Le Corbusier

• 1. Introduction

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  Le Corbusier insisted that "a house is a machine to live in," a maxim that would unsettle architects for a century. The man who wrote it was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker's son with no formal training as an architect. He shared that lack of training with two contemporaries, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, yet he became one of the pioneers of what we now call modern architecture. Over a five-decade career he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and the Americas. He also remains a controversial figure, his name shadowed by alleged ties to fascism, antisemitism, eugenics, and the dictator Benito Mussolini. How did a boy who claimed "a horror of architecture and architects" come to reshape how cities house their people? And why, sixty years after his death, do his concrete towers still divide opinion? The answers run from a Swiss watch valley to the government buildings of a new Indian capital.

• 2. The Watch Valley

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  La Chaux-de-Fonds sat in the Neuchatel canton, 5 km across the border from France, at the heart of the Watch Valley. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born there on the 6th of October 1887 to French-speaking Swiss parents. His father enameled boxes and watches, his mother taught piano, and his elder brother Albert played the violin as an amateur. The town's culture carried the influence of the Loge L'Amitie, a Masonic lodge whose symbols were the right angle for rectitude and the compass for exactitude. Le Corbusier later called these "my guide, my choice," describing them as ideas ingrained like entries from a catechism. The boy was drawn first to the visual arts, not to buildings. At fifteen he entered the municipal art school, which taught the applied arts tied to watchmaking. Three years later he joined a higher course of decoration founded by the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. It was L'Eplattenier, he said, who made him choose architecture against his own resistance: "I was sixteen, I accepted the verdict and I obeyed." His architecture teacher, Rene Chapallaz, shaped his earliest house designs, including a chalet for the engraver Louis Fallet built in 1905.

• 3. A Self-Taught Education

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  In September 1907, Jeanneret made his first trip outside Switzerland, going to Italy and then traveling through Budapest to Vienna, where he met Gustav Klimt. In Florence he visited the Charterhouse at Galluzzo, which left a lifelong impression. He wrote that he would have liked to live in one of its cells, calling it the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, a terrestrial paradise. That monastery would echo in his work decades later. In Paris he spent 14 months between 1908 and 1910 as a draftsman for Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete in residential construction. Between October 1910 and March 1911 he worked four months in Germany for Peter Behrens, where Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were also learning. In 1911 he traveled five months through the Balkans, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, with his friend August Klipstein. He filled nearly 80 sketchbooks, many with renderings of the Parthenon. That journey supplied material for many of his books and became the subject of his last, Le Voyage d'Orient. In 1912 he built the Jeanneret-Perret house for his parents on a forested hillside, its white walls and flat horizontal planes a sharp break from the alpine slopes around it.

• 4. Concrete And The Open Plan

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  In December 1914 Le Corbusier began a serious study of reinforced concrete with the engineer Max Dubois. "Reinforced concrete provided me with incredible resources," he later wrote, "and variety, and a passionate plasticity." This study produced the Dom-Ino House of 1914 to 1915, an open floor plan of three concrete slabs held up by six thin columns, with a single stairway. The system was meant to supply temporary homes after World War I, producing only slabs, columns, and stairways while residents built their own exterior walls. He described it in his patent as a juxtaposable system of construction allowing an infinite number of plans. Because the structure no longer had to appear on the outside, the interior could be arranged any way the architect liked. In August 1916 he received his largest commission yet, a villa for the Swiss watchmaker Anatole Schwob. He built its structure from reinforced concrete filled with brick, centered on a large concrete box with a chandelier hall. His ambitions collided with the client's budget, and Schwob went to court to deny him access to the site and the right to claim authorship. Le Corbusier shot back: "Whether you like it or not, my presence is inscribed in every corner of your house."

• 5. Purism And A New Name

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  In 1918 Le Corbusier met the Cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant, in whom he recognized a kindred spirit. The two rejected Cubism as irrational and romantic, published a joint manifesto, Apres le Cubisme, and founded a movement they called Purism. They began writing for a journal, L'Esprit Nouveau. In its first issue, in 1920, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name Lecorbesier, reflecting his belief that anyone could reinvent themselves. The single name was in vogue among Paris artists of the era. In 1922 he and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret opened a studio at 35 rue de Sevres and set up an architectural practice together. From 1927 to 1937 they worked alongside Charlotte Perriand. When the trio's group stand was refused for the 1929 Decorative Artists Exhibition, they resigned and founded the Union of Modern Artists. His theory advanced into house models such as the Maison Citrohan, named for the Citroen automaker. He intended homes to be consumed like other commercial products, built with industrial methods, furnished with movable tubular metal frames and bare bulbs against white interior walls.

