He was a talented graphic designer with a gift for apocalyptic prose in the style of an American evangelist. He had already published extensively and knew his way around the printers in the city. Only in 1922 had the young Swiss painter and entrepreneur opened an architectural office with his cousin Pierre and begun to refer to himself as a heroic “dark crow” among the avant-garde.

Cover of recent reprint of Vers One Architecture (1995 from second edition of 1928). It would not be the last time the ambitious young firebrand would use others in pursuit of fame. Essays from the magazine appeared in Vers Une Architecture without attribution to Ozenfant, angering him and provoking a split between the two friends. It was intended to be a plea for the transformation of Cubism into a universal movement in the plastic arts, but extended its reach to urbanism and architecture. The most important product of their collaboration was undoubtedly the journal L’Esprit Nouveau, which began publication in 1919 and ceased in 1925, the year of the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. In the city, he met the painter Amedée Ozenfant through his former employer, Auguste Perret, and began a close relationship that produced not only paintings but polemical writings. When Charles Eduard Jeanneret returned to Paris in 1917, he had spent the war years in Switzerland, working as a teacher and designing a house for his parents at Chaux-le-Fonds. It was remarkably successful in fulfilling that aim. Instead, it was in many respects a clever diatribe intended to convince Europeans that they had no choice but to renounce every kind of architecture that had been built before the Great War and begin anew. The book wasn’t really about new architecture, because very little of it showed buildings in the International Style. Comparing the three editions is instructive, particularly in one crucial respect: the insertion of the word “new” in the title.

Though a new English translation appeared in 2007 to much acclaim, most other practicing architects read the first English edition that appeared in 1928, entitled Towards a New Architecture.

This year marks the centennial of the first edition of Vers Une Architecture, Le Corbusier’s epoch-making book.

Towards a new architecture