ear the close of "Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier" at the Bard Graduate Center, there is a scary display of irreconcilable differences: a suavely domestic mahogany commode and, hanging above it, an architectural rendering of an immense city suffused with a futuristic, totalitarian chill. The combination suggests a posh dining room, but the clash of world views — gemütlichkeit versus the Soviet Politburo — is enough to ruin one's appetite.

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The commode was designed by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1915, when he was 28, for the smoking room of Hermann Ditisheim's apartment in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (Jeanneret's birthplace and, until 1919, his home). A reduction of Biedermeier and neo-Classicism streamlining toward Art Deco, it is sophisticated in its proportion and plainness and would be at home in just about any well-considered interior.

The architectural rendering is "Plan for a City of Three Million Inhabitants," an enormous aerial view drawn up by Jeanneret in 1922. By then he was living in Paris and had modified his maternal grandfather's name, Lecorbézier, into a noun. The Corbusier. One part aristocrat (Le Grand Duc), two parts force of nature (Le Mistral), Le Corbusier, sometimes shortened to Corbu or LC, was the banner with which he rode into history.

The city plan is dominated by 24 identical skyscrapers, each with a footprint suggesting an iron cross or, more benignly, a plus sign. Surrounding them, like the framing hedges of a formal garden clipped wafer thin, are lower but still monolithic apartment buildings and a vast square buttressed by four monumental arches. All is orderly, evenly spaced and symmetrical, and there's not a sign of life anywhere.

This plan is, of course, the fountainhead of the low-income housing projects, apartment blocks and industrial parks that have figured so deleteriously in postwar urban planning, as well as of the separation of residential and commercial districts that blights suburbia. The tragic effect of both was chronicled in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs's masterpiece of empirical criticism, which helped ignite the preservation movement. In Ms. Jacobs's furious book, Corbu is something like the devil incarnate.

"Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting and Photography, 1907-1922" is a dense, informative show about the early years of the precocious polymath who became, as the introductory text panel states, "arguably the most influential, admired, and maligned architect of the 20th century."

Today the polymath presents an intimidating blend of modern master characteristics. Like Mondrian, whom he resembled in both his physical features and his preference for quiet Quakerly suits, he was a visionary with monastic leanings who loved the grid and wrote prolifically, producing 57 books and pamphlets. His 1911 watercolor of Munich's Frauenkirche as a nearly featureless lavender monolith could be a Mondrian if not for the boxy white villa detailed in the lower left corner.

Like Malevich, he helped make white the signature color of modernism and was drawn to the plain and the geometric. The glacial white cube that appears in "The Mantelpiece," a stripped-down still life from 1918 that evokes levitating architecture, is the orthogonal equivalent of Malevich's flat, floating "White Square."

But Le Corbusier is most frequently compared to Picasso, with whom he shared a brilliant imagination, an omnivorous curiosity, doting parents, gifted mentors, supreme self-confidence, a tendency toward guilt-free meanness and manipulation, and repeated appearances in Museum of Modern Art exhibitions.

With a little help from friends and patrons, Le Corbusier designed and built his first house when he was only 17. He often predicted great things and then achieved them, opening huge swaths of unexplored territory for successive generations of architects, yet he also reinvented himself regularly before he died in 1965. Nothing evokes Picasso in this exhibition so much as its prevailing sense of appetite and forward momentum.