Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, formulated the Five Points of a New Architecture and designed the Villa Savoye, the Unité d'habitation and the chapel at Ronchamp. His urban plans of tower blocks in parkland influenced post-war suburbs, in Sweden too.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a town known for its watchmaking industry. He first trained as an engraver at the town’s art school, where his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier encouraged him to become an architect. He designed his first villas in his home town as a teenager and then travelled in Europe. In 1908–1909 he worked for Auguste Perret in Paris, a pioneer of reinforced concrete, and in 1910 for Peter Behrens in Berlin. On a long journey in 1911 to the Balkans, Istanbul, Athens and Italy he drew prolifically. In 1917 he moved to Paris, where together with the painter Amédée Ozenfant he developed Purism, and from 1920 he began to use the name Le Corbusier.
In his 1923 book “Vers une architecture” he compared the house to machines such as cars and aeroplanes. He formulated five points for a new architecture: pilotis, roof terrace, free plan, free façade and long ribbon windows, clearly expressed in the Villa Savoye outside Paris. In urban plans such as the Plan Voisin and the Ville Radieuse he proposed tower blocks in parkland and separated traffic. After the war he built the Unité d'habitation in Marseille, a large apartment block of raw concrete with internal streets and services. The chapel at Ronchamp has a sculpturally curved form, and the monastery of La Tourette and the city plan for Chandigarh in India are among his late works. He also developed the Modulor system of proportion.
Le Corbusier died in 1965 while swimming in the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. He is perhaps the most influential architect of the 20th century, and in 2016 seventeen of his works in several countries were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. His ideas of light, air and towers in a park shaped post-war housing around the world. In Sweden he inspired the functionalists around 1930 and later the planning of suburbs with buildings set in green space, and several Swedish and Nordic architects worked in his Paris office when young. His urban planning has also been criticised for creating monotonous environments and fragmented cities, a debate that gathered pace in Sweden around the Million Programme in the 1970s.