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Charles-Édouard Jeanneret Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier (1933)
Born	(1887-10-06)October 6, 1887 La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
Died	August 27, 1965(1965-08-27) (aged 77) Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
Nationality	Swiss / French (from 1930)
Work
Buildings	Villa Savoye, France Notre Dame du Haut, France Buildings in Chandigarh, India

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier (French pronunciation: [lə kɔʁbyzje]; October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was an architect, designer, urbanist,and writer, famous for being 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, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India and America.

He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities.

Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, allegedly deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, "Lecorbésier."

He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1961.

Life[link]

Early life and education, 1887–1913[link]

He was born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) across the border from France. He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods.

Young Jeanneret was attracted to the visual arts and studied at the La-Chaux-de-Fonds Art School under Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. His architecture teacher in the Art School was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest houses.

In his early years he would frequently escape the somewhat provincial atmosphere of his hometown by traveling around Europe. About 1907, he traveled to Paris, where he found work in the office of Auguste Perret, the French pioneer of reinforced concrete. In 1908, He studied architecture in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann. Between October 1910 and March 1911, he worked near Berlin for the renowned architect Peter Behrens, where he might have met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. He became fluent in German. Both of these experiences would prove influential in his later career.

Later in 1911, he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, filling sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw, including many famous sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923) ("Towards an Architecture," but usually translated into English as "Towards a new Architecture").

Early career: the villas, 1914–1930[link]

Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds during World War I, not returning to Paris until the war was over. During these four years in Switzerland, he worked on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques.^[1] Among these was his project for the Domino House (1914–1915). This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs supported by a minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns around the edges, with a stairway providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan.

This design became the foundation for most of his architecture for the next ten years. Soon he would begin his own architectural practice with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), a partnership that would last until the 1950s, with an interruption in the WWII years, due to Le Corbusier's ambivalent position towards the Vichy regime.

In 1918, Le Corbusier met the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, in whom he recognised a kindred spirit. Ozenfant encouraged him to paint, and the two began a period of collaboration. Rejecting Cubism as irrational and "romantic," the pair jointly published their manifesto, Après le cubisme and established a new artistic movement, Purism. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier established the Purist journal L'Esprit nouveau. He was good friends with the Cubist artist Fernand Léger.

Pseudonym adopted, 1920[link]

In the first issue of the journal, in 1920, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name, "Lecorbésier", as a pseudonym, reflecting his belief that anyone could reinvent themselves. Adopting a single name to identify oneself was in vogue by artists in many fields during that era, especially among those in Paris.

Between 1918 and 1922, Le Corbusier built nothing, concentrating his efforts on Purist theory and painting. In 1922, Le Corbusier and his cousin Jeanneret opened a studio in Paris at 35 rue de Sèvres.^[1]

His theoretical studies soon advanced into several different single-family house models. Among these was the Maison "Citrohan", a pun on the name of the French Citroën automaker, for the modern industrial methods and materials Le Corbusier advocated using for the house. Here, Le Corbusier proposed a three-floor structure, with a double-height living room, bedrooms on the second floor, and a kitchen on the third floor. The roof would be occupied by a sun terrace. On the exterior Le Corbusier installed a stairway to provide second-floor access from ground level. Here, as in other projects from this period, he also designed the façades to include large expanses of uninterrupted banks of windows. The house used a rectangular plan, with exterior walls that were not filled by windows, left as white, stuccoed spaces. Le Corbusier and Jeanneret left the interior aesthetically spare, with any movable furniture made of tubular metal frames. Light fixtures usually comprised single, bare bulbs. Interior walls also were left white. Between 1922 and 1927, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed many of these private houses for clients around Paris. In Boulogne-sur-Seine and the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed and built the Villa Lipschitz, Maison Cook (see William Edwards Cook), Maison Planeix, and the Maison La Roche/Albert Jeanneret, which now houses the Fondation Le Corbusier.

Personal relationships[link]

While returning in 1929 from South America to Europe, Le Corbusier met entertainer and actress Josephine Baker on board the ocean liner Lutétia. Le Corbusier made several nude sketches of Baker. Soon after his return to France, Le Corbusier married Yvonne Gallis, a dressmaker and fashion model. She died in 1957. Le Corbusier also had a long extramarital affair with Swedish-American heiress Marguerite Tjader Harris.

