In 1925, Le Corbusier unveiled a plan for the center of Paris that stopped the city in its tracks. The Plan Voisin, named after the automobile manufacturer who sponsored it, proposed demolishing a large section of the historic Right Bank and replacing it with eighteen identical cruciform skyscrapers set in open parkland, each tower sixty stories high, housing three million people in what he called a Radiant City. The reaction was immediate and volcanic. Critics accused him of wanting to destroy Paris. Le Corbusier responded that he wanted to save it, that the medieval street plan was a catastrophe of congestion and darkness, and that only radical surgery could give the city's inhabitants light, air, and rational order. He was not joking, and he was not entirely wrong, and he was not remotely deterred by the outrage. The Plan Voisin was never built, but the ideas behind it shaped public housing, urban planning, and architectural education for the rest of the twentieth century, leaving a legacy that is still being debated in cities built according to his principles and now trying to live with the consequences.
Le Corbusier (1887–1965) did not just design buildings. He reimagined how humanity might inhabit the modern world. The Swiss visionary, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, transformed concrete, steel, and glass into a radical new architectural language for the machine age, from his purist villas to the utopian urbanism of his Radiant City. More than any single figure, he shaped modernism's conviction that architecture could and should remake society itself, leaving a contested but indelible mark on skylines from Chandigarh to Chicago. His influence was so pervasive that to understand twentieth-century architecture is, in large part, to understand the world he willed into existence, and the problems that came with it.
No scholar has charted this complex legacy more meticulously than Tim Benton, whose decades of research have illuminated Le Corbusier's most fertile creative period with a combination of archival depth and critical precision. Working as both biographer and intellectual archaeologist, compiling Le Corbusier's complete lectures for the Fondation Le Corbusier while also developing a major new life of the architect, Benton has spent his career peeling back layers of myth to reveal how the domestic projects of 1910 to 1935 became laboratories for the revolutionary principles that would reshape cities around the world.
In the conversation that follows, Benton shows how Le Corbusier's pencil strokes still influence debates about how we live today, and why modernism's promises and paradoxes remain not historical curiosities but live questions, still unresolved, still urgent, still shaping the cities we inhabit and the arguments we have about them.
Charles Carlini: Le Corbusier is commonly described as the greatest architect of the 20th century. Why do you think his reputation has grown in this way?
Tim Benton: Le Corbusier was at the right place, at the right time. He was a key figure in modern architecture; black-and-white photographs of his buildings were strong and striking. And his books, Towards a New Architecture (1923), followed by Urbanism (1925) were bestsellers.
CC: It is often said that Le Corbusier is to blame for many of the problems of modern cities and housing estates. Is this fair?
TB: Le Corbusier was his own worst enemy. He learned early on that to make a success of himself and to have an impact, he had to exaggerate. One example was his Plan Voisin, a project he exhibited in 1925, proposing to raze the center of Paris and replace it with 60-story towers. It was a terrible plan. But his ideas were also misunderstood. He did not approve of most examples of modern architecture after the war, considering it mechanical and inhuman.
CC: Le Corbusier once said, “We burn our bridges and break with the past.” His designs did break with the past. Why did he feel compelled to break away from all the predominant architectural trends of the previous centuries?
TB: Although Le Corbusier did burn bridges, he was also inspired by ancient buildings such as the Parthenon, which broke through the historical barriers. He believed in progress and the idea of the Zeitgeist—that architecture should reflect changes in the world—but the idea of progress was not more important to him than judgments of quality. Certain buildings would always be considered beautiful.
CC: Le Corbusier seemed to be fascinated by modern technology and the effects of industrialization, which, in turn, inspired his architectural designs. What exactly did he find so fascinating about machines?
TB: Here again comes the idea of the Zeitgeist; the powerful forces that change the world—industrialization, mechanization—and the way people see things. Le Corbusier saw a pure language of form in the details of cars and planes. Furthermore, he believed that machines tended to produce pure, geometric forms, which were comparable to the forms used by all the great architecture of the past. Similarly, when he saw rocks in Brittany that had been eroded by the wind into smooth, geometric forms, he compared the process to the way popular taste also selected simple, pure forms of the glasses, jugs, and bottles used in Parisian cafes.
CC: Which modern architects did Le Corbusier admire the most?
TB: His enthusiasm for other architects soon turned against them because he was terribly egocentric. But, on the whole, he liked the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, the Russian Berthold Lubetkin, the German Peter Behrens, and the French architect Auguste Perret, although he eventually turned against Perret.
CC: What did Le Corbusier think about the trends of the early 20th century, such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco, which were all about curves and sinuous decoration?
TB: He hated those trends and thought that ornaments were a depravity, although he had himself been an Arts and Crafts artist, designer, and architect in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. He turned increasingly against ornament after he left Switzerland for Paris in 1917 and read an essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos, titled Ornament and Crime.
CC: Were Le Corbusier’s designs viewed differently in America, which has traditionally been more open to new ideas, than in Europe? If so, why is there only one building built by him in the U.S., i.e., The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University?
TB: Most of Le Corbusier’s followers were young architects, not the people who commissioned important projects. American architect Raymond Hood, who designed the Rockefeller Center in New York, owned a copy of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, but it didn’t influence his work. Besides, Le Corbusier did himself no favors in Anglo-Saxon countries. He was openly contemptuous of some of the architectural designs, criticizing the skyscrapers of Manhattan as not being tall enough and too close together.
CC: Which modern architects of note have been inspired by Le Corbusier’s pioneering vision?
TB: A whole generation of architects, for example, Rem Koolhaas, Robert Venturi, Dennis Lasdun, as well as the British architectural movement called New Brutalism, and the “New York Five,” a group of New York City architects, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier.
It is interesting to note that even though Le Corbusier’s ideas and approach to solving problems have been criticized in the past 40 years, he still appeals to architects on so many levels.
CC: What do you admire most in Le Corbusier’s life and career, and what would you criticize?
TB: When I take students to Paris to look at his buildings, I am still amazed that there is so much richness and depth of texture, and that his designs still feel fresh after 50 years. Also, the fact that he never stayed still and constantly renewed himself. It is clear that Le Corbusier wasn’t frightened of contradicting himself. Although he could be very kind and generous to those he liked and admired, he was also a bit of a bastard with those who got in his way.
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