Architect Dictums Practice Test

This question tests recognition of a defining modernist idea: that a house should function like a well-made machine. Le Corbusier popularized the notion that housing ought to be designed for efficiency, standardization, and rational use of space, with ornament kept to a minimum. He expressed this in his influential book and essays, arguing that form should serve function and that architecture could be improved through precise planning and the use of industrial methods. The famous line about the house being “a machine for living in” captures this mindset and is most closely associated with him, as seen in works like his Villa Savoye and his broader theories in Towards a New Architecture. While Vitruvius laid the ground rules of architecture with firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, he did not frame the house as a machine. Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson were key figures in modernism and the Bauhaus movement, but the specific metaphor of a house as a machine for living in is Le Corbusier’s hallmark concept.