Le Corbusier took French citizenship in 1930.^[1]

Portrait on Swiss ten francs banknote

Forays into urbanism[link]

For a number of years French officials had been unsuccessful in dealing with the squalor of the growing Parisian slums, and Le Corbusier sought efficient ways to house large numbers of people in response to the urban housing crisis. He believed that his new, modern architectural forms would provide a new organizational solution that would raise the quality of life for the lower classes. His Immeubles Villas (1922) was such a project that called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of the other, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms and kitchen, as well as a garden terrace.

Not merely content with designs for a few housing blocks, soon Le Corbusier moved into studies for entire cities. In 1922, he presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine). The centerpiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story, cruciform skyscrapers; steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces. At the center was a huge transportation hub, that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and at the top, an airport. He had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. Le Corbusier segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low-story, zigzag apartment blocks (set far back from the street amid green space), housed the inhabitants. Le Corbusier hoped that politically-minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models to reorganize society. As Norma Evenson has put it, "the proposed city appeared to some an audacious and compelling vision of a brave new world, and to others a frigid megalomaniacally scaled negation of the familiar urban ambient."^[2]

In this new industrial spirit, Le Corbusier contributed to a new journal called L'Esprit Nouveau that advocated the use of modern industrial techniques and strategies to transform society into a more efficient environment with a higher standard of living on all socioeconomic levels. He forcefully argued that this transformation was necessary to avoid the spectre of revolution that would otherwise shake society. His dictum, "Architecture or Revolution," developed in his articles in this journal, became his rallying cry for the book Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture, previously mistranslated into English as Towards a New Architecture), which comprised selected articles he contributed to L'Esprit Nouveau between 1920 and 1923. In this book, Le Corbusier followed the influence of Walter Gropius and reprinted several photographs of North American factories and grain elevators.^[3]

Theoretical urban schemes continued to occupy Le Corbusier. He exhibited his "Plan Voisin," sponsored by another famous automobile manufacturer, in 1925. In it, he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers from the Contemporary City, placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space. His scheme was met with criticism and scorn from French politicians and industrialists, although they were favorable to the ideas of Taylorism and Fordism underlying Le Corbusier designs. Nonetheless, it did provoke discussion concerning how to deal with the cramped, dirty conditions that enveloped much of the city.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) of 1935. Perhaps the most significant difference between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandons the class-based stratification of the former; housing is now assigned according to family size, not economic position.^[4] Some have read dark overtones into The Radiant City: from the "astonishingly beautiful assemblage of buildings" that was Stockholm, for example, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.”^[5] He dreamed of "cleaning and purging" the city, bringing "a calm and powerful architecture"—referring to steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete. Though Le Corbusier's designs for Stockholm did not succeed, later architects took his ideas and partly "destroyed" the city with them.^[5]

High Court in Chandigarh, India

La Ville radieuse also marks Le Corbusier's increasing dissatisfaction with capitalism and his turn to the right-wing syndicalism of Hubert Lagardelle. During the Vichy regime, Le Corbusier received a position on a planning committee and made designs for Algiers and other cities. The central government ultimately rejected his plans, and after 1942 Le Corbusier withdrew from political activity.^[6]

After World War II, Le Corbusier attempted to realize his urban planning schemes on a small scale by constructing a series of "unités" (the housing block unit of the Radiant City) around France. The most famous of these was the Unité d'Habitation of Marseilles (1946–1952). In the 1950s, a unique opportunity to translate the Radiant City on a grand scale presented itself in the construction of the Union Territory Chandigarh, the new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana and the first planned city in India. Le Corbusier designed many administration buildings including a courthouse, parliament building and a university. He also designed the general layout of the city dividing it into sectors. Le Corbusier was brought on to develop the plan of Albert Mayer.

The cabin where he spent his last years in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

Death[link]

Against his doctor's orders, on August 27, 1965, Le Corbusier went for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. His body was found by bathers and he was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. It was assumed that he may have suffered a heart attack. His death rites took place at the courtyard of the Louvre Palace on September 1, 1965 under the direction of writer and thinker André Malraux, who was at the time France's Minister of Culture. He was buried alongside his wife in the grave he had designated at Roquebrune.

Le Corbusier's death had a strong impact on the cultural and political world. Homages were paid worldwide and even some of Le Corbusier's worst artistic enemies, such as the painter Salvador Dalí, recognised his importance (Dalí sent a floral tribute). The President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson said: "His influence was universal and his works are invested with a permanent quality possessed by those of very few artists in our history". The Soviet Union added, "Modern architecture has lost its greatest master". Japanese TV channels decided to broadcast, simultaneously to the ceremony, his Museum in Tokyo, in what was at the time a unique media homage.

