region of Italy and the ancient sites of Greece, he discovered classical proportion. Finally, popular architecture in the Mediterranean and in the Balkan peninsula gave him a repertory of geometric forms and also taught him the handling of light and the use of landscape as an architectural background.At the age of 30 he returned to live in Paris, where his formation was completed a year later when he met the painter and designer Amde Ozenfant, who introduced him to sophisticated contemporary art. Ozenfant initiated Le Corbusier into Purism, his new pictorial aesthetic that rejected the complicated abstractions of Cubism and returned to the pure, simple geometric forms of everyday objects. In 1918 they wrote and published together the Purist manifesto, Aprs le cubisme. In 1920, with the poet Paul Derme, they founded a polemic avant-garde review, L'Esprit Nouveau. Open to the arts and humanities, with brilliant collaborators, it presented ideas in architecture and city planning already expressed by Adolf Loos and Henri van de Velde, fought against the "styles" of the past and against elaborate nonstructural decoration, and defended functionalism.The association with Ozenfant was the beginning of Le Corbusier's career as a painter and as a writer. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (then still known as Jeanneret) together wrote a series of articles for L'Esprit Nouveau that were to be signed with pseudonyms. Ozenfant chose Saugnier, the name of his grandmother, and suggested for Jeanneret the name Le Corbusier, the name of a paternal forebear. The articles written by Le Corbusier were collected and published as Vers une architecture. Later translated as Toward a New Architecture (1923), the book is written in a telling style that was to be characteristic of Le Corbusier in his long career as a polemicist. "A house is a machine for living in" and "a curved street is a donkey track, a straight street, a road for men" are among his famous declaration...
