What is the French title of Le Corbusier's book 'Towards a New Architecture'?

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The French title of Le Corbusier’s book “Towards a New Architecture” is Vers une architecture.

Published in 1923, Vers une architecture is a collection of essays advocating a modern architecture suited to the industrial age. Many of the essays first appeared in L’Esprit nouveau, the avant-garde magazine associated with Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant. The book challenged academic historicism and promoted disciplined forms, functional thinking, engineering, and new possibilities created by mass production.

The familiar English title comes from Frederick Etchells’s 1927 translation, Towards a New Architecture. That wording is not a literal rendering of the French and has been criticised for adding “New.” John Goodman’s 2007 Getty Research Institute translation uses the closer title Toward an Architecture. Vers une architecture is sometimes shortened to Vers in architectural discussion. It is not the title of Le Corbusier’s separate urban-planning book Urbanisme, nor of the later concept La Ville Radieuse.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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