Le Corbusier Architecture Quotes & Sayings

When does a building actually become a built? — Le Corbusier

The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. — Le Corbusier

One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else. We have a natural opportunity to investigate the connections of a problem when looking back at its solution. — George Polya

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. — Le Corbusier

With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh. — Masato Otaka

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

What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot. — Jim Thompson

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light. — Le Corbusier

The brain is unreliable. It relies on lies. — Brian Spellman

I never ask myself how I do what I do. After all, how does it rain? — Pearl Bailey

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.
But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in. — Le Corbusier

If it's total freedom, I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer, with the performer projecting something he doesn't even have to play. — Alice Cooper

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for. — Michael Graves

The greatest barrier to knowing God's will is simply that we want to run our own lives. Our problem is that a battle is going on in our hearts - a battle between our wills and God's will. — Billy Graham

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects. — Le Corbusier

Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine. It is in two part time; tears in the heart; movement of the legs, torso arms and head. The music of the era of construction; innovating. It floods the body and heart; it floods the USA and its floods the world. The jazz is more advanced than the architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle. — Le Corbusier

Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois. — Le Corbusier

The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US. — Le Corbusier

It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution. — Le Corbusier

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual
ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world
is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love
passion
liberty.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve. — Richard Meier

I first decided architecture was for me when I saw Le Corbusier's designs in a Japanese magazine in the 1930s. — Kenzo Tange

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

Not the work, really, but what went along with it. The bureaucracy. The fact that he had to work in an office. He really hated having to wear a suit and tie every day. — Chris Kyle

A house is a machine for living in. — Le Corbusier