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.
