This paper looks at the life and the effects that we feel today of Corbusier. This biographical paper looks at his beginnings and early influences to understand this genius. For better or worse, the architect known as Le Corbusier changed the face of our cities. Along with Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier epitomizes modernism. Can, however, the future be built without standing on the shoulders of the past? Corbusier was a devotee of the esthetic of the machine and still he regarded the Parthenon as a pinnacle of architectural achievement. He believed in the Renaissance notion of man being at the center of creation and yet, built houses that men could not live in. Le Corbusier may have been designing square pegs for round holes but in the end, there was a direct line, for him, between the Parthenon and modernism. 10 pgs. 14 f/c. 5b.