Visitors may find his grave site in the cemetery above Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in between Menton and Monaco in southern France.

The Fondation Le Corbusier (or FLC) functions as his official Estate.^[7] The U.S. copyright representative for the Fondation Le Corbusier is the Artists Rights Society.^[8]

Ideas[link]

Five points of architecture[link]

It was Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929–1931) that most succinctly summed up his five points of architecture that he had elucidated in the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and his book Vers une architecture, which he had been developing throughout the 1920s. First, Le Corbusier lifted the bulk of the structure off the ground, supporting it by pilotis – reinforced concrete stilts. These pilotis, in providing the structural support for the house, allowed him to elucidate his next two points: a free façade, meaning non-supporting walls that could be designed as the architect wished, and an open floor plan, meaning that the floor space was free to be configured into rooms without concern for supporting walls. The second floor of the Villa Savoye includes long strips of ribbon windows that allow unencumbered views of the large surrounding yard, and which constitute the fourth point of his system. The fifth point was the roof garden to compensate for the green area consumed by the building and replacing it on the roof. A ramp rising from ground level to the third floor roof terrace allows for an architectural promenade through the structure. The white tubular railing recalls the industrial "ocean-liner" aesthetic that Le Corbusier much admired. As if to put an exclamation mark after Le Corbusier's homage to modern industry, the driveway around the ground floor, with its semicircular path, measures the exact turning radius of a 1927 Citroën automobile.

The Modulor[link]

Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements, Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit.

He took Leonardo's suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an extreme: he sectioned his model human body's height at the navel with the two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor system.

Le Corbusier's 1927 Villa Stein in Garches exemplified the Modulor system's application. The villa's rectangular ground plan, elevation, and inner structure closely approximate golden rectangles.^[9]

Le Corbusier placed systems of harmony and proportion at the centre of his design philosophy, and his faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden section and the Fibonacci series, which he described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in Man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages, and the learned."^[10]

The Open Hand[link]

The Open Hand Monument in Chandigarh, India

The Open Hand (La Main Ouverte) is a recurring motif in Le Corbusier's architecture, a sign for him of "peace and reconciliation. It is open to give and open to receive." The largest of the many Open Hand sculptures that Le Corbusier created is a 28 meter high version in Chandigarh, India.

Furniture[link]

Corbusier said: "Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois."

Le Corbusier began experimenting with furniture design in 1928 after inviting the architect, Charlotte Perriand, to join his studio. His cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, also collaborated on many of the designs. Before the arrival of Perriand, Le Corbusier relied on ready-made furniture to furnish his projects, such as the simple pieces manufactured by Thonet, the company that manufactured his designs in the 1930s.

In 1928, Le Corbusier and Perriand began to put the expectations for furniture Le Corbusier outlined in his 1925 book L'Art Décoratif d'aujourd'hui into practice. In the book he defined three different furniture types: type-needs, type-furniture, and human-limb objects. He defined human-limb objects as: "Extensions of our limbs and adapted to human functions that are type-needs and type-functions, therefore type-objects and type-furniture. The human-limb object is a docile servant. A good servant is discreet and self-effacing in order to leave his master free. Certainly, works of art are tools, beautiful tools. And long live the good taste manifested by choice, subtlety, proportion, and harmony".

The first results of the collaboration were three chrome-plated tubular steel chairs designed for two of his projects, The Maison la Roche in Paris and a pavilion for Barbara and Henry Church. The line of furniture was expanded for Le Corbusier's 1929 Salon d'Automne installation, Equipment for the Home.

The most famous of these chairs are the now-iconic LC-1, LC-2, LC-3, and LC-4, originally titled "Basculant" (LC-1), "Fauteuil grand confort, petit modèle" (LC-2, "great comfort sofa, small model"), "Fauteil grand confort, grand modèle" (LC-3, "great comfort sofa, large model"), and "Chaise longue" (LC-4, "Long chair", English: "chaise lounge").^[11] The LC-2 and LC-3 are more colloquially referred to as the petit confort and grand confort (abbreviation of full title, and due to respective sizes). The LC-2 (and similar LC-3) have been featured in a variety of media, notably the Maxell "blown away" advertisement.^[12]

In the year 1964, while Le Corbusier was still alive, Cassina S.p.A. of Milan acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture his furniture designs. Today many copies exist, but Cassina is still the only manufacturer authorized by the Fondation Le Corbusier; see US page.

