Le Corbusier

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Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris[1]

6 October 1887

La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland

Died 27 August 1965 (aged 77)

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

Nationality Swiss, French

Occupation Architect

Awards AIA Gold Medal (1961), Grand Officiers of the Légion

d'honneur(1964)

Buildings Villa Savoye, Poissy

 Villa La Roche, Paris

Unité d'habitation, Marseille

Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp

Buildings in Chandigarh, India

Projects Ville Radieuse

Signature

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), known as Le

Corbusier (French: [lə kɔʁbyˈzje]), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner,
writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born
in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he
designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America.
Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was
influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture
Moderne (CIAM). Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and
contributed specific designs for several buildings there.
On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of
UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding
Contribution to the Modern Movement.[2]

Contents

 1Early life (1887–1904)

 2Travel and first houses (1905–1914)
 3Dom-ino House and Schwob House (1914–1918)
 4Painting, Cubism, Purism and L'Esprit Nouveau (1918–1922)
 5Toward an Architecture (1920–1923)
 6L'Esprit Nouveau Pavilion (1925)
 7The Decorative Art of Today (1925)
 8Five Points of Architecture to Villa Savoye (1923–1931)
 9League of Nations Competition and Pessac Housing Project (1926–1930)
 10Founding of CIAM (1928) and Athens Charter
 11Moscow Projects (1928–1934)
 12Cité Universitaire, Immeuble Clarté and Cité de Refuge (1928–1933)
 13Ville Contemporaine, Plan Voisin and Cité Radieuse (1922–1939)
 14World War II and Reconstruction; Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1939–1952)
 15Postwar Projects, United Nations Headquarters (1947–1952)
 16Religious architecture (1950–1963)
 17Chandigarh (1951–1956)
 18Later life and work (1955–1965)
 19Death
 20Ideas
o 20.1The Five Points of a Modern Architecture
o 20.2"Architectural Promenade"
o 20.3Ville Radieuse and Urbanism
o 20.4Modulor
o 20.5Open Hand
 21Furniture
 22Politics
 23Criticism
 24Influence
 25Fondation Le Corbusier
 26Awards
 27World Heritage Site
 28Memorials
 29Works
 30Books by Le Corbusier
 31See also
 32References
o 32.1Bibliography
 33External links

Early life (1887–1904)[edit]

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), 1920, Nature morte (Still Life), oil on canvas, 80.9 cm × 99.7 cm
(31.9 in × 39.3 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in the
French-speaking Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5
kilometres (3.1 mi) across the border from France. It was an industrial town, devoted to the
manufacture of watches. (He adopted the pseudonym of Le Corbusierin 1920.) His father was an
artisan who enameled boxes and watches, while his mother gave piano lessons. His elder brother
Albert was an amateur violinist.[3] He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods.[4][5][6]
Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier did not have
formal academic training as an architect. He was attracted to the visual arts and at the age of fifteen
he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds which taught the applied arts connected
with watchmaking. Three years later he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the
painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. Le Corbusier wrote later that
L'Eplattenier had made him "a man of the woods" and taught him painting from nature.[3] His father
took him frequently into the mountains around the town. He wrote later, "we were constantly on
mountaintops; we grew accustomed to a vast horizon."[7] His architecture teacher in the Art School
was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest house
designs. However, he reported later that it was the art teacher L'Eplattenier who made him choose
architecture. "I had a horror of architecture and architects," he wrote. "...I was sixteen, I accepted the
verdict and I obeyed. I moved into architecture."[8]

Travel and first houses (1905–1914)[edit]

 

Le Corbusier's student project, The Villa Fallet, a chalet in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (1905)

The "Maison Blanche", built for Le Corbusier's parents in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1912)

Open Interior of the "Maison Blanche" (1912)

 

The Villa Favre-Jacot in Le Locle, Switzerland (1912)

Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and
philosophy, by visiting museums, by sketching buildings, and by constructing them. In 1905, he and
two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz, designed and built his
first house, the Villa Fallet, for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier.
Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-fonds. It was a large chalet with a steep roof in the
local alpine style and carefully crafted colored geometric patterns on the façade. The success of this
house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same
area.[9]
In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland, going to Italy; then that winter
traveling through Budapest to Vienna, where he stayed for four months and met Gustav Klimt and
tried, without success, to meet Josef Hoffmann.[10] In Florence, he visited the Florence
Charterhouse in Galluzzo, which made a lifelong impression on him. "I would have liked to live in
one of what they called their cells," he wrote later. "It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's
housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise."[11] He traveled to Paris, and during fourteen months
between 1908 until 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect Auguste Perret, the
pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in residential construction and the architect of the Art
Deco landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Two years later, between October 1910 and March
1911, he traveled to Germany and worked four months in the office Peter Behrens, where Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were also working and learning.[12]
In 1911, he traveled again for five months; this time he journeyed to the Balkans and
visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, as well as Pompeii and Rome, filling nearly 80 sketchbooks
with renderings of what he saw—including many sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would
later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923). He spoke of what he saw during this trip in
many of his books, and it was the subject of his last book, Le Voyage d'Orient.[12]
In 1912, he began his most ambitious project; a new house for his parents. also located on the
forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds. The Jeanneret-Perret house was larger than the others,
and in a more innovative style; the horizontal planes contrasted dramatically with the steep alpine
slopes, and the white walls and lack of decoration were in sharp contrast with the other buildings on
the hillside. The interior spaces were organized around the four pillars of the salon in the center,
foretelling the open interiors he would create in his later buildings. The project was more expensive
to build than he imagined; his parents were forced to move from the house within ten years, and
relocate in a more modest house. However, it led to a commission to build an even more imposing
villa in the nearby village of Le Locle for a wealthy watch manufacturer. Georges Favre-Jacot. Le
Corbusier designed the new house in less than a month. The building was carefully designed to fit its
hillside site, and interior plan was spacious and designed around a courtyard for maximum light,
significant departure from the traditional house.[13]

Dom-ino House and Schwob House (1914–1918)[edit]

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1914–15, Maison Dom-Ino (Dom-ino House)

During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, He concentrated
on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques.[14] In December 1914, along with the
engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building
material. He had first discovered concrete working with Auguste Perret in Paris, but now wanted to
use it in new ways.
"Reinforced concrete provided me with incredible resources," he wrote later, "and variety, and a
passionate plasticity in which by themselves my structures will be rhythm of a palace, and a
Pompieen tranquility.".[15] This led him to his plan for the Dom-Ino House (1914–15). This model
proposed an open floor plan consisting of three concrete slabs supported by six thin reinforced
concrete columns, with a stairway providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan.[16]The
system was originally designed to provide large numbers of temporary residences after World War I,
producing only slabs, columns and stairways, and residents could build exterior wallls with the
materials around the site. He described it in his patent application as "a juxtiposable system of
construction according to an infinite number of combinations of plans. This would permit, he wrote,
"the construction of the dividing walls at any point on the façade or the interior."

The Anatole Schwob House in La-Chaux-de-Fonds (1916–1918)

Under this system, the structure of the house did not have to appear on the outside, but could be
hidden behind a glass wall, and the interior could be arranged in any way the architect liked.[17] After
it was patented, Le Corbusier designed a number of houses according to the system, which were all
white concrete boxes. Although some of these were never built, they illustrated his basic
architectural ideas which will dominate his works throughout the 1920s. He refined the idea in his
1927 book on the Five Points of a New Architecture. This design, which called for the disassociation
of the structure from the walls, and the freedom of plans and façades, became the foundation for
most of his architecture over the next ten years.[18]
In August 1916, Le Corbusier received his largest commission ever, to construct a villa for the Swiss
watchmaker Anatole Schwob, for whom he had already completed several small remodeling
projects. He was given a large budget and the freedom to design not only the house, but also to
create the interior decoration and choose the furniture. Following the precepts of Auguste Perret, he
built the structure out of reinforced concrete and filled the gaps with brick. The center of the house is
a large concrete box with two semicolumn structures on both sides, which reflects his ideas of pure
geometrical forms. A large open hall with a chandelier occupied the center of the building. "You can
see," he wrote to Auguste Perret in July 1916, "that Auguste Perret left more in me than Peter
Behrens."[19]
Le Corbusier's grand ambitions collided with the ideas and budget of his client, and led to bitter
conflicts. Schwob went to court and denied Le Corbusier access to site, or the right to claim to be the
architect. Le Corbusier responded, "Whether you like it or not, my presence is inscribed in every
corner of your house." Le Corbusier took great pride in the house, and reproduced pictures in
several of his books.[20]