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PERSONAL DATA 6 FAMOUS CONCEPTS 10 14 FAMOUS BUILDINGS 18 HERITAGE& INFLUENCE
PERSONAL ACCOUNT SYNOPSIS
QUICK FACTS NAME Le Corbusier OCCUPATION Architect, Artist BIRTH DATE October 6, 1887 DEATH DATE August 27, 1965 EDUCATION École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds PLACE OF BIRTH La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland PLACE OF DEATH Cap Martin, France ORIGINALLY Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris AKA Charles Jeanneret-Gris FULL NAME Le Corbusier 6
Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris in Switzerland on October 6, 1887. In 1917, he moved to Paris and assumed the pseudonym Le Corbusier. In his architecture, he chiefly built with steel and reinforced concrete and worked with elemental geometric forms. Le Corbusier’s painting emphasized clear forms and structures, which corresponded to his architecture.
EARLY YEARS Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris on October 6, 1887, Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, an artist who painted dials in the town’s renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, a musician and piano teacher. His family’s Calvinism, love of the arts and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, where his family fled during the Albigensian Wars of the 12th century, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier. At age 13, Le Corbusier left primary school to attend Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he would learn the art of enameling and engraving watch faces, following in the footsteps of his father. After designing his first house, in 1907, at age 20, Le Corbusier took trips through central Europe and the Mediterranean, including Italy, Vienna, Munich and Paris. His travels included apprenticeships with various architects, most significantly with structural rationalist Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, and later with renowned architect Peter Behrens, with whom Le Corbusier worked from October 1910 to March 1911, near Berlin.
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EARLY CAREER He designed a series of villas and began to theorize on the use of reinforced concrete as a structural frame, a thoroughly modern technique. Le Corbusier began to envisage buildings designed from these concepts as affordable prefabricated housing that would help rebuild cities after World War I came to an end. The floor plans of the proposed housing consisted of open space, leaving out obstructive support poles, freeing exterior and interior walls from the usual structural constraints. This design system became the backbone for most of Le Corbusier’s architecture for the next 10 years.
THE MOVE TO PARIS In 1917, Le Corbusier moved to Paris, where he worked as an architect on concrete structures under government contracts. He spent most of his efforts, however, on the more influential, and at the time more lucrative, discipline of painting. Then, in 1918, Le Corbusier met Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, who encouraged Le Corbusier to paint. Kindred spirits, the two began a period of collaboration in which they rejected cubism, an art form finding its peak at the time, as irrational and romantic. With these thoughts in mind, the pair published the book Après le cubisme (After Cubism), an anti-cubism manifesto, and established a new artistic movement called purism. In 1920, the pair, along with poet Paul Dermée, established the purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), an avant-garde review. In the first issue of the new publication, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier, an alteration of his grandfather’s last name, to reflect his belief that anyone could reinvent himself. Also, adopting a single name to represent oneself artistically was particularly en vogue at the time, especially in Paris, and Le Corbusier wanted to create a persona that could keep separate his critical writing from his work as a painter and architect. In the pages of L’Esprit Nouveau, the three men railed against past artistic and architectural movements, such as those embracing elaborate nonstructural (that is, nonfunctional) decoration, and defended Le Corbusier’s new style of functionalism. In 1923, Le Corbusier published Vers une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture), which collected his polemical writing from L’Esprit Nouveau. In the book are such famous Le Corbusier declarations as “a house is a machine for living in” and “a curved street is a donkey track; a straight street, a road for men.” 7
PERSONAL ACCOUNT
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FONDATION LE CORBUSIER THE FONDATION LE CORBUSIER is a private foundation and archive honoring the work of Le Corbusier. It operates Maison La Roche, a museum located in the 16th arrondissement at 8–10, square du Dr Blanche, Paris, France, which is open daily except Sunday. The foundation was established in 1968. It now owns Maison La Roche and Maison Jeanneret (which form the foundation's headquarters), as well as the apartment occupied by Le Corbusier from 1933 to 1965 at rue Nungesser et Coli in Paris 16e, and the "Small House" he built for his parents in Corseaux on the shores of Lac Leman (1924). Maison La Roche and Maison Jeanneret (1923–24), also known as the La Roche-Jeanneret house, is a pair of semi-detached houses that was Le Corbusier's third commission in Paris. They are laid out at right angles to each other, with iron, concrete, and blank, white façades setting off a curved two-story gallery space. Maison La Roche is now a museum containing about 8,000 original drawings, studies and plans by Le Corbusier (in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret from 1922 to 1940), as well as about 450 of his paintings, about 30 enamels, about 200 other works on paper, and a sizable collection of written and photographic archives. It describes itself as the world's largest collection of Le Corbusier drawings, studies, and plans.
