Le Corbusier

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born on October 6, 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town in the Jura mountains of French-speaking Switzerland ^[1]. His father worked as an enameller of watch faces, and his mother taught piano. The family expected the boy to follow the local trade, so at thirteen he entered the town's art school to train as an engraver of watch cases ^[2].

His teacher there, Charles L'Eplattenier, saw talent that pointed beyond watchmaking and steered him toward architecture. Jeanneret had no formal architectural degree and never earned one. Instead he learned by building and by traveling. At seventeen he received his first commission, the Villa Fallet in his hometown, designed with help from a local architect and finished in 1907 ^[2].

The journeys that followed shaped him more than any classroom. Between 1907 and 1911 he visited Italy, Vienna, Paris, and Germany, worked briefly in the Paris office of Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete, and spent months in the Berlin studio of Peter Behrens ^[1]. A long trip through the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey in 1911, later recounted in his book Journey to the East, gave him a lasting reverence for the Parthenon and for simple Mediterranean building forms ^[3].

Jeanneret settled permanently in Paris in 1917. There he met the painter Amedee Ozenfant, and together they launched Purism, a movement that rejected the fragmentation of Cubism in favor of clean geometry and everyday objects rendered with classical calm ^[4]. In 1920 the two men, with the poet Paul Dermee, founded the journal L'Esprit Nouveau. Writing for it, Jeanneret adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier, a name adapted from a maternal ancestor, and the identity stuck ^[1].

The articles he wrote for the journal were gathered in 1923 into Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture), one of the most widely read architecture books of the century. In it he argued that engineers, grain silos, ocean liners, and aircraft pointed the way toward an honest modern building art, and he offered the famous formulation of the house as a machine for living in ^[3].

During these years he also worked out the technical basis of his architecture. His Dom-Ino concept of 1914 proposed a skeleton of concrete slabs and slender columns that freed walls from carrying loads ^[2]. By 1926 he had distilled his approach into the Five Points of a New Architecture: pilotis lifting the building off the ground, a free plan, a free facade, ribbon windows, and a roof garden. Anyone asking who was Le Corbusier in the Paris of the 1920s would have heard of a polemicist as much as a builder, a man who fought for modernism in print, in paint, and in concrete.

The purist villas of the late 1920s made his reputation concrete. The Villa Savoye at Poissy, completed around 1931, gathered all five points into a white box hovering on thin columns above a meadow, and it remains among the most studied houses ever built ^[5]. Other commissions of the period included the Villa La Roche in Paris, now home to the Fondation Le Corbusier, and large projects such as the Cite de Refuge for the Salvation Army and the Swiss Pavilion at the Cite Universitaire ^[1].

After the Second World War his work turned rougher and more sculptural. The Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, finished in 1952, stacked 337 apartments with shops and a rooftop terrace into a single concrete slab on massive pilotis, a built argument for his ideas about collective housing ^[2]. Its exposed rough concrete, beton brut, gave a name to the Brutalist movement that followed. The pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, consecrated in 1955, surprised even his admirers with its curved walls and billowing roof, proof that the apostle of the right angle could also build in an almost sculptural, irrational key ^[5].

The largest canvas of his career came from India. From 1951 Le Corbusier served as architectural adviser for Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, where he planned the city grid and designed its Capitol Complex: the High Court, the Secretariat, and the Palace of Assembly, monumental concrete buildings set against the Himalayan foothills ^[6]. Among the most cited Le Corbusier achievements is also the Modulor, a proportional system based on the human body and the golden section, which he applied to buildings from Marseille to Chandigarh ^[3]. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed seventeen of his sites across seven countries on the World Heritage list as an outstanding contribution to the Modern Movement ^[7].

No account of a Le Corbusier biography can skip his city plans, which provoked more argument than any of his buildings. His Ville Contemporaine of 1922 imagined three million people housed in cruciform glass towers set in parkland. The Plan Voisin of 1925 applied the same logic to Paris, proposing to raze a large section of the historic Right Bank and replace it with eighteen towers ^[4]. The plan was never a serious prospect, but it became a symbol, for critics, of modernist arrogance toward the existing city.

His 1935 book La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) refined these ideas: strict separation of functions, high-rise living, and broad highways in place of the traditional street ^[3]. Through the CIAM congresses, which he helped found in 1928, such principles spread worldwide and influenced postwar reconstruction and public housing on several continents. Later critics, most famously Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, blamed tower-in-the-park planning for destroying the fine grain of urban life ^[4].

His politics have also drawn scrutiny. During the early 1940s he sought commissions from the Vichy regime in France and spent months lobbying its officials, an episode examined in detail by historians and in several books published in 2015 ^[8]. Scholars continue to debate how far his authoritarian sympathies shaped his urban thought, even as they acknowledge the scale of his influence.

Le Corbusier became a French citizen in 1930, the same year he married Yvonne Gallis, a fashion model from Monaco whom he had met in Paris in the early 1920s ^[1]. The couple had no children. Yvonne, by most accounts a grounding presence who cared little for architectural theory, died in 1957, a loss he felt deeply.

He kept a strict daily rhythm, painting most mornings in his apartment studio on rue Nungesser-et-Coli and reserving afternoons for the office at 35 rue de Sevres ^[2]. Painting was never a sideline in his own eyes; he produced canvases, murals, tapestries, and sculptures throughout his life and considered the visual arts inseparable from his building work.

From 1952 he spent long holidays at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera in the Cabanon, a log-clad cabin of roughly fifteen square meters that he designed for himself using Modulor dimensions ^[6]. That a man who planned cities for millions chose a one-room hut as his own retreat says much about the tensions in his character: grand ambition alongside an ascetic streak.

The final decade brought late masterworks and growing honors. The monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette near Lyon, completed in 1960, wrapped a Dominican community in austere concrete around a quiet court ^[5]. In the United States he built the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, finished in 1963, his only building in North America ^[6]. Work continued at Chandigarh, and designs were underway for a hospital in Venice and a church at Firminy that would only be completed decades after his death.

Recognition arrived from many directions. He received the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1953 and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1961 ^[2]. Universities awarded him honorary degrees, and governments that had once ignored his proposals now sought his presence at ceremonies.

On August 27, 1965, against his doctor's advice, the 77-year-old went for his customary swim in the Mediterranean below the Cabanon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and drowned ^[1]. France gave him a state funeral in the Cour Carree of the Louvre, with the culture minister Andre Malraux delivering the eulogy. He was buried beside Yvonne at Roquebrune in a grave he had designed himself.

Few architects have marked the built world so widely. The Fondation Le Corbusier, established in Paris in 1968 in accordance with his wishes, holds his archives, drawings, and paintings and maintains several of his buildings ^[9]. His collected Oeuvre complete, published in eight volumes, became a standard reference for generations of students, and his roughly fifty books and countless articles kept his ideas circulating long after his death ^[3].

The verdict on his urbanism is mixed. Admirers credit him with confronting the housing crisis of the industrial city head on; detractors trace the failures of many postwar housing estates to the doctrines he promoted ^[4]. Both camps agree on the essentials among Le Corbusier facts: he changed the vocabulary of architecture, from pilotis and ribbon windows to raw concrete, and he forced the profession to think at the scale of the whole city.

His buildings continue to draw pilgrims. Ronchamp, the Villa Savoye, the Marseille Unite, and the Capitol at Chandigarh are studied, restored, and visited by travelers from around the world, and the 2016 UNESCO listing formally recognized their shared importance across three continents ^[7]. Six decades after his death, arguments about Le Corbusier remain arguments about modern life itself.