Le Corbusier Best Quotes & Sayings

Architects everywhere have recognized the need of ... a tool which may be put in the hands of creators of form, with the simple aim ... of making the bad difficult and the good easy. — Le Corbusier

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

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

Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds. — Le Corbusier

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

The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach. — 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

I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school. — Michael Graves

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

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. — Tom Wolfe

Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. — Le Corbusier

The "styles" are a lie. — Le Corbusier

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

When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s. — Michael Graves

By law, all buildings should be white. — Le Corbusier

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

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. — Le Corbusier

The mathematical phenomenon always develops out of simple arithmetic, so useful in everyday life, out of numbers, those weapons of the gods: the gods are there, behind the wall, at play with numbers. — 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

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

You don't start a revolution by fighting the state but by presenting the solutions. — Le Corbusier

Light creates ambience and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure. — Le Corbusier

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

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist. — Robert Hughes

Life never stops. The torment of men will be eternal, unless the function of creating and acting and changing, living intensely through each day, be considered an eternal joy. — Le Corbusier

To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be. — Le Corbusier

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

A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on. Our — Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. — Alain De Botton

Cameras get in the way of seeing. — Le Corbusier