Architect, artist, and author, Le Corbusier helped to shape the 20th century. And by the way, he was a car enthusiast, too. Here’s his 1936 proposal for a universal automobile, the Voiture Minimum. 

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—we know him by his adopted name, Le Corbusier—was a leading architect, artist, urban planner, and visionary of the 20th century. Without his efforts, our world of today could look remarkably different. It was Le Corbusier who said, “To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state,” and “a house is a machine for living.” Among his many  passions, Le Corbusier was a car guy. An enthusiastic Voisin owner, he instantly recognized the automobile’s power to alter the face of civilization, and in his “white phase” of the 1920s, he insisted that vehicles were included in the illustrations of his architecture.

Raised in French-speaking La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1930 Le Corbusier became a citizen of France. In 1936, along with his cousin and business manager, Pierre Jeanneret, he entered a design competition sponsored by France’s Société des Ingénieurs de l’Automobile (SIA), for a simple, volume-production car that would cost no more than 8000 Francs—a Voiture Minimum.  A people’s car, in the language of the time.

Le Corbusier’s highly detailed entry did not win the design competition, and as far as we know, was never seriously considered for production by a major auto manufacturer. Still, the charming little coupe has had a lasting impact on designers and design. Architects and automotive designers alike continue to study its simple, harmonious form. There’s at least one recent book on the subject:  Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile, by the Spanish architect and scholar Antonio Amado Lorenzo.

Giorgetto Giugiaro, founder of the Turin design house Italdesign and, as of this writing, 80 years old, could safely be called one of the most successful and prolific auto designers of all time. Giugiaro was impressed and intrigued enough with Le Corbusier’s Voiture Minimum that in 1987 he commissioned a full-scale studio model. After more than half a century of existence only on paper, Le Corbusier’s dream car had finally taken solid, three-dimensional form.

A similar replica was constructed for the London Museum, and now there are others. Jeff Lane’s Lane Museum in Nashville, Tennessee—which previously created a functional replica of Buckminster Fuller’s fabulous Dymaxion—is reportedly planning to build a running, driving version of the Voiture Minimum.