Top 50 Corbusier's Quotes
#1. I first decided architecture was for me when I saw Le Corbusier's designs in a Japanese magazine in the 1930s.
Kenzo Tange
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.
Le Corbusier
#7. You don't start a revolution by fighting the state but by presenting the solutions.
Le Corbusier
#8. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution.
Le Corbusier
#9. 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
#10. You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.
Le Corbusier
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.
Le Corbusier
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US.
Le Corbusier
#21. The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity.
Le Corbusier
#22. 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
#23. Vehicular traffic is completely forbidden in the green strips, where tranquility shall reign and the curse of noise shall not penetrate.
Le Corbusier
#24. 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
#25. This one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration ... I'm a minimalist in a rapper's body.
Kanye West
#26. When does a building actually become a built?
Le Corbusier
#27. 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
#28. The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.
Leon Krier
#29. A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.
Le Corbusier
#30. Light creates ambience and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure.
Le Corbusier
#31. Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
Le Corbusier
#32. The home should be the treasure chest of living.
Le Corbusier
#33. Architecture is the learned game; correct and magnificent of forms assembled in the light
Le Corbusier
#34. If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.
Evelyn Waugh
#35. 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
#36. To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.
Le Corbusier
#38. Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.
Le Corbusier
#39. The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.
Le Corbusier
#41. 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
#42. My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life
the poetry.
Le Corbusier
#43. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.
Le Corbusier
#44. Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.
Le Corbusier
#45. I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a 'wonderful catastrophe.' It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring.
Dieter Rams
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds.
Le Corbusier
#50. The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy.
Le Corbusier
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