Le Corbusier had begun by defining his conception of the Foundation’s missions at a very early stage, but he still had to draw up a timetable of the legal steps needed for it to become a reality at the appointed time. There were now four major points that were to focus all his attention and that of his friends.

• Their most immediate task was to define a legal status, which would ensure both the Foundation’s coming into being and its permanence, and provide it with the necessary resources for accomplishing its missions. The main subject of his preliminary study was the tax question, but it also confirmed the advantage to be gained from conceiving of the Foundation as a testamentary body after the death of its founder. To begin with, however, this solution meant provisionally forming an association with the job of ensuring a transition/transfer in legal and material conditions that were sound.
• It was equally important to find premises to house the different activities of the Foundation. The project required office accommodation for a secretariat, exhibition and meeting spaces as well as a building for stocking archives and a large collection of works of art. The Foundation would have at its disposal the apartment at 24 rue Nungesser et Coli and the Maison du Lac at Corseaux, which were obviously part of its heritage, but not adapted to the needs of the future institution.

Le Corbusier then began negotiations on two different fronts. On one hand, he succeeded in persuading his friend Raoul La Roche, for whom he had built the house in Square du Docteur Blanche and who had no direct heirs, to donate the house to the Foundation. On the other, in his talks with André Malraux on the restoration and future attribution of Villa Savoye, which had just been saved from demolition, he proposed to turn it into an international centre housing the Fondation Le Corbusier.

Between 1957, the year of the conversation with La Roche about donating the house and 1964, when the transactions were finally concluded, Le Corbusier studied several possibilities for locating the Foundation’s headquarters. The different schemes all included the Musée National d’Art Moderne, where a large part of his collection of paintings was deposited. Thus, in one of these schemes, he planned to present a selection of works in Villa Savoye ("Musée Corbu"), with the Foundation’s secretariat being housed in Maison La Roche. Paintings, sculptures and drawings would have been stored by the Musée d’Art Moderne. The role that this institution might play in the project was the subject of numerous discussions with its two curators, who had been closely following Le Corbusier’s work, Bernard Dorival et Maurice Besset.

On 3 July 1959, after an exchange of letters lasting several months, Le Corbusier sent a handwritten letter to La Roche to thank him for formally confirming the donation of his house in Square du Docteur Blanche to the Fondation Le Corbusier.

On this occasion you and I are accomplishing a material and moral act expressing our mutual respect and our faith in art. Your life and mine alike have been inspired by it
. After my time, the Fondation Le Corbusier will prolong the research I have devoted myself to; giving this foundation a roof will consecrate the friendship that brought us together in a far-away and … heroic time.

In 1962 he was concerned by the fate of Maison Jeanneret, also located in Square du Docteur Blanche, and whose links with Maison La Roche he wished to preserve. The house, formerly occupied by his brother Albert, was no longer part of the family heritage and was about to be involved in transactions in which Le Corbusier had no say. In the end, Maison Jeanneret, which today houses the Foundation’s offices and its resource centre, was acquired in 1970 only, through the sale of a painting by Picasso belonging to the Foundation’s collection.

• Le Corbusier then had to give the future Foundation the means to achieve one of its main tasks, that of ensuring the handing on of his artistic and intellectual œuvre.
  For this purpose he desired to draw up before his death the list of members of the future Governing Board of the Foundation. The first list of names appeared in 1961. It was constantly to be modified, depending on his changes of mood, advice from others and, with time, people just naturally dying off. Names were scribbled down in notebooks, lists exchanged in letters.
  In 1962 several prestigious foreign candidates were added to the names of friends and close associates: Boesiger, Gropius, Costa, Sert, Rogers, Candilis, Nervi… Le Corbusier was concerned to widen the circle of the Foundation’s loyal supporters and to obtain through an international network the support and the resources needed to run it.
  When the Association for the Fondation le Corbusier was formed in 1962, new lists of names appeared, this time for the management committee. From the outset it was decided that Raoul La Roche would be its Honorary President.
• Lastly, the Foundation was to encourage the recognition and the dissemination of Le Corbusier’s plastic creations. It was thus necessary to draw up an inventory of pieces due to become part of the Foundation’s collections and to contribute to improving knowledge of this aspect of Le Corbusier’s work, which he considered to be unfairly neglected by the public.
  In a note dated 6 November 1957, Le Corbusier therefore drew up a preliminary inventory of pictures of his that were either in circulation, deposited in French or foreign galleries or museums, or stored in his studio. He planned to make "a list of 20 available pictures, representative of [his] pictorial work, to be exhibited at the Paris headquarters of the Foundation". And in the margin he added: "in maison La Roche, 20 of them could be hung."
  This list was to be added to over the years through more or less detailed inventories of his personal collection, emphasizing both its variety and its unity (papiers collés, copper-plate engravings, tapestries, lithographs, enamels, etc.). He was troubled when paintings of his that had been deposited at the Musée National d’Art Moderne were returned to the Foundation in 1963, together with fifteen paintings by André Bauchant. He was also anxious to find fireproof housing for the plans of the Atelier at 35 rue de Sèvres.