quality:correction, information:filtering
Influence

Le Corbusier was concerned about problems he saw in industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century. He thought industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better-living conditions and a better society through housing. Ebenezer Howard 's Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries.

Le Corbusier revolutionized urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). One of the first to realize how the automobile would change human society, Le Corbusier conceived the city of the future with large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier's plans were adopted by builders of public housing in Europe and the United States. In Great Britain, urban planners turned to Le Corbusier's "Cities in the Sky" as a cheaper method of building public housing from the late 1950s. Le Corbusier criticized any effort at ornamentation of the buildings.

Several of the many architects who worked for Le Corbusier in his studio became prominent, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa 's city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are based on his ideas. Le Corbusier's thinking had profound effects on city planning and architecture in the Soviet Union during the Constructivist era.

Le Corbusier harmonized and lent credence to the idea of space as a set of destinations between which mankind moved continuously. He gave credibility to the automobile as a transporter and freeway in urban spaces. His philosophies were useful to urban real estate developers in the American post-World War II period because they justified and lent intellectual support to the desire to raze traditional urban spaces for high density, high-profit urban concentration. The freeways connected this new urbanism to low density, low cost, highly profitable suburban locales available to be developed for middle-class single-family housing.

Missing from this scheme of movement was connectivity between isolated urban villages created for the lower-middle and working classes, and the destination points in Le Corbusier's plan: suburban and rural areas, and urban commercial centres. As designed, the freeways travelled over, at, or beneath grade levels of the living spaces of the urban poor, for example, the Cabrini–Green housing project in Chicago. Because such projects were devoid of freeway-exit ramps and were cut off by freeway rights-of-way, they became isolated from the jobs and services that had been concentrated at Le Corbusier's nodal transportation endpoints.

As jobs migrated to the suburbs, these urban-village dwellers effectively found themselves stranded without freeway-access points in their communities or public mass transit that could economically reach suburban job centres. Late in the post-War period, suburban job centres found labour shortages to be such a critical problem that they sponsored urban-to-suburban shuttle-bus services to fill the vacant working-class and lower-middle-class jobs, which did not typically pay enough to afford car ownership.

Le Corbusier influenced architects and urbanists worldwide. In the United States, Shadrach Woods; in Spain, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza; in Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer; In Mexico, Mario Pani Darqui; in Chile, Roberto Matta; in Argentina, Antoni Bonet i Castellana (a Catalan exile), Juan Kurchan, Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Amancio Williams, and Clorindo Testa in his first era; in Uruguay, the professors Justino Serralta and Carlos Gómez Gavazzo; in Colombia, Germán Samper Gnecco, Rogelio Salmona, and Dicken Castro; in Peru, Abel Hurtado and José Carlos Ortecho; in Lebanon, Joseph Philippe Karam; in India Shiv Nath Prasad; in South Korea, Kim Chung-up.

Many skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Frankfurt have been inspired by Le Corbusier, and his style is still used as influence for buildings worldwide.