It is 50 years since the death of Le Corbusier, the most influential architect of the twentieth century and whose renovating ideas spread to architecture, urbanism and the arts in general all over the world. To him we owe the image of all modern city developments on any continent, the grid that extends them by dividing and distributing functions, the sober and bare architecture, made of straight lines that generally only architects like, and white as the only color that, in reality, was his way of burying in quicklime any organic remains of decoration.

Le Corbusier was born in the late nineteenth century in a small Swiss town (La Chaux de Fonds) known worldwide for its watch manufacturing and industrial organization, which made Karl Marx quote it in his work Capital. He had a very traditional training in the local Art School and a teacher closely related to all the European movements of the time that tried to apply design processes to the manufacturing industry.  

He directed him towards architecture and taught him that to achieve a social influence of any subject had to develop a strategy based on two axes: training and propaganda. Le Corbusier learned the lesson so well that without being one, he managed to go down in history as the founder of the ideas of the modern movement, the creator of rationalist architecture and the ideologist of a new artistic tradition. He was one of those who, like so many others, experienced firsthand the avant-garde movements of Paris in the 1920s, where he had close friendships with literary creators, painters, set designers and dressmakers. From all of them he took elements for his speech as much as from the architects who throughout Europe were trying to combine the disappearing artisan official document with industrial manufacturing processes.

His "Housing unit of adequate size" is the origin of our housing blocks; the "worker's housing of subject " that of our social housing that he designed with the purpose to make each house a palace; the "CIAM grid", that of our cities arranged in different land uses. Seductive and histrionic, he traveled the world giving lectures with radical ideas supported by magnificent drawings that he made live in front of his audience and left the testimony of his thought with works spread over four continents.

He traveled to Spain in 1928, where he gave two lectures at the residency program of Students of Madrid. He also visited Barcelona and some time later San Sebastian to see the building of the yacht club. He was a poet who built his verses with concrete to the beat of the "modulor", invented by him. This master, despite celebrating the 50th anniversary of his death at sea on an August afternoon, is still alive in each and every contemporary architect and in scholars and researchers, giving rise to permanent publications, congresses - such as the one to be held in Valencia in November - and exhibitions on him, his art and his thinking, which contribute to mythologizing the seemingly inexhaustible figure that turned the boy Charles Edouard Jeanneret into the immortal Le Corbusier.