Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965), born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, was a Swiss-French architect, painter, writer and urban planner, and one of the principal figures of the modern movement in architecture. His buildings, among them the Villa Savoye, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille and the chapel at Ronchamp, together with polemical books such as Vers une architecture, defined much of the architectural language of the twentieth century. [1] He also planned the city of Chandigarh in India, and seventeen of his works are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. [2]
Early life and training
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town in the Swiss Jura. He enrolled at the local art school, where his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier turned him towards architecture; he had no formal architectural degree. [1]
He travelled extensively in Italy, Central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, worked briefly in the Paris office of Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete, and in Berlin with Peter Behrens. [3]
Purism and theory
Settling in Paris after the First World War, he joined the painter Amédée Ozenfant in founding Purism, a movement seeking clarity and order in painting, and in 1920 adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier for his architectural writing. He painted throughout his life and regarded the practice as inseparable from his architecture. [1]
His book Vers une architecture, published in 1923, argued that the house should be conceived as a machine for living in and that architecture should learn from the standardisation of ships, aircraft and cars. He set out the Five Points of a New Architecture: pilotis raising the building off the ground, the free plan, the free façade, the horizontal ribbon window and the roof garden. [3]
Buildings
The Villa Savoye at Poissy, completed in 1931, is the clearest demonstration of the Five Points and became an icon of the International Style. With his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the designer Charlotte Perriand he also produced a series of tubular steel furniture designs that remain in production. [1]
After the Second World War his work grew heavier and more sculptural in raw concrete. The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, combined apartments, shops and communal facilities in a single slab and influenced a generation of housing schemes; the chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, showed a curving, expressive idiom that surprised his admirers. He devised the Modulor, a proportional system based on human dimensions, to govern the measurements of these buildings. [2]
From 1951 he was responsible for the planning of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Indian state of Punjab, designing its Capitol Complex with the High Court, the Secretariat and the Palace of Assembly. [4]
Urbanism and controversy
Le Corbusier's city planning proposals, including the Ville Contemporaine, the Plan Voisin for central Paris and the Ville Radieuse, called for high towers set in open parkland and the separation of traffic from pedestrians. These schemes were largely unbuilt but were widely imitated in postwar reconstruction, and the resulting housing estates have been extensively criticised for their social consequences. [3]
His political conduct has also been debated, in particular his attempts to obtain commissions from the Vichy government during the German occupation of France, a subject of scholarly reassessment since the 2010s. [1]
Death and legacy
Le Corbusier drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on 27 August 1965, aged 77. [1]
His work is represented in eleven countries, and in 2016 UNESCO inscribed seventeen of his projects as a transnational World Heritage site recognising his contribution to the modern movement. The Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris maintains his archive. [2]
