Top 35 Le Corbusier Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A house is a machine for living in.”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

3. “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

5. “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

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

— Le Corbusier

7. “The home should be the treasure chest of living.”

— Le Corbusier

8. “Cameras get in the way of seeing.”

— Le Corbusier

9. “Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.”

— Le Corbusier

10. “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

11. “Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

13. “You don’t start a revolution by fighting the state but by presenting the solutions.”

— Le Corbusier

14. “The “styles” are a lie.”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

16. “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

17. “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

18. “By law, all buildings should be white.”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

20. “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

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

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

24. “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

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

— Le Corbusier

26. “When does a building actually become a built?”

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

28. “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

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

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

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

— Le Corbusier

32. “Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan – that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds.”

— Le Corbusier

33. “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

34. “My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life – the poetry.”

— Le Corbusier

35. “When I flew over the Atlas Mountains in a plane, I realized that their formation-through erosion, geological dramas, the action of winds-was completely independent of our moral anxieties; man is in a kind of cyclone; he builds solid houses to protect and shelter his heart. Outside, nature is nothing but indifference, even terror.”

— Le Corbusier

36. “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

37. “Things are not revolutionalized by making revolutions, The real revolution lies in the solution of existing problems.”

— Le Corbusier