ABSTRACT
In 1923 Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, delivered
a bombshell to the Beaux-Arts tradition of architecture by publishing Vers une architecture, a book which has been misleadingly translated into English as Towards a New Architecure, but which deserves the full force of its original iconoclastic title: Towards an Architecture. The book had an enormous influence on Goldfinger. It was created from a series of articles which Le Corbusier
had written under the name of Le Corbusier-Saugnier for the L’Esprit nouveau (New Spirit), a magazine he had founded with the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the poet Paul Dermée in 1920, and which ran for twenty-eight issues until
1925, counting Adolf Loos, Jean Cocteau and Louis Aragon among its contrib-
utors. In order to disguise the fact that there were very few contributors to
L’Esprit nouveau – since most were written by Ozenfant and Jeanneret – Jeanneret first adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier.1 Vers une architecture was illustrated with photographs of grain elevators, airplanes and cars, set
alongside pictures of the Parthenon, which Le Corbusier singled out as a func-
tional building which included the harmonious aesthetic dimension. Vers une architecture was a deliberately provocative challenge to complacency, and the outline of a philosophy of architecture for a new technological age. Its
message would transform building in the twentieth century and launch Le
Corbusier on the trajectory towards becoming the best known architect of the
century. The style of the L’Esprit nouveau writing has been aptly characterised by Charles Jencks as ‘baroque – telegraphic – neo-hysterical’2: it reads like a
cross between Nietzsche and a futurist manifesto.
