urial innovator. Irascible, caustic, Calvinistic, Corbusier was modern architecture's conscience. One of the most famous houses of the modern movement in architecture, the Villa Savoye is a masterpiece of Le Corbusier's purist design. It is perhaps the best example of Le Corbusier's goal to create a house which would be a "machine a habiter," a machine for living (in). Located in a suburb near Paris, the house is as beautiful and functional as a machine. The Villa Savoye was the culmination of many years of design, and the basis for much of Le Corbusier's later architecture. Although it looks severe in photographs, it is a complex and visually stimulating structure. As with his church of Notre Dame du Haute, Ronchamp, the building looks different from every angle. After falling into disrepair after the war, the house has been restored and is open to the public.In 1922, Le Corbusier created a City for Three Million, a vast landscape of identical skyscraper monoliths that appealed to the aggressive urban futurism of the twenties. Transportation was clean, organized, and partially invisible: Subways would run beneath the vast city of towers, and planes would land in the center, cutting seamlessly among the buildings on their way in. "I relied on the sure paths of reason," Le Corbusier wrote of his design, "and having absorbed the romanticism of the past, I felt able to give myself up to that of our own age, which I love. My friends, astonished to see me so deliberately passing over immediate considerations, said, 'All this is for the year 2000!' Everywhere journalists wrote of it as the 'city of the future.' Yet I had called it 'A Contemporary City' -- contemporary because tomorrow belongs to nobody." Le Corbusier's City for Three Million was, like many of his creations, predicated on the idea that great modern cities could only function if order and efficiency were at the heart. Aim for efficiency first, he believed, and then follow it u...