Politics[link]

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier associated with Georges Valois and Hubert Lagardelle and briefly edited the syndicalist journal Prélude. In 1934, he lectured in Rome on architecture, by invitation of Benito Mussolini. He sought out a position in urban planning in the Vichy regime and received an appointment on a committee studying urbanism. He drew up plans for the redesign of Algiers in which he criticized the perceived differences in living standards between Europeans and Africans in the city, describing a situation in which "the civilised live like rats in holes" yet "the barbarians live in solitude, in well-being."^[13] These and plans for the redesign of other cities were ultimately ignored. After this defeat, Le Corbusier largely eschewed politics.

Although the politics of Lagardelle and Valois included elements of fascism, anti-semitism, and ultra-nationalism, Le Corbusier's own affiliation with these movements remains uncertain. In La Ville radieuse, he conceives an essentially apolitical society, in which the bureaucracy of economic administration effectively replaces the state.^[14]

Le Corbusier was heavily indebted to the thought of the 19th-century French utopians Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. There is a noteworthy resemblance between the concept of the unité and Fourier's phalanstery.^[15] From Fourier, Le Corbusier adopted at least in part his notion of administrative, rather than political, government.

Criticisms[link]

Since his death, Le Corbusier's contribution has been hotly contested, as the architecture values and its accompanying aspects within modern architecture vary, both between different schools of thought and among practicing architects.^[16] At the level of building, his later works expressed a complex understanding of modernity's impact, yet his urban designs have drawn scorn from critics.

Technological historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in Yesterday's City of Tomorrow that the extravagant heights of Le Corbusier's skyscrapers had no reason for existence apart from the fact that they had become technological possibilities. The open spaces in his central areas had no reason for existence either, Mumford wrote, since on the scale he imagined there was no motive during the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter. By "mating utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile hybrid."

The public housing projects influenced by his ideas are seen by some as having had the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community's development. One of his most influential detractors has been Jane Jacobs, who delivered a scathing critique of Le Corbusier's urban design theories in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Influence[link]

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Le Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

Gustavo Capanema Palace, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).

One of the first to realize how the automobile would change human agglomerations, Le Corbusier described the city of the future as consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier's theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in Western Europe and the United States. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier criticized any effort at ornamentation. The large spartan structures in cities, but not 'of' cities, have been widely criticized for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians.

Throughout the years, many architects worked for Le Corbusier in his studio, and a number of them became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa's city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier's thinking also had profound effects on the philosophy of city planning and architecture in the Soviet Union, particularly in the Constructivist era.

Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by problems he saw in industrial cities at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries.

Le Corbusier also harmonized and lent credence to the idea of space as a set of destinations which mankind moved between, more or less continuously. He was therefore able to give credence and credibility to the automobile (as a transporter); and most importantly to freeways in urban spaces. His philosophies were useful to urban real estate development interests in the American Post World War II period because they justified and lent architectural and intellectual support to the desire to destroy traditional urban space for high density high profit urban concentration, both commercial and residential. Le Corbusier’s ideas also sanctioned further destruction of traditional urban spaces to build freeways that connected this new urbanism to low density, low cost (and highly profitable), suburban and rural locales which were free to be developed as middle class single-family (dormitory) housing.

Notably missing from this scheme of movement were connectivity between isolated urban villages created for lower-middle and working classes and other destination points in Le Corbusier's plan: suburban and rural areas, and urban commercial centers. This was because as designed, the freeways traveled over, at, or beneath grade levels of the living spaces of the urban poor (one modern example: the Cabrini–Green housing project in Chicago). Such projects and their areas, having no freeway exit ramps, cut-off by freeway rights-of-way, became isolated from jobs and services concentrated at Le Corbusier’s nodal transportation end points. As jobs increasingly moved to the suburban end points of the freeways, urban village dwellers found themselves without convenient freeway access points in their communities and without public mass transit connectivity that could economically reach suburban job centers.

Very late in the Post-War period, suburban job centers found this to be such a critical problem (labor shortages) that they, on their own, began sponsoring urban-to-suburban shuttle bus services between urban villages and suburban job centers, to fill working class and lower-middle class jobs which had gone wanting, and which did not normally pay the wages that car ownership required.

Le Corbusier deliberately created a myth about himself and was revered in his lifetime, and after death, by a generation of followers who believed Le Corbusier was a prophet who could do no wrong. But in the 1950s the first doubts began to appear, notably in some essays by his greatest admirers such as James Stirling and Colin Rowe, who denounced as catastrophic his ideas on the city. Later critics revealed his technical incompetence as an architect. In his book Armée du Salut, Brian Brace Taylor went into great detail about Le Corbusier's Machiavellian activities to create this commission for himself, his many ill-judged design decisions about building technologies, and the sometimes absurd solutions he then proposed.

