Le Corbusier

Early Years

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, he seemed destined for a career in watch-case engraving before developing an interest in architecture. The first house he built was the Villa Fallet (1907), which reflected his hometown vernacular with its steep roof and ornamented façade. Between 1908 and 1911, however, Jeanneret was apprenticed to Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens, early pioneers of reinforced concrete construction and industrial design.

He traveled extensively around Europe and the near East, where the Hagia Sophia and Parthenon had a profound effect on him. It was also around [Page 445]this time that he read the works of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, in particular Ornament and Crime (1908). These influences inspired Jeanneret to devise an architectural style that eschewed decoration and combined the latest building technologies with the monumentality of ancient architecture.

During World War I, Jeanneret attempted to patent a new housing prototype for postwar reconstruction. The Dom-Ino had six columns, a staircase, and three slabs for the ground, first floor, and roof. This design encapsulated the theory that would characterize his architectural work in the 1920s, the Five Points of a New Architecture (1926): pilotis, open plan, free façade, strip windows, roof garden.

Moving to Paris in 1917, Jeanneret met the painter Amédée Ozenfant, and together, they published Après le Cubisme (1918), the founding manifesto of the Purist movement. Their Purist still lifes had interlocking forms spread calmly across the canvas, often in gentle pastel colors, unlike the swirling, fragmented forms of Cubist still lifes. This pictorial orderliness was part of a more general return to order that Ozenfant and Jeanneret hoped to see in Europe after the upheavals of the war.

Architecture and town planning were part of the plan and these were discussed in the Purist journal, L'Esprit Nouveau. Le Corbusier was invented as a pseudonym for Jeanneret when writing about these topics, but soon the name stuck, and his articles were collected into books that define the Modern movement, including Vers une Architecture (1923) and Urbanisme (1924).

A Theory of Architecture

Vers une Architecture outlined Le Corbusier's theory of architecture as the sculptural arrangement of volumes under light, which he derived from his analysis of the Parthenon. It discussed also the architectural promenade, where the complexities of space are revealed as one passes through them in a carefully orchestrated sequence. These principles were put into practice in a series of elegant homes, including the Villa La Roche-Jeanneret (Paris, 1925) and the Villa Savoye (Poissy, 1929).

Urbanisme introduced Le Corbusier's theory of town planning. It focused on his designs for the Ville Contemporaine, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne of 1922. The centerpiece of this “city for two million inhabitants” was a transport hub complete with airport and surrounded by 24 skyscrapers, each of them 60 stories high, clad in glass and cruciform in plan. Further out were residential blocks arranged according to set-back and perimeter-block patterns. Each residence was soundproof and had a double-height living room and an internal garden, and each block enjoyed catering and cleaning services as well as allotments and sports facilities. The buildings were to be lifted up on pilotis, and the different grades of vehicular traffic were segregated, some running underground. This allowed the entire ground surface of the city to be cultivated into a vast park.

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