Le Corbusier

Swiss architect

• Born: October 6, 1887
• Birthplace: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
• Died: August 27, 1965
• Place of death: Cap Martin, France

Le Corbusier was one of the most creative, bold, and controversial architects of the twentieth century. He also wrote passionately and powerfully about the nature and configuration of the modern city, thereby making him a pioneer in the field of urban planning.

Early Life

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret adopted the somewhat theatrical pseudonym Le Corbusier (leh kahr-bew-zyay), the family name of one of his ancestors from the south of France, in his adult life. The town of La Chaux-de-Fonds was associated with the watch-making industry, which provided employment for his parents, who engraved watch-cases. On leaving elementary school at age thirteen, he was admitted to the local art school, which was actually a technical school preparing students for manual vocations. There he learned engraving, chiseling, and goldsmith work, and this type of hands-on experience proved valuable later in his career. One of his teachers was Charles L’Éplattenier, who encouraged him in the direction of architecture and advised him to travel extensively. In 1906, he began his so-called knapsack period, traveling through Central Europe, the Balkans, and along the Mediterranean, visiting famous cities, sites, and buildings, constantly sketching or jotting down notes. Occasionally, his travels were interrupted for extensive periods when he would work in some of the great ateliers or studios of Europe, including the Paris studio of Auguste Perret, an engineer-architect who had pioneered in the use of reinforced concrete, and the Berlin studio of Peter Behrens, a famous architect of industrial design. It was during these travels, especially along the Mediterranean, that he learned much about light, nature, and form.

By the end of World War I, Le Corbusier was once again in Paris, eventually becoming a French citizen in 1930. Perret introduced him to Amédée Ozenfant, the Purist painter, who in turn encouraged Le Corbusier to paint. Over his lifetime, Le Corbusier produced perhaps as many as three hundred canvases, and undoubtedly this activity helped to crystallize some of his views on architecture. In 1920, the two men, along with Paul Dermée, founded an avant-garde journal, L’Esprit nouveau . It was a stimulating venture, with articles on the cutting edge of not only architecture but also art, technology, and the social sciences. It reflected the infatuation that many of the intellects of the period had with machinery and science. Architects such as Le Corbusier were enthusiastic about how the new technologies opened up rich possibilities for their craft, particularly in regard to prefabrication, modular construction, and mass production. Modernity and the new machine civilization held no terrors for him.

Le Corbusier’s early life, then, was essentially one of self-education. Neither the product of a famous university nor a celebrated mentor, he learned from a variety of sources his teachers, his travels, his work in the great ateliers of Europe as well as from friends and colleagues. Now his own creativity and boldness of vision would begin to assert themselves.

Life’s Work

What distinguishes Le Corbusier from many great architects is that he never isolated architecture from urban planning and housing, but regarded them as all part of the same challenge. Indeed, his views on the city and urban planning appear to have matured more quickly than those on architecture. At the Salon d’Automne in 1922, he unveiled his plan for a “Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants,” and in 1925, he presented his famous “Voisin Plan” for Paris, a project that would have placed several skyscrapers on the Right Bank of that city. Throughout his career, he was constantly producing plans for the renewal of cities, including Barcelona, Algiers, Stockholm, Antwerp, Berlin, and São Paulo. His views on the subject were further enunciated in a series of books, including Urbanisme (1924; The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning , 1929) and Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches: Voyage au pays des timides (1937; When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People , 1947), the latter written after a celebrated trip to the United States.

By the mid-1930’s, then, Le Corbusier’s views on the city were fairly well established. He rejected the linear city, with its haphazard growth, urban sprawl, and distant suburbs, which collectively constituted a great waste of space, raw materials, and commuter traveling time. Instead, he proposed that cities be built upward, the so-called vertical city. These cities would be characterized by office skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings. If people could work and live under densely populated circumstances, a vast amount of space would be liberated for parks, gardens, and recreational purposes. There would be a complete separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the latter running below ground level or on elevated freeways. Thus, the vertical city would enable the masses, not only the few, to live in dignity amid light, space, and nature.

Simultaneously, Le Corbusier’s views on architecture were advancing, as can be seen in his epoch-making work Vers une architecture (1923; Towards a New Architecture , 1927). By the late 1920’s, however, he had built comparatively little, mostly villas and mansions. It is a tribute to his reputation, then, that when he entered the competition to construct a new palace for the League of Nations at Geneva, his entry was seriously considered but apparently rejected only on a technicality. Shortly afterward he received several important commissions. In 1928, he began work on one of the most famous houses in architectural history, the Villa Savoye, Poissy, France; the house, essentially a white square cube of reinforced concrete and glass resting on stilts, reflected his commitment to the cubist and Purist traditions. About the same time, he received a commission to build the Centrosoyus in Moscow, a building eventually used by the Soviet Ministry for Light Industry. Between 1930 and 1932, he constructed the Swiss Pavilion, University City, Paris. It is a rectangular “slab-block” dormitory, elevated and resting on stilts (pilotis), made of reinforced concrete, with a flat roof and southern facade made almost entirely of glass. The purpose of the pilotis was to lift the structure off the ground, thus freeing space for pedestrians, foliage, and sun. He also was an important consultant on the ministry of education and health building, started in 1936, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This building featured one of his most notable innovations, the sun-break (brise-soleil), concrete fins or panels attached to the exterior facade alongside windows. Their positioning was closely coordinated with the trajectory of the sun on the horizon, the purpose being to minimize the heat and glare of the sun in summer and maximize it in winter.

After World War II, Le Corbusier resumed his career with an astounding burst of energy and creativity. He received a commission from the French ministry of reconstruction to build his famous complex in Marseilles, the Unité d’Habitation (1946-1952). Perhaps this project, more than any other, encapsulates the theories and innovations of Le Corbusier. It is a high-rise apartment complex, built on the now familiar pilotis. The building’s reinforced concrete is not simply exposed but flaunted and celebrated. Windows run across much of the facade, leaving few dark or gloomy interior spaces. It has a flat roof, on which is located a garden and leisure complex, including a pool, a children’s play area, and a three-hundred-meter running track. To relieve the monotony of the facade, he introduced a polychromatic scheme, coloring the panels that separated the balcony apartments with vivid pastels. Each apartment within the building contains two levels, the “work areas,” such as the kitchen, bath, and bedrooms, being half as high as the spacious living room fronting the balcony. Included in the building were the necessary shops and services. What Le Corbusier did, in effect, was to tilt the linear city into a vertical one. In other words, at the bottom and top of the building are the green spaces and recreational areas, with “the city” in between. Scarcely any wonder then that Le Corbusier and his disciples referred to elevator shafts and stair wells as “vertical streets.” Other Unités d’Habitation were constructed in France at Rezé-les-Nantes, Briey-en-Forět, and Firminy, and in Berlin as well.

One of the most expansive projects of Le Corbusier’s career involved the creation of an entirely new city for the capital of the Punjab, at Chandigarh, India. Begun in 1951, the entire city was planned, special emphasis given to lovely pools and pedestrian walks. Le Corbusier was deeply involved in the construction of several governmental buildings, including the High Court, the Secretariat, and the Legislative Assembly Hall. It was an extraordinary achievement for a man who by 1957 had reached his seventieth birthday. His touch of genius is particularly noticeable in the remarkable Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950-1955) at Ronchamp, France. Many critics view this building as one of his greatest works. While the familiar concrete and geometric shapes are present, there is a plasticity and rhythm to this building not seen in his other works. The basic shape is that of a prow of a ship, and the roof sweeps upward in a fluid, graceful, almost lyrical fashion. Ironically, Le Corbusier built little in the very country most closely associated with modernity and progress, the United States. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, completed in 1963, stands as his only work of consequence in the United States.

