Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret is an internationally known influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture and was their most able propagandist in his numerous writings. In his architecture he joined the functionalist aspirations of his generation with a strong sense of expressionism. He was the first architect to make a studied use of rough-cast concrete, a technique that satisfied his taste for asceticism and for sculptural forms.

Education and early years

Le Corbusier was born in a small town in the mountainous Swiss Jura region, since the 18th century the world's centre of precision watchmaking. All his life he was marked by the harshness of these surroundings and the puritanism of a Protestant environment. At 13 years of age, Le Corbusier left primary school to learn the enamelling and engraving of watch faces, his father's trade, at the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. There, Charles L'Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier later called his only teacher, taught him art history, drawing, and the naturalist aesthetics of Art Nouveau.

It was L'Eplattenier who decided that Le Corbusier, having completed three years of studies, should become an architect and gave him his first practice on local projects.

From 1907 to 1911, on his advice, Le Corbusier undertook a series of trips that played a decisive role in the education of this self-taught architect. During these years of travel through central Europe and the Mediterranean, he made three major architectural discoveries. The Charterhouse of Ema at Galluzzo, in Tu...

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...: an art centre for Frankfurt (1963), the Olivetti computer centre in Milan (1963), the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg (1964), and the French embassy in Brasília (1964). Le Corbusier died suddenly in 1965 while swimming. The man who had thought himself so misunderstood in his own time was given a national funeral, and in 1968 the Le Corbusier Foundation was created.

Works Consulted

The Complete Architectural Works, ed. by Willy Boesiger et al. 7 vol. (1935-65),

Le Corbusier: Last Works, ed. by Willy Boesiger (1970).

Le Corbusier, ed. by Boesiger (1972),

Le Corbusier (1960). Peter Blake,

Le Corbusier: Architecture and Form (1964). Stanislaus Von Moos,

Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (1979).Maurice Besset,

Who Was Le Corbusier? (1968). Charles Jencks,

Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture. (1974) (ed.), Russell Walden