Fondation Le Corbusier[link]

The Fondation Le Corbusier is a private foundation and archive honoring the work of architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It operates Maison La Roche, a museum located in the 16th arrondissement at 8-10, square du Dr Blanche, Paris, France, which is open daily except Sunday. As of June 2008, the Maison La Roche is temporarily closed for renovation.

The Fondation Le Corbusier was established in 1968. It now owns Maison La Roche and Maison Jeanneret (which form the foundation's headquarters), as well as the apartment occupied by Le Corbusier from 1933-1965 at rue Nungesser et Coli in Paris 16e, and the "Small House" he built for his parents in Corseaux on the shores of Lac Leman (1924).

Maison La Roche and Maison Jeanneret (1923–24), also known as the La Roche-Jeanneret house, is a pair of semi-detached houses that was Corbusier's third commission in Paris. They are laid out at right angles to each other, with iron, concrete, and blank, white facades setting off a curved two-story gallery space. Maison La Roche is now a museum containing about 8,000 original drawings, studies and plans by Le Corbusier (in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret from 1922–1940), as well as about 450 of his paintings, about 30 enamels, about 200 other works on paper, and a sizable collection of written and photographic archives. It describes itself as the world's largest collection of Le Corbusier drawings, studies, and plans.^[17][18]

Major buildings and projects[link]

Ronchamp Chapel

National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan

Centre Le Corbusier (Heidi Weber Museum) in Zurich-Seefeld (Zürichhorn)

Palace of Justice, Chandigarh

Assembly building, Chandigarh, India

Secretariat building, Chandigarh, India

• 1905: Villa Fallet, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
• 1908: Stotzer House, 6, Chemin de Pouillerel, la Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
• 1912: Villa Jeanneret-Perret, La Chaux-de-Fonds
• 1916: Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds
• 1922: Villa Besnus (Ker-Ka-Ré), Vaucresson, Paris, France
• 1922: Ozenfant House and Studio, Vaucresson, Paris. ( much altered.)
• 1923: Villa La Roche/Villa Jeanneret, Paris
• 1924: Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau, Paris (destroyed)
• 1924: Quartiers Modernes Frugès, Pessac, France
• 1925: Villa Jeanneret, Paris
• 1926: Villa Cook, Boulogne-sur-Seine, France
• 1926: Villa Ternisien, 5, Allee des Pins, Boulogne-sur-Seine, Paris. ( Block of apartments built over the house.)
• 1927: Villa Stein, Garches, Paris.
• 1927: Pleinex House, 24, Bis Boulevard Massena, Paris 13e.
• 1927: Villas at Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, Germany
• 1928: Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France View on the map
• 1929: Cité du Refuge, Armée du Salut, Paris, France
• 1930: Pavillon Suisse, Cité Universitaire, Paris
• 1930: Maison Errazuriz, Chile
• 1930: Las Nubes, house of Uruguayan novelist Enrique Amorim (Salto, Uruguay)
• 1931: Palace of the Soviets, Moscow, USSR (project)
• 1931: Immeuble Clarté (fr), Geneva, Switzerland View on the map
• 1933: Tsentrosoyuz, Moscow, USSR
• 1936: Palace of Ministry of National Education and Public Health, Rio de Janeiro (as a consultant to Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others)
• 1938: The "Cartesian" sky-scraper (project)
• 1945: Usine Claude et Duval, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France
• 1947–1952: Unité d'Habitation, Marseille, France View on the map
• 1948: Curutchet House, La Plata, Argentina
• 1949–1952: United Nations headquarters, New York City (Consultant)
• 1950–1954: Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France View on the map
• 1951: Cabanon de vacances, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin
• 1951: Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
• 1951: Mill Owners' Association Building, villa Sarabhai and villa Schodan, Ahmedabad, India
• 1952: Unité d'Habitation of Nantes-Rezé, Nantes, France View on the map
• 1952–1959: Buildings in Chandigarh, India
  • 1952: Palace of Justice (Chandigarh)
  • 1952: Museum and Gallery of Art (Chandigarh)
  • 1953: Secretariat Building (Chandigarh)
  • 1953: Governor's Palace (Chandigarh)
  • 1955: Palace of Assembly (Chandigarh)
  • 1956: Shodan House
  • 1959: Government College of Art (GCA) and the Chandigarh College of Architecture(CCA) (Chandigarh)
• 1956: Museum at Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, India
• 1956: Saddam Hussein Gymnasium, Baghdad, Iraq
• 1957: Unité d'Habitation of Briey en Forêt, France
• 1957: National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
• 1957: Maison du Brésil, Cité Universitaire, Paris
• 1957–1960: Sainte Marie de La Tourette, near Lyon, France (with Iannis Xenakis)
• 1957: Unité d'Habitation of Berlin-Charlottenburg, Flatowallee 16, Berlin View on the map
• 1957: Unité d'Habitation of Meaux, France
• 1958: Philips Pavilion, Brussels, Belgium (with Iannis Xenakis) (destroyed) at the 1958 World Expositon
• 1961: Center for Electronic Calculus, Olivetti, Milan, Italy
• 1961: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 1963: House of Man, Zurich, Switzerland
• 1964–1969: Firminy-Vert
  • 1964: Unité d'Habitation of Firminy, France
  • 1966: Stadium Firminy-Vert
  • 1965: Maison de la culture de Firminy-Vert
  • 1969: Church of Saint-Pierre, Firminy, France (built posthumously and completed under José Oubrerie's guidance in 2006)
• 1967: Heidi Weber Museum (Centre Le Corbusier), Zurich, Switzerland

