The exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through September 23), explores a provocative theme: that the giant of 20th-century architecture is wrongly categorized as an International Style designer whose “machines for living in,” as he termed them, could be plunked down anywhere. Rather, argue the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, Le Corbusier was a keen observer of nature and landscapes, which informed almost everything he touched, from the master plan for a city to the design of a single room.

And consider just one such single room. In the early 1950s, Le Corbusier built the Cabanon, a tiny summer cabin for himself and his wife, on a spectacular site overlooking the Monte Carlo Bay in the south of France. The Cabanon was sparsely furnished—there was a bed, a table, a sink—and the glorious view was strictly framed by just one narrow vertical slot and a two-and-a-half-foot square window cut into the rustic log exterior. Almost 30 years earlier, the Swiss-born architect had built the Modernist Villa Le Lac for his aging parents, with its pioneering use of a 36-foot-long ribbon of windows that framed the vista as a horizontal panorama. He even created an outdoor “room” in the garden, with a six-foot-high masonry wall facing Lake Geneva, into which he cut a rectangular opening, to crop the view from the terrace to the lake and the mountains beyond. “In order for the landscape to count,” Le Corbusier wrote, “it has to be limited, proportioned through drastic steps: blocking the horizons by raising the walls and only revealing them at strategic locations through breaks.”