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CRITICISM Few other 20th century architects were praised, or criticized, as much as Le Corbusier. In his eulogy to Le Corbusier at the memorial ceremony for the architect in the courtyard of the Louvre on September 1, 1965, French Culture Minister André Malraux declared, “Le Corbusier had some great rivals, but none of them had the same significance in the revolution of architecture, because none bore insults so patiently and for so long.” Most of the later criticism of Le Corbusier was directed at his ideas of urban planning. In 1998 the architectural historian Witold Rybzyynski wrote in Time magazine: “He called it the Ville Radieuse, the Radiant City. Despite the poetic title, his urban vision was authoritarian, inflexible and simplistic. Wherever it was tried- in Chandirgarh by Le Corbusier himself or in Brasilia by his followers- it failed. Standardization proved inhuman and disorienting. The open spaces were inhospitable; the bureaucratically imposed plan , socially destructive. In the U.S., the Radiant City took the form of vast urban-renewal schemes and regimented public housing projects that damaged the urban fabric beyond repair. Today, these megaprojects are being dismantled, as superblocks give way to rows of houses fronting streets and sidewalks. Downtowns have discovered that combining, not separating, different activities is the key to success. So is the presence of lively residential neighborhoods, old as well as new. Cities have learned that preserving history makes more sense than starting from zero. It has been an expensive lesson, and not one that Le Corbusier intended, but it too is part of his legacy.”
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FAMOUS CONCEPTS *** FIVE POINTS OF ARCHITECTURE During his career, Le Corbusier developed a set of architectural principles that dictated his technique, which he called “the Five Points of a New Architecture” and were most evident in his Villa Savoye.
THE FIVE POINTS ARE: Pilotis — replacement of supporting walls by a grid of reinforced concrete columns that bears the structural load is the basis of the new aesthetic. The free designing of the ground plan — the absence of supporting walls — means the house is unrestrained in its internal use. The free design of the faсade — separating the exterior of the building from its structural function — sets the faсade free from structural constraints. The horizontal window, which cuts the façade along its entire length, lights rooms equally. Roof gardens on a flat roof can serve a domestic purpose while providing essential protection to the concrete roof. 10
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MODULOR THE MODULOR is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by Le Corbusier.
It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the imperial and the metric system. It is based on the height of a man with his arm raised. It was also used as a system to set out a number of Le Corbusier’s buildings and was later codified into two books. The graphic representation of the Modulor, a stylised human figure with one arm raised, stands next to two vertical measurements, a red series based on the figure’s navel height (1.08 m in the original version, 1.13 m in the revised version) then segmented according to Phi, and a blue series based on the figure’s entire height, double the navel height (2.16 m in the original version, 2.26 m in the revised), segmented similarly. A spiral, graphically developed between the red and blue segments, seems to mimic the volume of the human figure.
Le Corbusier developed the Modulor in the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and other attempts to discover mathematical proportions in the human body and then to use that knowledge to improve both the appearance and function of architecture. The system is based on human measurements, the double unit, the Fibonacci numbers, and the golden ratio. Le Corbusier described it as a “range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things”. With the Modulor, Le Corbusier sought to introduce a scale of visual measures that would unite two virtually incompatible systems: the Anglo Saxon foot and inch and the French metric system. Whilst he was intrigued by ancient civilisations who used measuring systems linked to the human body: elbow (cubit), finger (digit), thumb (inch) etc., he was troubled by the metre as a measure that was a forty-millionth part of the meridian of the earth. In 1943, in response to the French National Organisation for Standardisation’s (AFNOR) requirement for standardising all the objects involved in the construction process, Le Corbusier asked an apprentice to consider a scale based upon a man with his arm raised to 2.20 m in height. The result, in August 1943 was the first graphical representation of the derivation of the scale. This was refined after a visit to the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences in Sorbonne on 7 February 1945 which resulted in the inclusion of a golden section into the representation. Whilst initially the Modulor Man’s height was based on a French man’s height of 1.75 metres (5 ft 9 in) it was changed to 1.83 m in 1946 because “in English detective novels, the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always six feet tall!” The dimensions were refined to give round numbers and the overall height of the raised arm was set at 2.262 m.