Major written works[link]

• 1918: Après le cubisme (After Cubism), with Amédée Ozenfant
• 1923: Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture) (frequently mistranslated as "Towards a New Architecture")
• 1925: Urbanisme (Urbanism)
• 1925: La Peinture moderne (Modern Painting), with Amédée Ozenfant
• 1925: L'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui (The Decorative Arts of Today)
• 1931: Premier clavier de couleurs (First Color Keyboard)
• 1935: Aircraft
• 1935: La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City)
• 1942: Charte d'Athènes (Athens Charter)
• 1943: Entretien avec les étudiants des écoles d'architecture (A Conversation with Architecture Students)
• 1945: Les Trios éstablishments Humains (The Three Human Establishments)
• 1948: Le Modulor (The Modulor)
• 1953: Le Poeme de l'Angle Droit (The Poem of the Right Angle)
• 1955: Le Modulor 2 (The Modulor 2)
• 1959: Deuxième clavier de couleurs (Second Colour Keyboard)
• 1966: Le Voyage d'Orient (The Voyage to the East)

Quotations[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Le Corbusier

• "You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: 'This is beautiful.' That is Architecture. Art enters in..." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
• "Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light."
• "Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."
• "The house is a machine for living in." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
• "It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
• "Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
• "The 'Styles' are a lie." (Vers une architecture, 1923)
• "Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided." (Vers une architecture, 1923)

Memorials[link]

Le Corbusier's portrait was featured on the 10 Swiss francs banknote, pictured with his distinctive eyeglasses.

The following place-names carry his name:

• Place Le Corbusier, Paris, near the site of his atelier on the Rue de Sèvres.
• Le Corbusier Boulevard, Laval, Quebec, Canada.
• Place Le Corbusier in his hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
• Le Corbusier Street in the partido of Malvinas Argentinas, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina.
• Le Corbusier Street in Le Village Parisien of Brossard, Quebec, Canada.
• Le Corbusier Promenade, a promenade along the water at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
• Le Corbusier Museum, Sector- 8 Chandigarh, India.

See also[link]

Design portal

• Category:Le Corbusier buildings – articles
• Modernism

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Curtis, William J.R. "Le Corbusier. Ideas and Forms", Phaidon, 1994, ISBN 978-0-7148-2790-2
• Jencks, Charles. "Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture", The Monacelli Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-58093-077-2
• Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, ISBN 0-375-41043-0
• Marco Venturi, Le Corbusier Algiers Plans, research available on planum.net
• Sampò, Luca, Le Maisons Jaoul di Le Corbusier. La petite maison e la città contemporanea, FrancoAngeli, Milano 2010.
• Behrens, Roy R. (2005). COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books. ISBN 0-9713244-1-7.
• Naïma Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Skira, 2005, ISBN 88-7624-203-1
• Eliel, Carol S. (2002). L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918 - 1925. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-6727-8
• Frampton, Kenneth. (2001). Le Corbusier. London, Thames and Hudson.
• H. Allen Brooks: Le Corbusier's Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Paperback Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1999, ISBN 0-226-07582-6
• Von Moos, Stanislaus. (2009). Le Corbusier: Elements of A Synthesis. Rotterdam, 010 Publishers.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Le Corbusier

