Architects comment on Le Corbusier's 100-year legacy
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Picasso was to painting, a towering and egomaniacal creative force who transformed his discipline for ever. His buildings have inspired admiration, sometimes devotion. He is an icon, granted the nickname “Corb” or “Corbu” by architects. He has also been vigorously attacked, as a mechanistic fanatic whose ideas inspired inhumane tower blocks and concrete jungles.In his latest Guardian piece, critic Rowan Moore remembers the 100-year anniversary of the seminal modernist manifesto Toward an Architecture by one of the profession's most revered and controversial figures, Le Corbusier. Acknowledging that the book's thoughts about the future were now "firmly in the past," Moore asked acclaimed present-day architects about the impact Le Corbusier's work has had on them and which of his buildings was most relevant in their view. Among the respondees are Pritzker Prize and Gold Medal winners Frank Gehry, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron's founding partner Jacques Herzog, Grafton Architects' Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, Yasmeen Lari, Kate Macintosh, as well as contemporary architects and designers Jayden Ali and Adam Nathaniel Furman.
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Picasso was to painting, a towering and egomaniacal creative force who transformed his discipline for ever. His buildings have inspired admiration, sometimes devotion. He is an icon, granted the nickname “Corb” or “Corbu” by architects. He has also been vigorously attacked, as a mechanistic fanatic whose ideas inspired inhumane tower blocks and concrete jungles.
In his latest Guardian piece, critic Rowan Moore remembers the 100-year anniversary of the seminal modernist manifesto Toward an Architecture by one of the profession's most revered and controversial figures, Le Corbusier.
Acknowledging that the book's thoughts about the future were now "firmly in the past," Moore asked acclaimed present-day architects about the impact Le Corbusier's work has had on them and which of his buildings was most relevant in their view.
Among the respondees are Pritzker Prize and Gold Medal winners Frank Gehry, Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron's founding partner Jacques Herzog, Grafton Architects' Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, Yasmeen Lari, Kate Macintosh, as well as contemporary architects and designers Jayden Ali and Adam Nathaniel Furman.