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THE RADIANT CITY
Ville Radieuse (THE RADIANT CITY) is an unrealized urban masterplan by Le Corbusier, first presented in 1924 and published in a book of the same name in 1933. 12
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SPREADING THE IDEA
THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN IDEAL In the late 1920s Le Corbusier lost confidence in big business to realise his dreams of utopia represented in the Ville Contemporaine and Plan Voisin (1925). Influenced by the linear city ideas of Arturo Soria y Mata (which Milyutin also employed) and the theories of the syndicalist movement (that he had recently joined) he formulated a new vision of the ideal city, the Ville Radieuse. It represented an utopian dream to reunite man within a well-ordered environment. Unlike the radial design of the Ville Contemporaine, the Ville Radieuse was a linear city based upon the abstract shape of the human body with head, spine, arms and legs. The design maintained the idea of high-rise housing blocks, free circulation and abundant green spaces proposed in his earlier work. The blocks of housing were laid out in long lines stepping in and out. Like the Swiss Pavilion they were glazed on their south side and were raised up on pilotis. They had roof terraces and running tracks on their roofs. The Ville Radieuse also made reference to Corbusier’s work in Russia. In 1930, he wrote a 59-page Reply to Moscow when commenting upon a competition in Moscow. The report contained drawings defining an alternative urban model for the planning of the city. He exhibited the first representations of his ideas at the third CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930 (although he withdrew the Moscow proposals). In addition he developed proposals for the Ferme Radieuse (Radiant Farm) and Village Radieuse (Radiant Village).
Throughout the thirties Le Corbusier spread the message of his new, ideal city. Discussions at the fourth CIAM meeting on board the SS Patris bound for Athens were incorporated into Corbusier’s book, The Radiant City (published in 1933). This in turn influenced the Athens Charter. Between 1931 and 1940 Corbusier undertook a series of town planning proposals for Algiers. During that period Algiers was the administrative capital of French North Africa. Although he was not officially invited to submit proposals for the city, he knew the mayor was interested so he tried his luck. The plan had to incorporate the existing casbah whilst allowing for the linear growth of the increasing population. The resulting Obus Plan was a variation on the Ville Radieuse, adapted for a very specific culture and landscape. It comprised four main elements: an administration area by the water in two slab blocks, convex and concave apartment blocks for the middle classes up on the slopes above the city, an elevated roadway on a north-south axis above the casbah and a meandering viaduct with a road on top meandering down the coast. In 1933 in Nemours, North Africa he proposed eighteen Unité apartment blocks orientated north-south against a backdrop of mountains. On his 1935 trip to the United States, Corbusier criticised the skyscrapers of Manhattan for being too small and too close together. He proposed replacing all the existing buildings with one huge Cartesian Skyscraper equipped with living and working units. This would have cleared the way for more parkland, thus conforming to the ideals of the Ville Radieuse. Even as late as the 1940s he was trying to court both Mussolini and the Vichy government to adopt his ideal city plans. Corbusier’s best opportunity for the realisation of his plans were the designs for Chandigarh, India, which he developed in 1949. From 1945 to 1952 he undertook the design and construction of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. The Unité embodied the ideas of the Ville Radieuse that he had developed in Nemours and Algiers. When designing the layout for Brasilia, architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were influenced by the plans for the Ville Radieuse. 13
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FAMOUS BUILDINGS UNITÉ D’HABITATION, MARSEILLE, FRANCE, 1945 An experiment in collective housing, this bare concrete block is often considered the founding work of Brutalism. Elevated on sculptural pilotti and topped by a roof garden, the Unité d’Habitation contains 337 apartments ranging from studios to homes for families with up to 8 children. On the building’s opening in 1952, Le Corbusier described it as “the first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life.”
MAISON DE LA CULTURE, FIRMINY, FRANCE, 1953 Le Corbusier gave this concrete cultural centre in Loire a scooped roof that projects into a dramatic point above an angled facade. While the flanks of the building are solid concrete, its two glazed facades feature primary coloured stripes.
