In the preface to his classic Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, published in 1986 and for the quarter century since the most thoughtful and complete analysis of the architect, William J.R. Curtis compared his subject's impact to that of Freud, Joyce, and Picasso. But why stop there? If the pronouncement-making passion of the early Corbusier makes him another Freud (explaining away the darkness, an answer for everything), then the later Corbusier—the architect of post-rational dreamscapes like La Tourette and Ronchamp —is another Karl Jung. There simply is no viable extra-architectural comparison. If Le Corbusier is Joyce for the rigorous novelty of the Villa Savoye, then his earlier villas show him to be a sumptuously intelligent Nabokov. And, of course, Picasso, looked at a certain way, was only a Corbusier who failed to build.

Curtis may get closest when he compares the architect's influence to Palladio's. Our modernism—or our manner of practicing architecture now—remains Corbusian through and through. In character, privileging the rational and irrational in equal parts; in method, attempting to achieve a personal synthesis while whipsawing between inspirations; and in form itself, we are all his descendants. Architecture today is never nearly so Wrightian, so Gropian, or so Kahnian. And, if it may at times appear glassily, griddily Miesian, we need only remember that Le Corbusier also got there first.