strange paths we are likely to be forced to travel whether we will or no.
The average architect of to-day, then, M. Le Corbusier would tell us, is a timid and poor-spirited creature, afraid to look facts in the face. He plays his little tricks with this or that historic "style," and he can turn his attention to order from "Gothic" to "Classical," to "Tudor," "Byzantine," or what not. By concentrating his training so largely on these superficial aspects, Le Corbusier would say, all "styles" become equally available to the architect for exploitation. Not so, he would say, is great or even good architecture produced.[1]
But it will be said, we cannot escape the past or ignore the pit from which we were hewn. True; and it is precisely Le Corbusier's originality in this book that he takes such works as the Parthenon or Michael Angelo's Apses at St. Peter's and makes us see them in much the same direct fashion as any man might look at a motor-car or a railway bridge. These buildings, studied in their functional and plastic aspects—all that is accidental or merely stylistic being relegated to its proper minor place—emerge under a new guise and are seen to be far more closely and strangely akin to a first-rate modern concrete structure or a Rolls Royce car than to the travesties of themselves on which we have battened.
This book, then, is an important contribution to the modern study of architecture, and to the study of modern architecture; it may annoy but it will certainly stimulate. M. Le Corbusier has not wasted time and space on a catalogue raisonné of modern buildings; he has- ↑ This is, of course, a relatively new state of affairs dating roughly, with exceptions, from the time of the Industrial Revolution; though the Victorian era in England, with all its faults, had its own mind and its own outlook.
