Le Corbusier delighted in the similarity between a cathedral and a grain silo.

Machine for living

The 1931 Villa Savoye outside Paris, designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Mondadori Via Getty Images

By Alex Danchev

Charles- Edouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier (1887-1965), was perhaps the most influential architect of the 20th century. He was also a painter, a writer, a thinker and a self-promoter of genius, or something close to it—the original “starchitect,” as Anthony Flint describes him. His pen name, the name by which he lived and will live—“the crow-like one” (from le corbeau)—was an altered form of an old family name, Lecorbésier. It was adopted at the beginning of his Purist period, in 1920, the period in which Le Corbusier became Le Corbusier.

Purism was a reaction to Cubism and the Great War—a bid to leave both in the past—finding expression in painting and architecture, interior and industrial design, and urban planning. It championed traditionalism, even classicism, with a formal emphasis on clean lines, refinement, visual clarity and purity, while at the same embracing new technologies, new materials and the machine aesthetic. Out of these impulsions, the crow-like one published his manifesto and call to arms, “Toward an Architecture” (1923), first translated (or mutilated) into English by Frederick Etchells in 1927 and restored to its original glory in a new translation by John Goodman in 2007.....Continue Reading

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