Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland to French-speaking Swiss parents, and acquired French nationality by naturalization in 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc."
Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings there, especially the government buildings. In 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement.
Le Corbusier remains a controversial figure. Some of his urban planning ideas have been criticized for their indifference to pre-existing cultural sites, societal expression and equality, and his alleged ties with fascism, antisemitism, eugenics, and the dictator Benito Mussolini have resulted in some continuing contention. Le Corbusier also designed well-known furniture such as the LC4 chaise longue and the LC1 chair, both made of leather with metal framing.
Early life (1887–1904)
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a city in the Neuchâtel canton in the Romandie region of Switzerland. His ancestors included Belgians with the surname Lecorbésier, which inspired the pseudonym Le Corbusier which he would adopt as an adult. His father was an artisan who enameled boxes and watches, and his mother taught piano. His elder brother Albert was an amateur violinist. He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods.Located in the Jura Mountains across the border from France, La Chaux-de-Fonds was a burgeoning city at the heart of the Watch Valley. Its culture was influenced by the Loge L'Amitié, a Masonic lodge upholding moral, social, and philosophical ideas symbolized by the right angle and the compass. Le Corbusier would later describe these as "my guide, my choice" and as "time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism."
Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier lacked formal training as an architect. He was attracted to the visual arts; at the age of fifteen, he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds which taught the applied arts connected with watchmaking. Three years later he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. Le Corbusier wrote later that L'Eplattenier had made him "a man of the woods" and taught him about painting from nature. His father frequently took him into the mountains around the town. He wrote later, "we were constantly on mountaintops; we grew accustomed to a vast horizon." He reported later that it was L'Eplattenier who made him choose architecture. "I had a horror of architecture and architects," he wrote. "...I was sixteen, I accepted the verdict and I obeyed. I moved into architecture." His architecture teacher was architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest house designs.
Travel and first houses (1905–1914)
Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and philosophy, visiting museums, sketching buildings, and constructing them. In 1905, he and two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz, designed and built his first house, the Villa Fallet, for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier. Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-Fonds, it was a large chalet with a steep roof in the local alpine style and carefully crafted colored geometric patterns on the façade. The success of this house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same area.In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland, going to Italy; he then spent the winter traveling through Budapest to Vienna, where he stayed for four months and met Gustav Klimt and tried, without success, to meet Josef Hoffmann. In Florence, he visited the Florence Charterhouse in Galluzzo, which made a lifelong impression on him. "I would have liked to live in one of what they called their cells," he wrote later. "It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise." He travelled to Paris, and for 14 months between 1908 and 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect Auguste Perret, the pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in residential construction and the architectural designer of the Art Deco landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Two years later, between October 1910 and March 1911 he traveled to Germany and worked for four months in the office of Peter Behrens, where Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were also working and learning.
In 1911, he traveled again with his friend August Klipstein for five months; this time he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Pompeii and Rome, filling nearly 80 sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw—including many sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture. He spoke of what he saw during this trip in many of his books, and it was the subject of his last book, Le Voyage d'Orient.
In 1912, he began his most ambitious project yet: a new house for his parents, also located on the forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds. The Jeanneret-Perret house was larger than the others, and in a more innovative style; the horizontal planes contrasted dramatically with the steep alpine slopes, and the white walls and lack of decoration were in sharp contrast with the other buildings on the hillside. The interior spaces were organized around the four pillars of the salon in the centre, foretelling the open interiors he would create in his later buildings. The project was more expensive to build than he imagined; his parents were forced to move from the house within ten years and relocate to a more modest house. However, it led to a commission to build an even more imposing villa in the nearby village of Le Locle for a wealthy watch manufacturer, Georges Favre-Jacot. Le Corbusier designed the new house in less than a month. The building was carefully designed to fit its hillside site, and the interior plan was spacious and designed around a courtyard for maximum light, a significant departure from the traditional house.
Dom-Ino House and Schwob House (1914–1918)
During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways."Reinforced concrete provided me with incredible resources," he wrote later, "and variety, and a passionate plasticity in which by themselves my structures will be the rhythm of a palace, and a Pompieen tranquillity." This led him to his plan for the Dom-Ino House. This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of three concrete slabs supported by six thin reinforced concrete columns, with a stairway providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan. The system was originally designed to provide large numbers of temporary residences after World War I, producing only slabs, columns and stairways, and residents could build exterior walls with the materials around the site. He described it in his patent application as "a juxtiposable system of construction according to an infinite number of combinations of plans.” This would permit, he wrote, "the construction of the dividing walls at any point on the façade or the interior."
Under this system, the structure of the house did not have to appear on the outside but could be hidden behind a glass wall, and the interior could be arranged in any way the architect liked. After it was patented, Le Corbusier designed several houses according to the system, which were all white concrete boxes. Although some of these were never built, they illustrated the basic architectural ideas which would dominate his works throughout the 1920s. He refined the idea in his 1927 book on the Five Points of a New Architecture. This design, which called for the disassociation of the structure from the walls, and the freedom of plans and façades, became the foundation for most of his architecture over the next ten years.
In August 1916, Le Corbusier received his largest commission ever, to construct a villa for the Swiss watchmaker Anatole Schwob, for whom he had already completed several small remodelling projects. He was given a large budget and the freedom to design not only the house but also to create the interior decoration and choose the furniture. Following the precepts of Auguste Perret, he built the structure out of reinforced concrete and filled the gaps with brick. The centre of the house is a large concrete box with two semicolumn structures on both sides, which reflects his ideas of pure geometrical forms. A large open hall with a chandelier occupied the centre of the building. "You can see," he wrote to Auguste Perret in July 1916, "that Auguste Perret left more in me than Peter Behrens."
Le Corbusier's grand ambitions collided with the ideas and budget of his client and led to bitter conflicts. Schwob went to court and denied Le Corbusier access to the site, or the right to claim to be the architect. Le Corbusier responded, "Whether you like it or not, my presence is inscribed in every corner of your house." Le Corbusier took great pride in the house and reproduced pictures in several of his books.