Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile (review)

In this book, architect Antonio Amado considers a little-known aspect of the work of Le Corbusier (Édouard Jeanneret) and his partner and cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. They designed an automobile, the voiture minimum, which often has been portrayed as a model for both the Volkswagen Beetle and the Citroën 2CV. As was the case in their architectural endeavors, Le Corbusier was the visionary and showman who drew the model, while Pierre Jeanneret handled the underlying nuts and bolts. The automobile itself was never produced, though recently a couple of models of the exterior have been built as the voiture minimum has become part of the mythology surrounding Le Corbusier.

As recent exhibitions of his work have made clear, until the late 1930s Le Corbusier was fascinated by the automobile, the very emblem of modernity in the early twentieth century. (When Le Corbusier’s interest in the automobile waned, he became preoccupied with that other, even more potent, modern symbol, the airplane.) Photographs of his buildings from the late 1920s and 1930s almost always featured an automobile, usually a fashionable and expensive Voisin, in the foreground. And, of course, the ground floor of the Villa Savoye was rounded to facilitate the entry of automobiles into the three-car garage. After driving a Fiat on the test track atop the Turin factory, Le Corbusier dreamed of highways that stretched across long lines of apartment blocs. And his efforts at urban planning, including his grand plan to raze most of Paris for skyscrapers and roads, reflected his interest in the effects of the automobile on the architecture of the city.

By the 1930s Europe still lacked an automobile cheap enough for the masses. While Fiat unveiled the 500, Ferdinand Porsche designed the Beetle, and Pierre Boulanger set Citroën engineers to work, the Société des Ingénieurs de l’Automobile (SIA) organized a competition for the creation of a small, affordable car. Le Corbusier’s entry was a design remarkably like that of the VW Beetle, for which a prototype had already been produced. Le Corbusier hoped to find a manufacturer for his model, even writing to Tatra and Fiat when French manufacturers did not bite.

Amado provides this broader context to debunk the longstanding myth, propagated by Le Corbusier himself, that he designed his voiture minimum in 1928, found it too revolutionary for manufacturers, and then worked it up for the SIA competition in 1936. The myth allowed Le Corbusier to claim that it was his design that inspired those of the Beetle and the 2CV. With careful analysis of the sketches and Le Corbusier’s extensive correspondence, Amado makes a very convincing case. He even suggests that the inspiration may have gone the other way. By placing an overlay of an early Beetle over one of the voiture minimum, Amado shows that their resemblance is remarkable.

Readers should note that this book is about culture and technology, rather than technology and culture. Amado is not interested in the issues that have come to characterize work on the cultural history of technology. Instead, this is an art book with innumerable gorgeous photographs on glossy paper of buildings by Le Corbusier, sketches for the voiture minimum, and photographs of an array of interwar automobiles.

Even if one accepts the serious conceptual limitations that Amado places on this work, his reliance on popular histories of the automobile weakens the book. Why rely on often faulty generalizations when there is excellent historical scholarship at hand? To give but one example, Amado completely ignores Patrick Fridenson’s work on the development of the affordable automobile, which would provide a much better, and more accurate, context for developments in the 1930s. Also, given what MIT Press spent producing the illustrations for this book, a bit of money on copyediting might have been in order. There are a number of typographical errors, repetitions, and awkward phrases that a good copyeditor would have caught.

In the end, this is one of...