ABSTRACT
Le Corbusier’s fascination with Islamic architecture and urbanism forms a continuing thread throughout his lengthy career. The first, powerful manifestation of this lifelong interest is recorded in his 1911 travel notes and sketches from the ‘Orient’—
an ambiguous place, loosely alluding in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century discourse to the lands of Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Corbu’s case, solely to Istanbul and western Asia Minor.1
