Schwarz
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Toward an Architecture is the most influential book on architecture of the modern era. Perhaps only Vitruvius can match it for influence from any age. So let's make that the most influential book on architecture for about 2,000 years.
Emerging from the era of manifestos, it is a radical, hectoring, brilliant book. It blends the eye-catching absurdity of Dada, the strange juxtapositions of surrealism and the technophilic cutaway drawings of a boys' magazine with text that is incisive, sometimes funny and occasionally wholly convincing.
Written in 1923, when Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect living in France, had built only a couple of houses, it has survived as the manifesto of modern architecture. It is a paean to the unselfconscious, functional beauty of engineering - an appeal to architects and patrons to abandon outmoded traditional modes of construction and look to the power and clarity of industrial buildings, aeroplanes and machines. And that is how the book is largely remembered, along with its call for the house to be ''a machine for living in'', perhaps the most quoted phrase in architecture. It is also an ode to architectural ambition - grandeur, proportion, elegance and meaning.