Almost since the French-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) took on the pseudonym “Le Corbusier” in 1920, his architectural work and ideas have had worldwide influence. This began in Paris, but rapidly extended to the Bauhaus in Germany, and to various architects in Russia, Latin America, the United States, and Japan, and later to India and much of the world. In Osaka, Japan in the 1960s, the self-taught architect Tadao Ando looked to Le Corbusier’s works, many of them displayed in this exhibition and lent by the Foundation Le Corbusier, Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago, as a method of organizing his use of raw materials, particularly concrete, in dialog with natural elements such as light, wind, and water. But like many architects of the time, Ando also mostly rejected the rationalist urbanism of Le Corbusier, and instead sought to create vital and memorable spaces linked to human emotions as well as functional needs, generated from the expectations and routines of daily living. Unlike much postmodern historicism, then also just developing in the 1970s, Ando’s work continued to use some of Le Corbusier’s methods, but in a variety of profoundly different urban and cultural situations, an approach which he has continued to the present.

This symposium of Le Corbusier scholars, which took place on November 8-9, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture held at the Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago, was organized by Eric Mumford, co-curator of the exhibition and the Rebecca and John Voyles Chair of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis (Figs. 1. 2).