Page 20 - summer 22

• “The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity.”
• “Art is in its essence arrogant.”
• “The history of architecture is the struggle for light.”
• "Modern life demands and is waiting for a new kind of plan both for the and
the house and city.”
• “A house is a machine for living in.”

… yet he said he preferred drawing to writing: “Drawing is faster and leaves less room
for lies.”

He summed up his ideas on architecture as follows:
• “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought

together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade
reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great
primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct
and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are
beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the
child, the savage and the metaphysician.”

His vision was to purge architecture of superfluous decoration and clutter and base it

on the basic geometric shapes, cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, pyramids. There was
something Platonic about this; Plato said ideal, perfect forms lay behind all matter,
which could only be known through the intellect, not the senses. Modernist
architecture was intellectual, austere, coolly logical, mathematical, pared down to
the basics of line, space and form. Le Corbusier also advocated the use of new
materials, reinforced concrete and steel, and he liked raising buildings up on stilts or

pilotis.

All this linked in with the Bauhaus school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in
1919 who wanted architecture to be functional and integrated with art, design and
mass-production technology; Le Corbusier, Kandinsky and Paul Klee were all
involved. Le Corbusier admired engineers for their appreciation that the sheer
functionality of modern machines and engineering structures gave them both purity
and beauty. But Modernist architecture wasn’t just about getting it aesthetically
right; underpinning it was a utopian faith, that beautiful homes and city buildings

would create beautiful, happy people. Rational city planning would create a new
world; Modern Paradise.

The outcome was the so-called International Style which swept the world in Le
Corbusier’s life-time. However, by the time of his death in 1965, his reputation was in