12/02/2026
We would like to draw your attention to the new thematic issue of Architectúra & Urbanizmus, 59, 3-4, titled Architecture Manifestos: From Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas. https://architektura-urbanizmus.sk/issues/2025-volume-59-number-3-4/
This issue is edited by Jiří Tourek of the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. The issue contains seven studies that examine Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture and the broader genre of 20th-century architectural manifestos from distinct perspectives. Read the editors' introduction below.
The issue also features a series of illustrations by artist Lívia Suchá https://www.instagram.com/liviasucha. Her simple style, playful approach, and deliberate ambiguity create a narrative parallel to the theoretical focus of the A&U journal issue.
The first three studies engage directly with Le Corbusier’s book and the question of what constitutes a manifesto. Monika Mitášová, in “Vers une Architecture – Complexity and Contradiction – S, M, L, XL: Three Bibles of Architecture?” compares three books that have profoundly influenced twentieth-century theoretical thinking: Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and Rem Koolhaas’ S, M, L, XL. She is particularly intrigued by the “biblicality” (or, as she terms it, “vectoriality”) of Le Corbusier’s book and the manner in which the two younger authors, Venturi and Koolhaas, engage with its prophetic-religious character. It may be revealing to read both Venturi’s and Koolhaas’ works as texts that entered into a critical dialogue with Le Corbusier’s primary publication. Jiří Tourek, in “Toward Le Corbusier’s Thinking in Vers une architecture” investigates the intellectual sources of Le Corbusier’s ideas. He turns to several authors, mainly philosophers, and demonstrates how their thought permeates the book under examination – a kind of intellectual autopsy. Adam Korcsmáros, Bruno Pella, and Andrea Vrtelová, in “Towards the Manifesto: Tracing a Genre at the Crossroads of Architectural Theory and Practice” explore the very meaning of the concept of manifesto. Le Corbusier’s book serves as a key example: historically regarded as a manifesto, its hybrid structure has generated diverse interpretations. This raises a question as to whether its “manifestness” was inherent or retrospectively assigned thanks to its influence. Their study situates these issues within broader architectural discourse, addressing the ontological and epistemological problem of what defines a manifesto, and aims to establish frameworks and criteria for recognising architectural manifestos and their variations.
The next two studies address the further dimensions of Le Corbusier’s book. Jana Tichá, in “The Whole City Is Covered with Greenery. Le Corbusier and His Vision of a New Urban Landscape”, focuses on the role of greenery and the landscape context. It is evident that the complex nature of Vers une architecture permits a broad interpretation, particularly concerning the relationship between buildings and their surroundings. The text considers urban planning, landscape integration, and the incorporation of gardens in architecture. Analysing the manifesto from this perspective underscores its relevance to modern approaches to landscape and public space. The study thereby extends its interpretation and situates it within contemporary discourse on urban and environmental design.
Marija Milikić, in “From Standardization to Chaos: Everyday Life in Architectural Manifestos” explores how everyday life shaped twentieth-century architectural manifestos. Le Corbusier sought to rationalize and standardize daily life, exemplified in the Cité Frugès project, yet his approach revealed the contradictions between serial production and lived experience. In contrast, Rem Koolhaas embraces everyday life as chaotic and unpredictable, epitomised by the concept of the Generic City. The study juxtaposes these divergent positions to assess the successes and failures of addressing everyday practices, aiming to identify consistent elements of everyday life that might inform future architectural manifestos.
The subsequent studies shift attention towards comparison with other manifestos, either within the context of Western civilisation or in contrast with another tradition.
Dimitris M. Moschos, in “Architecture and Social Dreaming: Three Generations of Attempts to Revolutionize Architecture, from Le Corbusier to Ant Farm and Critical Speculative Design” compares three seminal texts – Toward an Architecture, Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook, and Dunne & Raby’s Speculative Everything. His chosen lens is a notion of “capitalist modernities”. The study argues that capitalist modernities constitute an evolving, self-critical sociocultural condition shaping development of architecture and its social conscience. It tries to demonstrate how modern architecture sustains its relevance through political critique and speculative practice, ultimately attempting to underscore the continuing struggle of architecture to assert political agency within shifting modernities.
Ana Tostoes, in “From Toward an Architecture to the Metabolism Manifesto. Paris–Tokyo 1923–1960” traces the intellectual trajectory from Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923) to the Metabolist Manifesto (1960), underscoring their shared conviction that architecture constitutes a vehicle for societal transformation. By examining affinities between Le Corbusier’s technological poetics and the Metabolists’ biological metaphors, it situates both manifestos within a broader vision of urbanism conceived as dynamic and evolving.
The academic peer-reviewed journal Architektúra & urbanizmus provides a forum for the publication of research papers on architecture and town-planning. The attention is concentrated on the theory, history, philosophy and culture of architecture and town-planning of 20th and 21st century in Centra...