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NOTRE DAME DU HAUT CHAPEL, RONCHAMP, FRANCE, 1950 - 1955 Considered by many critics to be Le Corbusier’s finest work, the Notre Dame du Haut chapel features a huge curving board-marked concrete roof that shows a break away from the functionalism of the architect’s earlier buildings. Vandals broke into the chapel in 2014, breaking a hand-painted, glass window signed by Le Corbusier and prompting calls for better protection of the site.
COMPLEXE DU CAPITOLE, CHANDIGARH, INDIA, 1952 Designed as part of the masterplan for the Indian city of Chandigarh, the Complexe du Capitole comprises three buildings – the Legislative Assembly, Secretariat and High Court. Concrete was moulded into gridded, scalloped and columnar formations to create the complex geometry and patterns, which are highlighted with brightly coloured paintwork.
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MUSÉE NATIONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DE L’OCCIDENT, TAITO-KU, TOKYO, JAPAN, 1955 Built to house a collection of Impressionist painting and sculpture, the concrete building is set in a park overlooking Tokyo. A textured box forming the upper storey of the museum is raised on slim concrete columns over a smaller glass-fronted base.
WEISSENHOF ESTATE, STUTTGART, GERMANY, 1927 Le Corbusier designed two buildings for the Weissenhof Estate, conceived a showcase for new materials and construction methods in architecture and overseen by Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut were among the 17 European architects who contributed to the experiment. The two buildings Le Corbusier designed were intended as models for mass housing, and feature modular construction methods and mobile partitions to allow a flexible use of space.
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COUVENT SAINTE-MARIE DE LA TOURETTE, EVEUX-SUR-L’ARBRESLE, FRANCE, 1953 This vast board-marked concrete monastery contains 100 bedrooms, a library and refectory as well as separate halls of work and recreation for the Dominican order near Lyon. Gridded and linear patterns on the building’s facade express its internal structure, which features chunky concrete columns and exposed beams.
VILLA SAVOYE ET LOGE DU JARDINIER, POISSY, FRANCE, 1928 A key work of the Modernist movement, Villa Savoye has a top-heavy construction supported by row of slender columns. The residence, designed by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret, is crowned by a solarium encased by curving walls and features sliding glazing at ground level.
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HERITAGE & INFLUENCE
Le Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). One of the first to realize how the automobile would change human agglomerations, Le Corbusier described the city of the future as consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier’s theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in Europe and the United States. In Great Britain urban planners turned to Le Corbusier’s “Cities in the Sky” as a cheaper method of providing public housing from the late 1950s. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier criticized any effort at ornamentation. The large spartan structures in cities, but not ‘of’ cities, have been widely criticized for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians. Throughout the years, many architects worked for Le Corbusier in his studio, and a number of them became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier’s ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa’s city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable 18
plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier’s thinking also had profound effects on the philosophy of city planning and architecture in the Soviet Union, particularly in the Constructivist era. Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by problems he saw in industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries. Le Corbusier also harmonized and lent credence to the idea of space as a set of destinations which mankind moved between, more or less continuously. He was therefore able to give credence and credibility to the automobile (as a transporter); and most importantly to freeways in urban spaces. His philosophies were useful to urban real estate development interests in the American Post World War II period because they justified and lent architectural and intellectual
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support to the desire to destroy traditional urban space for high density high profit urban concentration, both commercial and residential. Le Corbusier’s ideas also sanctioned further destruction of traditional urban spaces to build freeways that connected this new urbanism to low density, low cost (and highly profitable), suburban and rural locales which were free to be developed as middle class single-family (dormitory) housing. Notably missing from this scheme of movement were connectivity between isolated urban villages created for lower-middle and working classes and other destination points in Le Corbusier’s plan: suburban and rural areas, and urban commercial centers. This was because, as designed, the freeways traveled over, at, or beneath grade levels of the living spaces of the urban poor (one modern example: the Cabrini–Green housing project in Chicago). Such projects and their areas, having no freeway exit ramps, cut off by freeway rightsof-way, became isolated from jobs and services concentrated at Le Corbusier’s nodal transportation end points. As jobs increasingly moved to the suburban end points of the freeways, urban village dwellers found themselves without convenient freeway access points in their communities and without public mass transit connectivity that could economically reach suburban job centers. Very late in the Post-War period, suburban job centers found this to be such a critical problem (labor shortages) that they, on their own, began sponsoring urban-to-suburban shuttle bus services between urban villages and suburban job centers, to fill working class and lower-middle class jobs which had gone wanting, and which did not normally pay the wages that car ownership required. Le Corbusier had a great influence on architects and urbanists all the world. In the United States, Shadrach Woods; in Spain, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza; in Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer; In Mexico, Mario Pani Darqui; in Chile, Roberto Matta; in Argentina, Antoni Bonet i Castellana, Juan Kurchan, Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Amancio Williams, and Clorindo Testa in his first era; in Uruguay, the professors Justino Serralta and Carlos Gómez Gavazzo; in Colombia, Germán Samper Gnecco, Rogelio Salmona, and Dicken Castro; in Peru, Abel Hurtado and José Carlos Ortecho.