In addition to his professional accomplishments, he was forced for much of his life to act as a vigorous advocate and polemicist for his views. While close friends experienced his warmth and friendship, his public posture was often perceived as aggressive, arrogant, and argumentative. In defense of Le Corbusier’s annoying didacticism, it must be said that, since his opinions and works were so controversial, he was often forced by his opponents to defend his views with a belligerence and hyperbole that the less talented were spared. Given the vigor and dynamism of his mind and personality, it is something of a blessing that his death came swiftly. He died while swimming near his cabin home on the French Riviera at Cap Martin on August 27, 1965.

Significance

Le Corbusier’s towering reputation is well deserved. He coined much of the modern architectural vocabulary. He demonstrated the rich potential of certain raw materials, such as concrete and stone, especially if their true, raw, primitive qualities were exposed. He pioneered many techniques, or took existing ones and used them with flair and imagination. He left behind not only a rich legacy of architecture but also an integrated vision concerning the nature of the city and the relationship of architecture to it.

Le Corbusier has had his critics, however, and they claim that his dreams have turned into urban nightmares. He is accused, fairly or not, of being godfather to a school of architecture that is characterized by huge, ugly, concrete high-rises, often situated amid a hostile environment of vast empty windswept spaces. His functionalism was said to be the enemy of beauty and comfort and that in the final analysis he never really did understand people and their needs, hopes, and aspirations when it came to city living. His defenders, in turn, claim that much of what was built in his name is only a cruel parody of what he intended. Undoubtedly, controversy will always swirl about his reputation, but none will deny his genius and the immense influence that he exerted on the course and shape of modern architecture.

Bibliography

Baltanás, José. Walking Through Le Corbusier: A Tour of His Masterworks. Translated from the Spanish by Matthew Clarke. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Provides an overview of a dozen of Le Corbusier’s projects, with numerous photographs, drawings, and other illustrations of each building.

Besset, Maurice. Who Was Le Corbusier? Translated by Robin Kemball. Geneva: Skira, 1968. A useful introduction into the life, ideas, and works of Le Corbusier. The book is well indexed and heavily illustrated, contains photos of every building that he designed, and has a valuable synoptic table that chronologically compares events in Le Corbusier’s life to other events transpiring in the larger world of art and architecture.

Blake, Peter. The Master Builders. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. Written by an architect and former editor of Architectural Forum, this book is in effect a lengthy essay intended for the more mature student. While a trifle adulatory, it is particularly good at placing Le Corbusier’s work within the larger context of architectural trends in the modern epoch. The book also contains essays of similar length on Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Choay, François. Le Corbusier. New York: George Braziller, 1960. Written while Le Corbusier was still alive and active, the book has an excellent though brief summary of his life and work up to that point. The book’s real strength is the eighty-seven carefully selected plates that are skillfully coordinated with the text. Strongly recommended for the novice who wants a quick visual introduction to Le Corbusier’s style.

Frampton, Kenneth. Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Century. New York: H. N. Abrams, 2002. Documents the design and construction of seventeen of Le Corbusier’s buildings, including numerous photographs and other illustrations for each structure.

Jencks, Charles. Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture. New York: Monacelli Press, 2000. Jencks, an architect and historian, provides a critical biography, in which he documents Le Corbusier’s development as an architect and innovator.

Le Corbusier. The Ideas of Le Corbusier on Architecture and Urban Planning. Edited by Jacques Guiton. Translated by Margaret Guiton. New York: George Braziller, 1981. This book makes an outstanding contribution, collecting the ideas of Le Corbusier from a variety of his books and articles and organizing them into logical topics and categories.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Le Corbusier. Edited by Willy Boesiger. New York: Praeger, 1972. A condensed edition of Boesiger’s multivolumed collected works of Le Corbusier, it was done at the request of Le Corbusier, who wanted an inexpensive survey of his work made available to poor students.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Le Corbusier: Creation Is a Patient Search. Introduction by Maurice Jardot. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960. Translated by James Palmes. While the narrative and captions are a trifle eccentric and offer no systematic biographical information, this book contains an exceptional collection of plates covering all aspects of Le Corbusier’s work. Within the covers of this one volume are assembled his sketches, drawings, paintings, models, and urban plans, as well as first-rate photographs of the exteriors and interiors of his most famous buildings.