Luis Fernández-Galiano   Le Corbusier left us fifty years ago, but he is still stubbornly among us. The centennial of his birth in 1987 brought about a broad critical review of his legacy, which this magazine collected in two consecutive issues of that year (AV 9 and 10), wh

Jean-Louis Cohen   If there is a blind spot in the astonishingly vast literature dedicated to Le Corbusier, it is certainly his relationship to landscape, which provided him with scenes to observe, stimulation for invention, horizons against which to set his projects,

Stanislaus von Moos   The Bassin Lémanique and its hillsides and mountains were omnipresent in guidebooks and on train-station billboards after World War I, thanks to the area’s thorough transformation into western Switzerland’s foremost tourist resort during the precedin

Jean-Louis Cohen   In Principes de géographie humaine, published in 1921, geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache evoked “[the] arches and the domes, all of this marvelous flowering which has alternately expressed Egyptian and Hellenistic art, that of Rome, and that of Byza

Juan José Lahuerta   Le Corbusier visited Spain on four occasions. In 1928 he lectured in Madrid and Barcelona; in 1930 he toured the country by car – in his luxurious Voisin – with Pierre Jeanneret and Fernand Léger; in 1931, again in the Voisin and accompanied by Pierr

Barry Bergdoll   We all know Paris. We all suffer for her ills. We are nourished by what she stands for in terms of history, tradition, instruction. We are ready to take up her situation with a respectful devotion and without sacrilege.1 Although Le Corbusier adopted

Tim Benton   When Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1947-52) was built, set against the undulating profile of the hills around Marseille, it stood tall and erect among a scattering of suburban houses and low-rise apartments. The assertive verticality of this blo

Josep Quetglas   Le Corbusier decried “les yeux qui ne voient pas”– unadventurous eyes incapable of seeing the new. He would frequently flip over one of his paintings in order to see it afresh; he proposed to those reading the Ronchamp volume of Les Carnets de la rec

Antoine Picon   With its immense and sensuous viaduct-housing, the main element of a composition that also comprises other apartment buildings and a business center, Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Algiers remains to this day an object of fascination, a provocation who

Jorge Francisco Liernur   As is well known, Le Corbusier embarked for Buenos Aires from Bordeaux on board the Massilia on September 14, 1929. One of his traveling companions was Adelina del Carril, who, along with her late husband, Ricardo Güiraldes (who had died in Paris two

Carlos Eduardo Comas   Rio de Janeiro was a port of call on Le Corbusier’s way to Argentina in October 1929, and the Swiss architect then likened its urbanization to “filling the tub of the Danaids.” The scenery was not alpine; nonetheless, he found it “violent and sublime

Maristella Casciato   If Chandi, supreme goddess of the Hindu pantheon and the eponymous divinity of the city of Chandigarh, ever played a celestial role in the selection of the site of the eastern Punjab’s new capital, it was perhaps enacted in the way she repelled, with