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Voted one of the top ten new design books, this lavishly illustrated book is a colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house "a machine for living," was fascinated-even obsessed-by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: "If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision," he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his "white phase" of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings be photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for "a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality," the Voiture Minimum.