A hat tip to reader George for alerting us to Dalrymple’s new contributions to Quadrant Online. His first piece for the publication was this September account of his visit to a Paris exhibition on one of his favorite targets, Le Corbusier:

People, especially in France, have long been cowed into veneration by decades of propaganda to the effect that Le Corbusier was a great, possibly the greatest, architect, and that any revulsion from, let along mockery of, his work would reveal their own lack of understanding. It is certainly true that Le Corbusier was a master: but a master of propaganda and self-promotion in a credulous age, not a master of architecture.

….

Corbusier’s ideas, all of them gimcrack and third-rate, have struggled with good taste and common sense, and triumphed in the struggle.