Architecture · Modernist

Le Corbusier

1887–1965 · Swiss-French

International Style, then béton brut; CIAM and the Athens Charter

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, Le Corbusier was the most influential and most argued-over architect of the twentieth century: a painter, polemicist, urbanist and designer as well as a builder. He codified modernism in the five points of a new architecture, devised the Modulor proportional system, planned the Indian city of Chandigarh, and in old age abandoned white purism for the rough concrete and swelling curves of Ronchamp. Seventeen of his buildings across seven countries were inscribed by UNESCO in 2016.

How to spot them

▸A white box lifted on slender columns (pilotis) with a long horizontal strip window and a roof garden
▸Later: raw board-marked concrete (béton brut), deep sun-breakers (brise-soleil), and a silhouette of curved shells
▸Quiz clue: 'a house is a machine for living in', 'the Modulor', 'Ville Radieuse', 'Plan Voisin', 'Chandigarh'
▸A stencilled Modulor man — a figure with one arm raised — cast into the concrete
▸He was a painter too, founding Purism with Amédée Ozenfant and the journal L'Esprit Nouveau

Key buildings

A white box on stilts at Poissy, its ramp winding up through the house to a roof garden, the ground floor curved to a car's turning circle (1931)

Poissy, Île-de-France, France

Villa Savoye — the five points of a new architecture demonstrated in a single house

A concrete slab of flats at Marseille raised on massive legs, with an interior shopping street, a rooftop running track and a nursery (1952)

Marseille, France

The Unité d'habitation, the Cité Radieuse — a 'vertical garden city' of 337 flats in 23 configurations

A hilltop pilgrimage chapel in the Haute-Saône with a billowing upturned roof and a south wall of splayed random windows filled with coloured glass (1955)

Ronchamp, Haute-Saône, France

Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp — the sculptural turn that astonished his own followers

A Dominican priory near Lyon, its cells hung on concrete stilts over a falling slope around a cloister that does not reach the ground (1960)

Éveux, near Lyon, France

The Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette; Iannis Xenakis worked on the rhythm of its glazing

The government buildings of a new Indian state capital, including a High Court under a great parasol roof and an Open Hand monument that turns in the wind (1950s–60s)

Chandigarh, India

The Capitol Complex — Palace of Assembly, High Court, Secretariat and the Open Hand; a UNESCO site since 2016

A twisting concrete building of 1963 on a New England campus, with a ramp cutting straight through it — the only work he built in North America (1963)

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

A pair of joined Paris houses of 1925 built for a banker and art collector, one of them now the home of the foundation that bears the architect's name (1925)

Square du Docteur-Blanche, Paris

Maison La Roche–Jeanneret, for the Swiss collector Raoul La Roche

His last building, a Zurich pavilion of enamelled steel panels under a free-standing umbrella roof, completed after his death (1967)

Zürichhorn, Zurich, Switzerland

Built for the gallerist Heidi Weber; the only one of his buildings in steel and glass rather than concrete

Key ideas

The five points of a new architecture (1927): pilotis (the building lifted on columns); the free plan (partitions independent of structure); the free façade (a skin hung off the frame); the ribbon window (fenêtre en longueur); and the roof garden
'A house is a machine for living in' (une maison est une machine à habiter) — Vers une architecture, 1923
The Modulor: a proportional system published in 1948 based on a 6-ft (1.83 m) man with his arm raised to 2.26 m, splitting his height by the golden section and generating two Fibonacci-like series of dimensions
The Ville Radieuse and the Plan Voisin: tall widely spaced towers in parkland, with motorways where the old city had been — the Plan Voisin of 1925 would have flattened much of the Marais
Purism, with Amédée Ozenfant: painting stripped to simple industrial objects and pure form, promoted in the journal L'Esprit Nouveau
The Athens Charter, arising from the 1933 CIAM congress and published by him in 1943, which separated the city into zones for dwelling, work, recreation and traffic

Quick-fire facts

•Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, on 6 October 1887; he took the name Le Corbusier around 1920, adapting his maternal grandfather's name Lecorbésier
•He became a French citizen in 1930 and married the Monegasque model Yvonne Gallis the same year
•He drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on 27 August 1965; André Malraux gave the oration at his state funeral in the Louvre courtyard
•Chandigarh was commissioned as the capital of Indian Punjab after Partition left Lahore in Pakistan; he took over after the death of Matthew Nowicki, working with Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew
•He lost the competition for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva in 1927 on a technicality, and later sat on the design team for the UN Headquarters in New York, where his scheme was largely carried out by Wallace Harrison
•His furniture — the LC2 armchair, the LC4 chaise longue — was designed with Charlotte Perriand and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret
•Seventeen of his buildings in seven countries were inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as 'The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier'
•His tiny holiday hut at Roquebrune, the Cabanon, was built to Modulor dimensions and measures about 3.66 m square
•His reputation has been contested since the 2015 centenary books documenting his far-right and Vichy sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources

Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris — Fondation Le Corbusier
Kenneth Frampton — Modern Architecture: A Critical History
Le Corbusier — Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture)