Le Corbusier
Modernism's most influential architect.
Le Corbusier set out five points for a new architecture and designed furniture with Charlotte Perriand. He called the house a machine for living in.
Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, a town known for watchmaking. He attended an art school for engravers and received early architectural commissions in his home town. During long study trips he worked for Auguste Perret in Paris, a pioneer of concrete construction, and for Peter Behrens in Berlin. In 1917 he settled in Paris.
Together with the painter Amédée Ozenfant he founded Purism and the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau, where he began using the name Le Corbusier. In his 1923 book Towards an Architecture he called the house a machine for living in. In 1927 he formulated five points for a new architecture: pilotis lifting the building off the ground, the free plan, the free façade, long horizontal ribbon windows and the roof garden. The Villa Savoye at Poissy outside Paris, built in 1928–31, is the best-known example.
From 1927 he worked with Charlotte Perriand and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret on tubular steel furniture, such as the chaise longue and the Grand Confort armchair, which are still made today. After the Second World War his architecture became heavier and more sculptural. The Unité d'habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, combined flats, shops and a roof terrace in a vast building of raw concrete. The chapel at Ronchamp of 1955 has a sweeping roof and light filtering in through small windows. In India he planned the new city of Chandigarh.
Le Corbusier was also a painter and sculptor, and he developed a system of proportions, the Modulor, based on the human body. He was a skilful propagandist for his ideas. His plans to demolish large parts of Paris and his contacts with the Vichy regime during the war have been criticised, and the extent of his political sympathies remains a matter of debate.
He died in 1965 while swimming in the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. In 2016 seventeen of his buildings in several countries were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. He is perhaps the most influential architect of the 20th century, and his ideas about concrete, housing and urban planning have shaped both admired and fiercely criticised environments around the world.