WEEK ONE READINGS

TEXT NOTES

LE CORBUSIER – TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE (Architecture or Revolution)

• Specialization ties a man to his machine; everyone is held to an implacable standard of precision
• Architecture or demoralization, demoralization or revolution
• All these objects of modern life end up creating a certain modern state of mind
• Our social organization has nothing ready in the way of a response
• These people too claim their right to a machine for living that is plan and simply humane
• Old ownership is based on inheritance and thinks of inertia, of changing nothing, of perpetuating the status quo
• We would be enthusiastic about building, and we would avoid revolution
• The advent of a new age intervenes only when earlier work has quietly prepared the way
• Industry has created its tools.  Enterprise has changed its ways.  Construction has found its means.  Architecture finds itself faced with an amended code
• Such tools are made for improving human welfare and lightening human labor
• If we set this renewal against the past, there is revolution
• Enterprise has altered its routines; it is now encumbered by heavy responsibilities: cost, time frame, solidity of work.
• Low price and high quality
• Everything is possible with calculation and invention when you have tools of sufficient perfection, and these tools exist
• Steel and concrete have completely transformed the organization of building
• The man of today sense on one hand a world that is elaborate rating itself regularly, logically, clearly, that produces with purity, and on the other hand, he finds himself disconcerted, still inside the old hostile world