Like It Or Not, Architect Le Corbusier's Urban Designs Are Everywhere

According to biographer Anthony Flint, Le Corbusier (seen here in an undated photo) once proposed razing Paris' historic Marais neighborhood in order to give the dilapidated district a fresh start. AP hide caption

According to biographer Anthony Flint, Le Corbusier (seen here in an undated photo) once proposed razing Paris' historic Marais neighborhood in order to give the dilapidated district a fresh start.

What do an Ikea showroom floor, urban housing projects and Kanye West have in common? They've all been inspired, at least to some degree, by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier. Though his name has fallen out of the popular imagination Frank Lloyd Wright is much more likely to ring a bell Le Corbusier's influence is visible nearly everywhere you look in the landscape of the modern world, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse.

Anthony Flint has written a new biography of the architect called Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow. As he tells NPR's Rachel Martin, today Le Corbusier is either derided or revered.

"He's blamed for urban renewal ... urban freeways, even countless suburban office parks with their horizontal strip windows," he says. "But what he was trying to do at the time, if you go back to the 1920s, was he was challenging the status quo. He believed that the city wasn't up to its full potential. And this spirit of innovation, I think, is something that can be applied in today's developing world cities in the 21st century just millions and millions of people streaming into cities and many of them moving directly to slums. So, those challenges are very much before us, in the same way that Le Corbusier faced them."

On Le Corbusier's shifting World War II alliances

He was nothing if not an opportunist. And during World War II, he rather aggressively sought to join the [collaborationist] Vichy government after the Nazi occupation of France, and he wanted to be the sort of urban czar for the Vichy government, and he consorted with some quite unsavory characters. ... He did say some things about Hitler in a letter to his mother that suggested that there was inherently a grand vision for Europe in what he did. And he was saying all the right things, if you will, to kind of ingratiate himself in the administration of the Vichy government.

Now, he did give up on this pretty quickly. And so, he ends up getting himself back to Paris. And by 1944, and of course 1945, he switched sides again and starts advising [French resistance leader Charles] de Gaulle about post-war housing and urban policies.

On the building that best exemplifies Le Corbusier's work

I guess I would say Unit d'Habitation in [Marseilles, France,] might have been the most inspiring and the most emblematic for how he thought about housing and efficient housing design. ... It's straight out of an Ikea catalog when you walk into some of these apartments. They're arranged over 12 floors, essentially, like "bottles in a wine rack" that was how he described it and it makes very efficient use of space. There are sliding doors that, you know, have chalkboards on them to write down grocery lists, built-in shelves. There's also a balcony that looks over the Mediterranean and makes things feel open. But it's just a terrific, efficient use of space. And within the building itself: theatre; shops; on the rooftop a gym; a school. So, it was a new approach to living.

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Like It Or Not, Architect Le Corbusier's Urban Designs Are Everywhere