LE CORBUSIER, "Toward an Architecture"

" The styles are a lie. Style is a unity of principle that animates all the works of an era and results from a distinctive state of mind.

Architecture is the use of raw materials to establish stirring relationships.

Spirit of order. Unity of intention.

Passion can make drama out of inert stone.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Architecture is an artistic fact, an emotional phenomenon that is outside questions of construction, beyond them.

Construction: THAT'S FOR MAKING THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; Architecture: THAT'S FOR STIRRING EMOTION.

Architectural emotion: that's when the work resounds inside us in tune with a universe whose laws we are subject to, recognize and admire. When certain relationships are achieved, we are apprehended by the work. Architecture is a matter of "relationships", a "pure creation of the mind".

Art no longer tells stories, it prompts meditation.

* * * * * * * * *

THREE REMINDERS TO ARCHITECTS:

1. Volume

2. Surface

3. Plan

Architecture has nothing to do with the "styles".

Louis XV, XVI, XIV and Gothic are to architecture what feathers are to a woman's head; they are pretty sometimes, but not always, and nothing more.

Architecture has graver ends; capable of sublimity, it touches the most brutal instincts through its objectivity; it appeals to the highest of the faculties, through its very abstraction. Architectural abstraction has the distinctive and magnificent quality that, while being rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes this, because brute fact is nothing other than the materialization, the symbol of a possible idea. Brute fact is amenable to ideas only through an order that is projected onto it. The emotions aroused by architecture emanate from physical conditions that are ineluctable, irrefutable, forgotten today.

Volume and surface are the elements through which architecture manifests itself. Volume and surface are determined by the plan. It is the plan that is the generator. So much the worse for those who lack imagination! "