Book: ‘Voiture Minimum’

Le Corbusier was a car junkie. In the ’20s and ’30s, automobiles regularly appeared in photos of his buildings, the way that families with strollers appear in renderings today. And in 1936, Corbu designed his own vehicle, the never-mass-produced Voiture Minimum. In Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile, author and architect Antonio Amado places the architect’s fascination in context with the Volkswagen Beetle, Porsche 356, and Citroën 2CV, and with the auto-love of his peers Wright and Gropius. • $49.95; MIT Press, March 2011