Three architects of the twentieth century have left an indelible imprint on the American landscape, each in distinctly different ways with buildings constructed of different architectural values and beliefs: Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier); Louis I. Kahn; and Frank Lloyd Wright. Le Corbusier’s structures reflected his mechanistic and industrial outlook on architecture, including his belief that buildings are machines for living in. Louis Kahn’s structures demonstrated his ideas of order, one that included geometric structures that often reference and express the natural landscape surrounding them and not the architect or themselves. Wright’s architectural works are varied, but his concept of purism and unified harmony are evident in most of his best known structures.
In Le Corbusier’s works, there is often a hugeness of scale, the use of preformed concrete, and a purity that expresses his style that became known as the International Style. His typical style was to raise a building on stilts, add a free-flowing floor plan, create walls independent of the structure, and add horizontal strip windows. He also topped off many of his buildings with a roof garden. The La Tourette monastery demonstrates Le Corbusier’s focus on modern architecture devoted to “truth and purity,” (Jencks 327). The building exhibits the symbiotic relationship between the hidden individual cells for the monks and the contrast with an idyllic nature that is hidden and framed in opposite ways. The building teeters on a hillside and the edge of verdure. As Jencks maintains, “It stands awkwardly and heroically apart from nature much as a Greek temple proclaiming man’s loneliness and independence from the cosmos,” (328). In contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic structures, La Tourette is the antithesis of organic architecture with its growth and picturesque compromise. Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harv
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