PERSON
Le Corbusier
The optimizer who gave us the open plan and the housing estate—the architect whose conviction that a city could be solved from a diagram produced both the Villa Savoye and Pruitt-Igoe, and who now returns as the sharpest historical mirror for an age deploying optimization at planetary scale.
Le Corbusier is the thinker AI most needs to reckon with, not because he was right but because he was wrong in exactly the right way. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887 in the Swiss watchmaking town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he spent his life convinced that the chaos of the modern world could be resolved into order by the application of reason, geometry, and the machine. His 1923 declaration that a house is 'a machine for living in' was not a cold provocation but a design doctrine: form follows function, ornament is waste, and the built environment should be engineered toward human well-being with the same rigor the early twentieth century brought to the ocean liner and the airplane. The doctrine produced extraordinary things—the Villa Savoye, the
Unité d’Habitation, the Five Points of a New Architecture that liberated the plan and freed the facade. It also produced the