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Le Corbusier

• Fondation Le Corbusier - Official site
• Le Corbusier - Free DWG
• Le Corbusier and Villa Cook
• Reflections on Brutalist Architecture in East London
• Podcast: Kenneth Frampton on Le Corbusier
• Images of the Ministry of National Education and Public Health, Rio de Janeiro
• Le Corbusier's projects in a map
• The Shape Of Things That Came: Tim Benton's Analysis Of Le Corbusier's Audacious Designs
• Le Corbusier in Artfacts.Net
• Corbusier's Working Lifestyle: 'Working with Corbusier'
• Video: Sector 1 Chandigarh, India
• Artists Rights Society, Le Corbusier's U.S. Copyright Representatives
• Model for the Villa Chimanbhai
• Proportional Systems in the architecture of Le Corbusier

lez:Ле Корбюзье

Charlotte Perriand (24 October 1903 – 27 October 1999), was a French architect and designer. Her work aimed to create functional living spaces in the belief that better design helps in creating a better society. In her article L’Art de Vivre from 1981 she states “The extension of the art of dwelling is the art of living- living in harmony with man’s deepest drives and with his adopted or fabricated environment.” ^[1]

Biography[link]

Charlotte Perriand was born in 1903 in Paris, France to a tailor and a seamstress. In 1920 she enrolled in the Ecole de L'Union Centrale de Arts Decoratifs ("School of the Central Union of Decorative Arts") to study furniture design from 1920 until 1925. After applying to work at Le Corbusier's studio in 1927 and being rejected, Perriand renovated her apartment into a room with a large bar made out of aluminum glass and chrome. She recreated this for the Salon d’Automne where Le Corbusier's partner, Pierre Jeanneret, showed him her contribution. He changed his mind and offered her a job in furniture design. There, she was in charge of their interiors work and promoting their designs through a series of exhibitions.^[2] In 1928 she designed three chairs from Corbusier's principles. Each chair had a chromium-plated tubular steel base. At Corbuiser's request a chair was made for conversation: the B301 sling back chair, another for relaxation: the LC2 Grand Comfort chair, and the last for sleeping: the B306 chaise lounge.

In the 1930s, Perriand’s focus became more egalitarian and populist. Along with designing furniture and living spaces, she was also involved with many leftist organizations such as the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and Maison de la Culture. She also collaborated with the Jeunes in 1937 and help to found The Union des Artistes Modernes.^[3] In her designs from that period, rather than using chrome, which proved to be expensive, she began to use traditional materials such as wood and cane, which were more affordable. She also used some handcrafted techniques which she displayed at the 1935 Brussels International Exhibition.^[4] Many of her designs from this period were inspired from the vernacular furniture of Savoie where her grandparents lived-a place she visited often as a child.

In 1940 Perriand traveled to Japan as an official advisor for industrial design to the Ministry for Trade and Industry. While in Japan she advised the government on raising the standards of design in Japanese industry to develop products for the West. On her way back to Europe she was detained and forced into Vietnamese exile because of the war. Throughout her exile she studied woodwork and weaving and also gained much influence from Eastern design. The Book of Tea which she read at this time also had a major impact on her work and she referenced it throughout the rest of her career.^[5] Charlotte Perriand took part in the design of the ski resorts of Les Arcs in Savoie. In the 1950s she designed for various corporate service spaces. Perriand's main goal as a designer was to develop affordable, functional, and appealing furniture for the masses.

Some of her work includes: Meribel ski resort The League of Nations building in Geneva the Remodeling of Air France's offices in London, Paris, and Tokyo Charlotte Perriand continued collaborating with Jean Prouve through the rest of her career

Timeline[link]

1903 Born in Paris, France.

1920 Enrolls at the Ecole de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs to study furniture design.

1926 Marries her first husband, Percy Kilner Scholefield, a year after graduation and converts their attic apartment into a ‘machine age’ interior.

1927 Was interviewed by Le Corbusier on an October afternoon. After a brief glance at her drawings she was rejected and Le Corbusier bid her farewell with the dry comment "We don't embroider cushions here." She left her card with him regardless, and later that year invited Le Corbusier to see her installation at the Bar sous le Toit filled with tubular steel furniture at the Salon d'Automne, resulting in an invitation by Le Corbusier to join his studio at 35, rue de Sèvres to design furniture and interiors.

1928 Designs three chairs with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret (the LC2 Grand Confort armchair, the B301 reclining chair and the B306 chaise longue) for the studio’s architectural projects.

1929 Creates a model modern apartment in glass and tubular steel to be exhibited as Equipment d’Habitation (Living Equipment) at the Salon d’Automne.