• 6. War On Decoration

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  "Modern decorative art has no decoration," Le Corbusier declared, repeating the line throughout his 1925 book L'art decoratif d'aujourd'hui. He called the desire to decorate everything a false spirit and an abominable small perversion, and pronounced the religion of beautiful materials in its final death agony. He cited the 1912 book by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, and quoted Loos: "The more a people are cultivated, the more decor disappears." He condemned the exotic styles at the 1925 Exposition drawn from China, Japan, India, and Persia, and mocked the revival of Louis Philippe and Louis XVI forms. He dreamed instead of working in a modern factory office, rectangular and well-lit, painted in white Ripolin. That same year he built the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion for the Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the event that later gave Art Deco its name. Forbidden to cut down trees on his forested plot, he built the pavilion around a tree emerging through a hole in the roof. The organizers were so furious they erected a fence to hide it, and he appealed to the Ministry of Fine Arts to have it removed. Inside he displayed his Plan Voisin, his scheme to bulldoze part of central Paris for sixty-story cruciform towers. The historian Bevis Hillier later borrowed his shorthand, Arts Deco, into the name we now use for the style.

• 7. The Five Points And The Radiant City

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  Villa Savoye, built between 1928 and 1931 at Poissy, became an icon of modernist architecture. The elegant white box stands on slender pylons, wrapped in a horizontal band of windows, with a gentle ramp leading visitors up toward a suspended garden and a roof terrace. It summed up the five points Le Corbusier set out in Les cinq points de l'architecture moderne, published in 1927 with Pierre Jeanneret. The points were the pilotis raising the building on concrete pylons, the roof terrace replacing the sloping roof, the free plan with columns instead of load-bearing walls, the ribbon window running the length of the house, and the free facade made light or entirely of glass. The house had problems; its roof persistently leaked. His urban thinking grew bolder in parallel. At the 1922 Salon d'Automne he presented the Ville Contemporaine, a city for three million in sixty-story towers and parkland. In 1935 he published La Ville radieuse, the Radiant City, which assigned housing by family size rather than economic position. He drew on the 19th-century utopians Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, and the unite bore a resemblance to Fourier's phalanstery. In 1928 he helped found the Congres International d'Architecture Moderne, whose first meeting was held on Lake Leman from the 26th to the 28th of June. Its delegates later drafted the Athens Charter aboard a ship between Marseille and Athens, published in 1943.

• 8. Marseille And Chandigarh

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  When World War II ended, Le Corbusier was nearly sixty and had not had a single project realized in ten years. He had spent part of the war at Vichy, served briefly as a technical adviser at Alexis Carrel's eugenics foundation, and resigned on the 20th of April 1944. His breakthrough came through Raoul Dautry, the new Minister of Reconstruction, who funded the Unite d'Habitation in heavily damaged Marseille. He revived his pre-war name Cite Radieuse for it, fitting 337 duplex apartment modules into a concrete framework like bottles into a bottle rack, housing 1,600 people. A wide interior street ran the length of every third floor with shops, a nursery school, and a running track on the roof. He said the idea came from his visits to the Florence Charterhouse, where he learned that standardization led to perfection. In 1952 he was made a Commander of the Legion d'Honneur in a ceremony on the building's roof. His largest project followed in India. In 1950 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited him to design Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab and Haryana, working with Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Pierre Jeanneret, who moved to India to supervise the work. He used raw concrete showing the marks of its forms, the Modulor for human scale, and his open hand symbol, "open to give and to receive." The High Court of Justice, begun in 1951, was finished in 1956, and the Palace of Assembly rose between 1952 and 1961. Le Corbusier died of a heart attack at age 77 in 1965 after swimming on the French Riviera. In 2016, seventeen of his projects across seven countries were inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.