Le Corbusier Quotations

The home should be the treasure chest of living.

A house is a machine for living in.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Cameras get in the way of seeing.

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

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

By law, all buildings should be white.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When does a building actually become a built?

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

The "styles" are a lie.

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

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.

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

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

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

Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The most beautiful bridge in the world. so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh.

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

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

The city that has speed has success.