Le Corbusier Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Le Corbusier
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.

Le Corbusier
A house is a machine for living in.

Le Corbusier
Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work. Our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, we have got to wash!

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
The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony.

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

Le Corbusier
Engineers fabricate the tools of their time. Everything, that is to say, except houses and moth-eaten boudoirs.

Le Corbusier
Working by calculations, engineers employ geometrical forms, satisfying our eyes by their geometry and our understanding of their mathematics; their work is one the direct line of good art.

Le Corbusier
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
There is one profession and one only, namely architecture, in which progress is not considered necessary, where laziness is enthroned, and in which the reference is always to yesterday.

Le Corbusier
The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity.

Le Corbusier
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.

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

Le Corbusier
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.

Le Corbusier
The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.

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

Le Corbusier
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.

Le Corbusier
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.

Le Corbusier
My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life—the poetry.

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

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

Le Corbusier
This frightful word [function] was born under other skies than those I have loved—those where the sun reigns supreme.

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

Le Corbusier