If you are wondering what is the link between the trip, the car and Le Corbusier, I invite you to read the following lines.
We no longer present Le Corbusier, this gifted architect who is as much adored as he is criticized. If his Villa Savoye (Poissy, Yvelines, 1928), Cité radieuse (Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, 1947) and Capitole de Chandigarh (Punjab, India) made his legend as much as his bad character, this commander of the Legion of Honor did not stop at the chapter on buildings.
Le Corbusier’s interest in the automobile goes back to his “white period”, that of the Villa Savoye for example. At that time, he insisted that these buildings be photographed with a modern car in the foreground. We can see him proudly posing in front of some of his achievements at the wheel of his Voisin C7 (Voisin, which created a few years later the Biscooter and to which Le Corbusier was very close).
Always in search of modernity but also rationality, he decided in 1936 to enter an automobile design competition with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret by submitting to the jury the plans for a “minimal” car that he had imagined in the 1920s, and which was part of a more global urban planning project, the Voisin-Paris plan of 1925.
It should be noted in passing that the shape of Le Corbusier’s car, like his philosophy, is not unlike that of the project of a German engineer named Ferdinand Porsche, which gave birth to the Beetle. Which of Porsche or Le Corbusier inspired the other, the debate is still open to this day… The fact remains that if Le Corbusier’s car had been out when it was first imagined, it would have been contemporary with the Ford T, that is to say, ahead of its time…