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UNESCO HERITAGE Seventeen buildings designed by Swiss-French architecture pioneer Le Corbusier have become UNESCO world heritage sites, the Swiss government said on Sunday, increasing the chance of conservation funding. The 17 architectural sites that have been added to the World Heritage List are spread across seven countries. They were built over 50 years by the Swiss-born French architect, who has become one of the Modernist movement’s most admired and controversial figures. They include the Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh, India, where Le Corbusier collaborated with his cousin and fellow architect and designer Pierre Jeanerret to build and furnish an entire government city. “The work of Le Corbusier is a central contribution to modern architecture,” the Swiss government said in its statement.The architect’s properties “embody the exceptional architectural and constructive responses to the social challenges of the 20th century,” it added. The structures include the Maison Guiette, in Antwerp, Belgium, the National Museum for Western Art in Tokyo, and others in Switzerland, Argentina, Germany and India. Ten buildings in France are on the list, including La Villa Savoye in Poissy, a Parisian suburb; La Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp and La Cité radieuse in Marseille. Le Corbusier - famed for calling a house a machine for living in - was born CharlesEdouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1887. He adopted the alias Le Corbusier - from his maternal grandfather, Lecorbesier - in 1920.He became a French citizen in 1930 and died in 1965. His image appears on the Swiss 10 franc note. 19
HERITAGE & INFLUENCE
INFLUENCE OF LE CORBUSIER IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE INDOOROUTDOOR Large windows incorporate the outside world into the interior. They visually and physically merge the indoors and outdoors, as well as enhance spaciousness, airiness and a sense of fluidity.
HYGIENE CONSIDERATIONS Furniture and cabinetry should be raised off the floor to make it easier to clean underneath and therefore meet better hygiene needs. 20
UNIVERSAL STYLE Interiors should do away with traditional, historic and nationalist styles. Rather, they should embrace a universal style that distills spaces and objects to their geometric foundations, incorporates cubic and architectonic forms and eliminates clutter.
LARGE SPACES Architecturally, spaces should be open and flexible and have clarity through rectangular lines and planes. Functionally, larger spaces are easier to move in, around, and through, and they can serve a variety of purposes. One large space is also easier to clean and is lighter than a series of smaller spaces, helping with energy-efficiency and hygiene.
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PRACTICAL FURNITURE STANDARDISED, PREFABRICATED UNITS Interiors should have an ample supply of drawers and cabinets for odds and ends. Storage should be in modular cabinets that are standardised and repeated forms for manufacturing efficiency and economy.
MINIMALIST DECORATION Walls should be a blank canvas to hang well-selected pictures and to provide a backdrop to sculptures and other choice decorative objects.
Furniture should be practical instead of decorative. It should be light and flexible in order to move it, store it, stack it and nest it. Plus, simple lines and thinner forms increase the sense of airiness, spaciousness and fluidity in a room.
BEAUTY IN MATERIALS Beauty should come from architectural unity, proportion and industry. Indeed, the inherent characteristics of materials — the sheen of chrome, the polish of concrete, the patina of leather — bring beauty to a space.
VENTILATION AND NATURAL LIGHT Large windows provide abundant light, and factory window frames with adaptable panes reduce manufacturing costs — as well as boost ventilation.
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