1930 Separates from her husband and moves to Montparnasse. Travels to Moscow for a Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) conference and designs fixtures for the Pavilion Suisse at the Cité Universitaire in Paris.

1932 Starts work on the Salvation Army headquarters project in Paris.

1933 Travels to Moscow and Athens to participate in CIAM conferences.

1934 Designs the furniture and interior fixtures for Le Corbusier’s new apartment on rue Nungesser-et-Coli.

1937 Leaves Le Corbusier’s studio to collaborate with the artist Fernand Léger on a pavilion for the 1937 Paris Exhibition and to work on a ski resort in Savoie.

1939 When World War II begins, she leaves Savoie to return to Paris and to design prefabricated buildings with Jean Prouvé and Pierre Jeanneret.

1940 Sails for Japan where she has been appointed as an advisor on industrial design to the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

1942 Forced to leave Japan as an “undesirable alien” but is trapped by the naval blockade and spends the rest of the war in Vietnam, where she marries her second husband, Jacques Martin, and gives birth to a daughter, Pernette.

1946 Returns to France and revives her career as an independent designer and her collaboration with Jean Prouvé.

1947 Works with Fernand Léger on the design of Hôpital Saint-Lo.

1950 Designs a prototype kitchen for Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation apartment building in Marseille.

1951 Organises the French section of the Triennale di Milano.

1953 Collaborates on design of the Hotel de France in Conakry, Guinea

1957 Designs the League of Nations building for the United Nations in Geneva.

1959 Works with Le Corbusier and the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa on the interior of their Maison du Brésil at the Cité Universitaire in Paris.

1960 Collaborates with Ernő Goldfinger on the design of the French Tourist Office on London’s Piccadilly.

1962 Begins a long-running project to design a series of ski resorts in Savoie.

1985 Retrospective of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

1998 Publication of her autobiography, Une Vie de Création, and presentation of a retrospective at the Design Museum in London.

1999 Charlotte Perriand dies in Paris.

The Chaise Lounge[link]

Perriand and Le Corbusier were familiar with Thonet's bentwood chairs and used them often not only for inspiration but also in their designs. Their chaise lounge, for this reason, bears some similarity to Thonet's bentwood rocker although it doesn't rock. The chair has double tubing at the sides and a lacquered sheet metal base. The legs unintentionally resemble horse hooves. Perriand took this and ran with it, finding pony skin from Parisian furriers to cover the chaise. Perriand wrote in a memoir, "While our chair designs were directly related to the position of the human body...they were also determined by the requirements of architecture, setting, and prestige".^[6] With a chair that reflects the human body (thin frame, cushion/head) and has decorative qualities (fabrication, structural qualities) they accomplished this goal. It wasn't instantly popular due to its formal simplicity but as modernism rose, so did the chair's popularity.

References[link]

http://designmuseum.org/design/charlotte-perriand

Bibliography[link]

• Charlotte Perriand by Elisabeth Vedrenne. Assouline, November 2005. ISBN 2-84323-661-4.
• Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation by Charlotte Perriand. Monacelli, November 2003. ISBN 1-58093-074-3.
• Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living by Mary McLeod. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. December 2003. ISBN 0-8109-4503-7.
• Charlotte Perriand and Photography: A Wide-Angle Eye by Jacques Barsac. Five Continents, February 2011. ISBN 978-88-7439-548-4.
• Charlotte Perriand: Livre de Bord by Arthur Ruegg. Birlhauser (Princeton Architectural Press); 1 edition, December 2004. ISBN 3-7643-7037-8.
• Charlotte Perriand: Modernist Pioneer by Charlotte Benton. Design Museum, October 1996. ISBN 1-872005-99-3.
• Charlotte Perriand: Un Art D'Habiter, 1903-1959 by Jacques Barsac. Norma Editions, 2005. ISBN 978-2-909283-87-6.
• Die Liege LC4 von Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret und Charlotte Perriand (Design-Klassiker by Volker Fischer. Birkhauser. ISBN 3-7643-6820-9.
• From Tubular Steel to Bamboo: Charlotte Perriand, the Migrating Chaise-longue and Japan by Charlotte Benton. Journal of Design History VOl.11, No.1 (1998)
• Hinchman, Mark. History of Furniture. New York: Fairchild Books, 2009. 493-96. Print.

External links[link]

• Information from the Design Museum, London
• Charlotte Perriand exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 7 December 2005 – 27 March 2006
• Charlotte Perriand biography
• Collective affinity — architect Charlotte Perriand — Interview by Hendel Teicher, ArtForum, Summer 1999
• Works by Charlotte Perriand and Biographical info
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