A colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house “a machine for living,” was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his “white phase” of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for “a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality,” the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier's energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced. This book is the first to tell the full and true story of Le Corbusier's adventure in automobile design. Architect Antonio Amado describes the project in detail, linking it to Le Corbusier's architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He provides abundant images, including many pages of Le Corbusier's sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier's letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier's design is often said to have been the inspiration for Volkswagen's enduringly popular Beetle; the architect himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. Amado Lorenzo, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way. Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier's career, Le Corbusier did not. This book, lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, restores Le Corbusier's automobile to the main text.

Featuring updates and revisions to reflect rapid changes in an increasingly globalized world, Readings in Planning Theory remains the definitive resource for the latest theoretical and practical debates within the field of planning theory. Represents the newest edition of the leading text in planning theory that brings together the essential classic and cutting-edge readings Features 20 completely new readings (out of 28 total) for the fourth edition Introduces and defines key debates in planning theory with editorial materials and readings selected both for their accessibility and importance Systematically captures the breadth and diversity of planning theory and puts issues into wider social and political contexts without assuming prior knowledge of the field

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

This tribute contains 18 papers on Henry-Russell Hitchcock and his lasting influence on architects practicing during the last decades, as well as on the critics and historians who have been following and at times leading the architects. They are arranged chronologically in three main areas of Hitchcock's interest: "The Age of Romanticism -- Rationalism, Revivalism and Eclecticism 1740-1900"; "American Architecture to 1900: Romanticism and Reintegration"; and "Twentieth Century Architecture -- The New Tradition and the New Pioneers."

Journalist Flint recounts the life and times of the legendary architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier, and provides illuminating details of his most iconic projects.

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.

Brilliantly written essays on the aesthetic principles and enduring motives of architecture.