Le Corbusier

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Le Corbusier was the most important, influential and famous architect of the 20th century. Swiss by birth and trained as an artist in his home town under a fastidious teacher, L’Eplattenier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret (he adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier only in the early 1920s) was a remarkably talented pupil.

He travelled widely in the Near and Middle East, and worked his way through a study tour of Germany at a time when the ideas for a new architecture were being formulated. In 1908-9 he went to Paris to attend classes with Auguste Perret. Paris later became his métier: he was absorbed in the cultural and artistic life of the great city as an editor, a writer, architect and artist.

His dedication to the synthesis of the arts – particularly sculpture, painting and drawing and designing – never wavered. His early work, like that of his most important contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, was related to nature but also owed much to the famous French theorists Charles Blanc and Auguste Choisy.

He began his career as an architect in his native town, building Villa Schwoh, an early example of reinforced- concrete construction, in 1916. He had by that time also worked out his basic building diagram, the so-called Maison Domino, a prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid over- sailing floors.

In 1917 he settled in Paris, where, together with his painter and writer colleague Amêdee Ozenfant, he issued his Purist manifesto Apres le Cubisme (1918). With the poet Paul Dermee they edited together a new review, L’Esprit Nouveau, from 1920 to 1925, the year in which Le Corbusier won international recognition for the small pavilion of the same name at the 1925 Paris Expo. Two years earlier his hook Vers lore architecture, mainly culled from articles in L’Esprit Nouveau, had appeared in French: it was to have worldwide repercussions, the most discussed architectural text of the age. It was translated into German in 1926 and English in 1927, and is still in print.

Other influential texts followed, including L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Urbanisme, Le Peinture moderne 1925), Precisions (1930), La Ville radieuse (1935) and the hooks on harmonious proportions, Le Modulor in 1954 and 1958. From 1922 he worked as an architect in conjunction with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and that year they exhibited the Maison Citrohan at the Paris Salon, together with proposals for a city of three million people.

Among the early executed domestic projects are the Vaucresson Villa (1922), the Maison La Roche (1923), Maison Cook at Boulogne-sur-Seine (1926), Villa Stein at Garches (1927) and the internationally renowned house and apartment block at the 1927 Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition, the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), the Villa Savoye, Poissy (1928-9), and the Clam’. Flats in Geneva (1932). These houses, mainly for wealthy clients but not necessarily expensive structures, established the form language of the new rational architecture, which seems to epitomize its definition as a machine a habiter (“a machine for living in”). Public buildings included the Swiss Pavilion in the University of Paris (1930-33) and the masterly Cite de Refuge for the Salvation Army in Paris (1929-33).

In international competition Le Corbusier did not fare well and complained ceaselessly that he was constantly compromised. He did, however, see the Centrosoyus Building in Moscow built, although he failed to realize his schemes for the League of Nations in Geneva (1927), the Palace of Soviets (1931), and United Nations, New York (largely carried out by Harrison & Abramovitz). He produced town-planning schemes for many parts of the world, often as an adjunct to a lecture tour. In these schemes the routes of mankind (vehicular and pedestrian) and the functional zones of the settlements were always emphasized and eventually embodied in the principles underlying “The Athens Charter”, issued as a result of the CIAM Congress IV in 1933. The famous Ville radieuse, more personal, humanistic and megalomanic, was issued in book form in 1935.

During the Second World War he produced little, emerging with his utopian Propos d’urbanisme of 1945 and some years later the fruit of his mathematical meditations in the form of the Modulor. In 1947 lie began work on his monumental Unite d’habitation at Marseille, completed in 1952. A prototype block of over 300 flats, it had internal streets, duplex maisonettes and internal shopping malls. It was followed by further examples in Berlin, Nantes, Meaux etc. Although relieved of their dominant rectangularity by sculptural roof-lines and highly coloured walls, these massive postwar dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism, although they were also plagiarized throughout the world.

As if to contrast with their megalomanic scale, Le Corbusier’s post-war small-scale poetic essays in architecture caught many designers unaware of his potentiality as an inventor of rich, new and varied forms. His Maisons Jaoul (1951-5) were a revelation of vernacular materials, brute concrete (beton brut) and articulated structure. The Monastery of Ste Marie de la Tourerte at Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle (1957¬60) and the splendid free-shaped pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-55) changed the direction of architectural and liturgical thinking.

Towards the end of his career Le Corbusier was appointed architect for the public buildings at Chandigarh, the new capital city of the Punjab in India (1952-64), and worked closely with Maxwell FRY and Jane Drew, who with others did a number of infrastructure buildings. This episode ran parallel to the more inspired work carried out at Ahmedabad, where his clients included the wealthy Sarabhai family. With the Shodan House (1956) and the Mill Owners Association (1951-9) some of his early design themes were taken up once again, such as the route, the recessed structural column and the expressive staircase and, of course, the flat undecorated plane, most of which formed part of his celebrated five principles of a free architecture which derive from the late 1920s.

With Le Corbusier, every building worked within its time as a testimony to his unremitting genius as the architect of the epoch. Much of it, even though this great architect’s popularity was marred by his tendency to overstate his case, will prove of lasting significance and value.

List of Le Corbusier’s major works

Various villas in and around La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1908-16.
Maison Citrohan (first project), 1920.
Ozenfant Studio, Paris, 1924.
Matson La Roche, Paris-Auteuil, 1925.
Pavillon de [Esprit Nouveau, Paris Exposition, 1925.
Villa Cook, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1927.
Houses, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927.
Villa Stein, Larches, 1927.
Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-9.
Cite de Refuge, Paris, 1929-33.
Maison aarte, Geneva, 1930-32.
Swiss Pavilion, Paris, 1933. V
ille Radieuse project, 1935.
Ministry of Health and Education, Rio de Janeiro, 1936.
“Temps Nouveau” Pavilion, Paris, 1937.
Unite d’habitation, Marseille, 1945-8.
Duval Factory, St Die, 1946.
Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55.
Projects and plans, Chandigarh, Punjab (with Fry, Drew and Jeanneret). 1951-64. Maisons Jaoul, 1951-5.
Ahmedabad villas and Mill Owners Association, between 1954 and 1959.
Ste Marie de la Tourette monastery, Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle, 1957-60.
Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass. (with stria), 1959-63.
Centre Le Corhusier, Zfirich, 1963-5.
Cultural Centre, Firminy, 1965.

Bibliography

Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Etude du mouvement d’art decoranf en Allemagne, La Chaux de Fonds, 1912 (reissued, New York, 1968); Vers taste architecture, Paris, 1923; Urbanisme, Paris, 1925; L ‘Art decoratif d’aujourd’hut, Paris, 1925 (1959); Le Pemture moderate, Paris, 1926; Une Matson – un palais, Paris, 1928; Precisions: sur on Etat present de !’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Paris, 1928 (1960); La Ville radieuse, Paris 1935 (1964); Quand les Cathedrales etaient blanches, Paris, 1937; Les Trois Etablissements human’s, Paris, 1945; UN Headquarters, New York, 1947; Le Modulor, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1950; Modulor 2, Boulogne-stir-Seine, 1955; Le Livre de Ronchamp (c.1956, multilingual editions), etc.
S. Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, 1979.
R. Walden (ed.), The Open Hand, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.
W Curtis, Le Corbusier: ideas and Forms, London and New York, 1986.
For a full bibliography with English and other foreign-language titles, see D Brady, Le Corbusier: an annotated bibliography, New York, 1985.

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Le Corbusier

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