Towards a New Architecture

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Since the early 1900s, modern architecture has undergone incremental development, where each new iteration has been informed by previous findings and solutions designed by other architects. This process started at a very slow pace, when a young Le Corbusier went east and published his findings and observations in Vers une Architecture. Profile and contour are the touchstone of the Architect. Here he reveals himself as artist or mere engineer. Profile and contour are free of all constraint. There is here no longer any question of custom, nor of tradition, nor of construction, nor of adaptsation to utilitarian needs. Profile and contour are a pure creation of the mind; they call for the plastic arts. His town, his street, his house or his flat rise up against him useless, hinder him from following the same path in his leisure that he pursues in his work.”

The airplane is the product of close selection. The lesson of the airplane lies in the basic logic which governed the statement of the problem and its realization. The problem of the house has not yet been stated. Nevertheless there do exist standards for the dwelling-house. Machinery contains in itself the factor of economy, which makes for selection. The house is a machine for living in. The Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jenneret, better known as "Le Corbusier" (1887-1965), was so innovative in his choices of building materials, arrangement of mass and flexibility of purpose that his very name became synonymous with "modern architecture." In this 1933 book, originally published in French as Vers une Architecture, he championed the use of cast concrete, plate glass, open staircases and curtain walls, designed ambitious public-housing schemes (and had most of them built), and saw his projects spread over the world. Is the above quote a practical observation rather than a basic principle it seems to have become later. There is no such thing as primative man; there are primative resources. The idea is constant, in full sway from the beginning.

Towards a new architecture

There exists a mass of work concieved in the new spirit; it is to be met with particularly in industrial production. A good comparison of the Parthenon with the machine age. The parthenon being so well attuned to human vision. The machine age being so able to adjust and improve even the smallest detail. For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials." Lots of demands for the house its at this point in history that building start to become a much more complex thing..Containing within them changing and mutable and many technologies, which have a life outside of the building they are within.

The regulating line is a means to an end; it is not a recipe. Its choice and the modalities of expression given to it are an integral part of architectural creation. urn:lcp:towardsnewarchit00leco_0:epub:c113a4a9-204f-4c5f-a98e-66e5a74552c4 Extramarc Brown University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier towardsnewarchit00leco_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t80k3h70b Isbn 9780486250236 Don't forget that this is a manifesto aimed towards an audience of architects, engineers and other artists living in the 1920s. The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the "mass-production spirit," and much else. A principal prophet of the "modern" movement in architecture, and a near-legendary figure of the "International School," he designed some of the twentieth century's most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cit Universitaire, Paris; Unit d'Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life."