can be quite effective and quite powerful but loses its strength and efficiency sooner rather than later. I think that architects generally get forgotten, and some of their work remains and stays important and inspiring once you visit it.
When you read Vers Une Architecture and look at some of his urban proposals, those were really part of an overestimation of his own personality, even if he was a genius. I admire Ronchamp and La Tourette because I think they are very important sculptural works. I appreciate his paintings less. I don’t think you can do more than one thing really on the highest level. That might have been possible in the 16th century, but I doubt that this can be done today.
What I miss in many works of modernists is a sense of doubt, and this is to do with the modernist idea of destruction to build something new. They had to believe. It was like an ideology. So there is no sense of doubt and that’s perhaps what I’m missing in Le Corbusier.
Favourite building: Ronchamp. “Because it is a work of art as much as a work of architecture and in a chapel that works well, much better than a factory or a housing scheme.”
Yasmeen Lari: ‘His strength for me was his creative play of forms and spaces’
Winner of the 2023 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, awarded for her relief work in disaster zones in Pakistan
He went to India, he got this huge chance to build a new capital. The two nations were born in 1947 and I’m a product of that post-colonial period, the first generation that was growing up then. When he was invited to Chandigarh I thought it was amazing for him to be there and to do things, though when you look back of course, what he created were still alien forms for India. They had never built anything like that, in terms of the size of the structures or the use of concrete.
Indian architects followed him, they found a path, they found a way to express themselves in an independent country. And Pakistan didn’t have that kind of giant working, so we struggled for a long time.
His strength for me was his creative play of forms and spaces. Indian architecture is very solid – I mean if you go to the Hindu tradition not the Muslim tradition – it is very solid, the temples are ornate and beautiful but I don’t get in them that sense of space. Corbu opened up another kind of spatial characteristics in India.
I think the importance of space is all pervading. You need to use it in different ways. But it is really what makes architecture. The work that I’m doing in communities, they’re minimum accommodation, minimum cost, so really it’s the way that you cluster them or put them together or raise them, that’s the kind of space that’s relevant to them.
Favourite building: Ronchamp. “It stays with me. I can still feel myself going in there.”
Rem Koolhaas: ‘His city plans are polemical and clearly not intended for reality’
A founder of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, whose projects include the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing (completed 2012) and the recent Taipei Performing Arts Centre, and the author of Delirious New York (1978)
When I was a teenager I went to the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels and saw the Poème Électronique [the pavilion that Le Corbusier designed with the composer Iannis Xenakis for the electronics company Philips]. It was totally exciting and amazingly radical, first as an expressionistic space but also because of a fantastic electronic soundtrack. The combination was an almost magical transformation of expected architectural space and experience. When I was a journalist when I was maybe 20 I interviewed Le Corbusier. Not that it was a great conversation because he was old and a little bit decrepit but I saw him and spoke to him. I looked him up and was aware of his history.
It was the work that I related to much more than the words. Corbusier the writer is over-hortatory. I’m amazed that a book that is so blatant and uses a rhetoric that is far from subtle could work – but 100 years ago you could simply announce what you want. It’s barely a single book, almost a collage of different brochures, an extremely complex hodgepodge of different preferences and subjects and you can barely say that they cohere.
Obviously the same brain is generating the words and the works. He’s partly talking to himself, trying to maybe identify a field of reference that is important to him. So in that way it makes the work more accessible. It’s also deeply exciting that a brain is willing to encompass all these different sources and enthusiasms.
I have described his city plans as neurotic jealousy of the already existing city of New York. On the other hand they are very polemical and clearly not intended for reality, certainly not in their entirety. As polemic they are very successful, but in the end they did enormous damage to the cause of architecture, in the sense that they were so outrageous that it gave an alibi for countless philistine and uncreative authors to make an idea of tabula rasa unacceptable.
Favourite building: none. “I find it difficult to say which is the best or the most of anything.”
Adam Nathaniel Furman: ‘He didn’t really follow his own rules, because he was an artist’
Architecturally trained artist and designer. Co-author of Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories
His writings represented everything I hate about the modernist and globalist project, the monstrous version that absolutely steamrollered over all identities. I’m very comfortable being conflicted. So I’m fine with thinking that Le Corbusier might be the greatest architect of all time – as an artist, not as an urban thinker or a critic. As a spatial artist I have never experienced anything quite on the level of mastery of his buildings. As a student we were taken on a tour of some of his works. I think I cried multiple times.
His buildings work on me in a spiritual way. They lift you up or bring you back to earth. You feel glamorous moving through them: Beyoncé should be walking up those staircases and ramps. And their use of colour is inspirational. People think they’re all white but they’re not. They gave me the impetus for feeling confident in my use of colour.
But I have to separate all that in my head from his ridiculous bombastic theories. Vers Une Architecture uses a language of cleansing and cleanliness and efficiency – “a house is a machine for living in” – of a kind that tends to erase everything that is aesthetically different or spatially different. Difference gets given negative connotations that in his time were often given to the exotic other – women and queers – superficial, silly, “I’m scientific and you’re not”, all that kind of stuff.
It was propaganda, reputation-building, influence-building. It was meant to be shocking and polemical and it’s had horrific consequences. But he didn’t really follow his own rules, because he was an artist. He imprisoned everyone else and set himself free.
Favourite building: La Tourette
