Le Corbusier Quotes

"A ceux qui, absorbés maintenant dans le problème de "la machine à habiter", déclaraient que "l'architecture c'est servir", nous avons répondu: "L'architecture c'est émouvoir". Et nous avons été taxé de "poète", avec dédain"

A house is a machine for living in.

Vehicular traffic is completely forbidden in the green strips, where tranquility shall reign and the curse of noise shall not penetrate.

A cast-iron stove overflowing with decoration costs less than a plain one; amidst the surging leaf patterns flaws in the casting cannot be seen.

Une maison est une machine-à-habiter.

Arhitectura are un alt sens și alte scopuri decât doar de a scoate în evidență construcția și de a răspunde unor necesități. Arhitectura este arta prin excelență, care atinge starea de măreție platoniciană, de ordine matematică, de speculație spirituală, de percepere a armoniei prin raporturi emoționale. Iată scopul arhitecturii.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

ROME AND OURSELVES Rome is a bazaar in full swing, and a picturesque one. There you find every sort of horror (see the four reproductions here given) and the bad taste of the Roman Renaissance. We have to judge this Renaissance by our modern taste, which separates us from it by four great centuries of effort, the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th. We reap the benefit of this endeavour; we judge hardly, but with a warrantable severity. These four centuries are lacking at Rome, which fell asleep after Michael Angelo. Setting foot once again in Paris, we recover our ability to judge. The lesson of Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who can resist and can verify. Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life. The Grand Prix de Rome and the Villa Medici are the cancer of French architecture.

Contour and profile ['modinature'] are the touchstone of the architect.
Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer.
Contour is free of all restraint.

And what about motor-cars?'
'So much the better,' replied the Great Authority: 'they will no longer be able to run in the streets.

What modern man wants is a monk's cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which he may look at the stars.
Page 59

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.

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.

…the skyscrapers of God dominated the countryside. They had made them as high as possible, extraordinarily high. It may seem a disproportion in the ensemble. Not at all, it was an act of optimism, a gesture of courage, a sign of pride, a proof of mastery! In addressing themselves to God, men did not sign their own abdication.

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.