Le Corbusier and the automobile

 
A new book from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Voiture Minimum is all about the obsession that famous Swiss/French minimalist architect Le Corbusier had with the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to cars: "If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision," he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his "white phase" of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings be photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for "a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality," the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier’s energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced.

The author, Spanish architect Antonio Amado, presents a substantial analysis of the project, linking it to Le Corbusier’s architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The book is packed with illustrations in color or duotone including many pages of Le Corbusier’s sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier’s letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier’s design is often said to have been the inspiration for the Volkswagen Beetle; and Le Corbusier himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. But Amado, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way.

Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier’s career, Le Corbusier did not. This book should restore Le Corbusier’s automobile to the main text. 350 pages, 233 mm square format, hardcover with jacket.