Le Corbusier

Biography

In the first issue of the journal L’Esprit Nouveau in 1920, the articles on architecture were signed “Le Corbusier”. It was the first time thirty-two-year-old Charles-Édouard Jeanneret had called himself that, altering the surname of an ancestor on his mother’s side, Lecorbésier. Readers were unlikely to know that the author had so far built mostly villas in the Swiss provinces.

He was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the canton of Neuchâtel. His father enamelled watch dials and his mother taught music; his elder brother Albert became a musician. In 1900 the boy entered the local school of applied arts to study engraving, but his teacher Charles L’Eplattenier steered him away from the craft towards painting and architecture. In 1905, with two fellow students and under the supervision of the architect René Chapallaz, he built the Villa Fallet for the engraver Louis Fallet: a large chalet with a steep roof and a geometric pattern on the façade. It was his first building. He spent the money it earned on travel. From 1907 Jeanneret travelled through northern Italy, Budapest and Vienna, where he spent several months, and at Galluzzo near Florence he saw a Carthusian monastery that he remembered all his life. In 1908–1910 he worked as a draughtsman in the Paris office of Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete. He spent the winter of 1910–1911 in Peter Behrens’s studio near Berlin, where Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were working at the same time. In 1911, with his friend the art historian August Klipstein, he spent five months travelling through the Balkans, Turkey and Greece and brought back almost eighty sketchbooks; he later referred to the Acropolis in “Towards an Architecture”.

In 1912 he built the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, the “White House”, for his parents. It proved so expensive that the family was soon forced to sell it. In 1914, with the engineer Max Dubois, he patented the Dom-Ino system: a reinforced-concrete frame of slabs and slender columns within which walls could be placed freely. The villa for the watchmaker Anatole Schwob (1916–1918) ended in a quarrel and a lawsuit with the client; Jeanneret was proud of it all the same and printed photographs of it in his books.

In 1917 he moved to Paris. There were almost no commissions, and he ran a small factory producing building materials. In 1918 he met the painter Amédée Ozenfant; together they issued the manifesto “After Cubism” and founded Purism, in which an object is reduced to simple geometric forms. In the mornings he painted still lifes of bottles and glasses; after lunch he worked on architecture. They published L’Esprit Nouveau from 1920, and the articles from it made up the book “Towards an Architecture” (1923), with its formula “a house is a machine to live in”.

In 1922, with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, he opened an office at 35 rue de Sèvres. There they designed the Villa La Roche, the Villa Stein and the Villa Savoye in Poissy. At the Paris exhibition of 1925 the organisers screened the L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion behind a fence, and the fence was taken down only on the order of the ministry. The Plan Voisin was shown there too, a proposal to demolish a large part of central Paris in favour of towers set in parkland. The project was condemned and never carried out.

He took part in founding the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, CIAM, the international congresses of modern architects (1928), and in 1930 he himself took French citizenship. In Moscow the Tsentrosoyuz building, the headquarters of the Soviet trade-union cooperatives, was built to his design (1928–1935), while in the competition for the Palace of the Soviets (1931) his project did not win. In 1940, during the occupation, he moved briefly to Vichy and unsuccessfully offered his services to the government; later researchers, among them the authors of books published in 2015, described his links with right-wing circles in detail.

After the war everything changed. The Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (1947–1952), with 337 apartments along with shops and a nursery school, brought him commissions and the rank of Commander of the Légion d’Honneur. He took part in designing the United Nations headquarters in New York, began planning Chandigarh, the new capital of the state of Punjab, in 1950, and built the buildings of its Capitol. In 1950–1955 he built the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, and then the monastery of La Tourette. His raw concrete showing the marks of the formwork led to the term “Brutalism”. His Modulor (1948), a system of proportions based on the height of a man, never entered building practice.

Le Corbusier died on 27 August 1965 while swimming off Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near his small summer cabin. The farewell ceremony took place on 1 September in the Louvre, led by the Minister of Culture, André Malraux.

He was buried beside his wife in the cemetery at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.