Towards a New Architecture

work by Corbusier

Also known as: “Vers une architecture”

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Last updated

July 14, 2026

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Toward a New Architecture (1923) is a seminal work by Le Corbusier, a highly influential Swiss architect and city planner. The book, a collection of his writings, champions a new architectural vision rooted in functionality and modern technology. Le Corbusier famously declared, "a house is a machine for living in," advocating for designs that prioritized efficiency and purpose over historical ornamentation.12

He drew inspiration from industrial products like ships and airplanes, seeing them as models for 20th-century design. Le Corbusier's work, often characterized by bold sculptural expressionism and the use of rough-cast concrete, aimed to create a new architectural language for a modern era. His ideas profoundly impacted the Modernist movement and continue to influence architecture and urban planning today.234

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Le Corbusier
Education and early years
…were collected and published as Vers une architecture. Later translated as Toward a New Architecture (1923), the book is written in a telling style that was to be characteristic of Le Corbusier in his long career as a polemicist. “A house is a machine for living in” and “a curved…
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…were collected and published as Vers une architecture. Later translated as Toward a New Architecture (1923), the book is written in a telling style that was to be characteristic of Le Corbusier in his long career as a polemicist. “A house is a machine for living in” and “a curved…
Read More

Western architecture
Europe
…statement, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), published in 1923. It revealed a world of new forms—not Classical capitals and Gothic arches but ships, turbines, grain elevators, airplanes, and machine products, which Le Corbusier said were indexes to 20th-century imagination. His love of machines was combined with a…
Read More
…statement, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), published in 1923. It revealed a world of new forms—not Classical capitals and Gothic arches but ships, turbines, grain elevators, airplanes, and machine products, which Le Corbusier said were indexes to 20th-century imagination. His love of machines was combined with a…
Read More