Le Corbusier Quotes

Architecture is the learned game; correct and magnificent of forms assembled in the light

Vous savez, c'est la vie qui a raison, l'architecte qui a tort.

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.

A house is a machine for living in.

When I flew over the Atlas Mountains in a plane, I realized that their formation-through erosion, geological dramas, the action of winds-was completely independent of our moral anxieties; man is in a kind of cyclone; he builds solid houses to protect and shelter his heart. Outside, nature is nothing but indifference, even terror.

The "styles" are a lie.

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.

Education will always be torn between two fatalities: apostleship and egoism.

Design has killed architecture.
Design is what they teach in the schools.

Una nueva sociedad crea su hogar, ese receptáculo de la vida.

My own duty and my aim is to try and raise people out of their misery, away from catastrophe; to provide them with happiness, with a contented existence, with harmony. My own goal is to establish or re-establish harmony between people and their environment.

…the schist pyramids can leave us contrite. Greatness is in the intention; and not in dimensions.

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.

Here is a fact which may seem discouraging at first blush, but one which on reflection will encourage and inspire confidence; immense industrial undertakings do not need great men.

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