39 Le Corbusier Quotes

Le Corbusier quotes

1. 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.

2. The 'styles' are a lie.

3. Une maison est une machine-a-habiter.

4. 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.

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

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

7. The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

8. 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.

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

10. The age of personal statues is gone. No personal statues shall be erected in the city or parks of Chandigarh. The city is planned to breathe the new sublimated spirit of art. Commemoration of persons shall be confined to suitably placed bronze plaques.

11. The truthfulness of materials of constructions, concrete, bricks and stone, shall be maintained in all buildings constructed or to be constructed. The seed of Chandigarh is well sown. It is for the citizens to see that the tree flourishes.

12. Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

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

1. Light creates ambience and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure.

2. A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

3. To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

4. Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

5. My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life--the poetry.

6. 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.

7. By law, all buildings should be white.

8. You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.

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

10. The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.

11. The home should be the treasure chest of living.

12. Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.

13. We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

14. Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development... might be carried as far as possible.

15. You don't start a revolution by fighting the state but by presenting the solutions.

16. A house is a machine for living in.

17. Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

18. 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.

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

20. When does a building actually become a built?

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

24. My research is like my feeling directed towards what is the principal value in the life, the poetry.

25. The city that has speed has success.

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