Published in 1923, Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe. He urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world.

Le Corbusier writes simultaneously as an architect, city planner, historian, critic, discoverer, and prophet. He illustrates Toward an Architecture with striking images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners, provocatively placed next to views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome.

His slogans—such as “The house is a machine for living in”—and his “reminders to architects” changed how his contemporaries understood the relationship between architecture, technology, and history.

This edition includes a new translation of the text, background notes on Le Corbusier’s concepts and iconography, and a scholarly introduction that reconstructs the production of the book, the origin of its ideas, and its reception throughout the world.

Download Toward an Architecture, Getty Edition 2007

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