Le Corbusier Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, later known as Le Corbusier, was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town in the Swiss Jura. Raised amid the precision crafts and rhythms of a specialized industry, he absorbed an early education in drawing and applied arts that emphasized both discipline and invention. At the local art school he studied under Charles L'Eplattenier, a teacher who redirected the young student from decorative crafts toward architecture, persuading him to think in terms of volume, light, and ordered space. By his late teens he was sketching mountain farmhouses and designing small villas, building a foundation of close observation that would later inform his radical modernist proposals.

Education and Apprenticeships
Seeking a broader horizon, Jeanneret undertook extensive study tours across Europe. A pivotal journey in 1911, often called the Voyage d'Orient, carried him through the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece, where the Parthenon and vernacular settlements offered enduring lessons in proportion, tectonics, and urban form. He apprenticed in Paris with Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, and in Berlin with Peter Behrens, whose office was a crucible of modern design that also employed Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. These experiences linked engineering discipline with architectural imagination and exposed him to the emerging industrial culture transforming Europe.

Becoming Le Corbusier
After World War I he settled in Paris, adopting the pen name Le Corbusier as he began writing and publishing polemical essays. With the painter Amedee Ozenfant he founded the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and advanced Purism, a post-cubist aesthetic that favored clarity, proportion, and the precise assembly of forms. His manifesto Vers une Architecture (1923) argued for an architecture aligned with the age of the machine, famously comparing the house to a machine for living. He articulated the Five Points of a New Architecture, pilotis, free plan, free facade, ribbon windows, and roof garden, and conceived the Dom-ino structural system, a concrete frame that separated structure from enclosure to enable open, flexible plans.

Collaborators and Studio
Le Corbusier formed a long and productive partnership with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Together they designed buildings, furniture, and urban plans, later inviting Charlotte Perriand to lead the furniture program. Their tubular steel chairs and chaises, developed through meticulous prototyping, became icons of modern interior design. Over the years his circle included the historian Sigfried Giedion, an advocate who chronicled modernism; the planner Cornelis van Eesteren, a key ally in urban debates; and patrons such as Raoul La Roche, Pierre and Eugenie Savoye, and the industrialist Henry Fruges.

Architectural Principles and Key Works
The early Paris years produced emblematic houses that tested his principles. The Maison La Roche-Jeanneret (1923-25) combined a gallery for La Roche's art collection with domestic spaces, using ramps, double-height volumes, and ribbon windows to choreograph movement and light. The Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925) presented standardized dwelling units and built-in furniture as components of a rational urban future. The experimental neighborhood at Pessac for Henry Fruges explored mass housing in colorful concrete volumes. The Villa Savoye (1928-31) at Poissy distilled his Five Points into a serene promenade architecturale, where a ramp links ground to roof garden through a sequence of framed views.

He contributed to the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart (1927), an international showcase of modern housing, and collaborated with the Russian architect Nikolai Kolli on the Centrosoyuz building in Moscow, testing brise-soleil and deep-section facades suited to climate and office organization. After the war he built the first Unite d'Habitation in Marseille (1947-52), a vertical neighborhood with duplex apartments, internal streets, a rooftop terrace, and communal amenities, an experiment replicated, with variations, in Nantes-Reze, Berlin, Briey, and Firminy.

Urbanism and CIAM
Le Corbusier was central to the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), where, alongside Sigfried Giedion and colleagues such as Cornelis van Eesteren, he argued for functional zoning, open space, and high-density living as means to address industrial-era cities. His Plan Voisin for Paris (1925) and later the Radiant City proposed towers in parkland and an emphasis on sunlight, greenery, and efficient circulation. The Athens Charter synthesized many of these ideas, influencing postwar planning across continents, even as critics later challenged the social consequences of such large-scale visions.

Postwar Projects and Chandigarh
After 1945 his work diversified in material and expression. The pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-55) used thick walls and sculptural roofs to gather light in a meditative interior, departing from the planar language of his interwar houses. The Dominican monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette near Lyon (1953-60) explored rough concrete surfaces, modular order, and acoustics for prayer and study. In the United States he designed the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard (1961-63), his only building there, threading a sinuous ramp through a brise-soleil facade to connect campus paths.

His most extensive urban commission was Chandigarh, a new capital for the Indian state of Punjab. Invited after an earlier plan by Albert Mayer was set aside, he worked under the political sponsorship of Jawaharlal Nehru and in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry, as well as Indian colleagues including M. N. Sharma. He designed the Capitol Complex, High Court, Secretariat, and Assembly, together with sector layouts, housing types, and landscape elements, adapting his theories to climate, culture, and governance.

Art, Writing, and The Modulor
Painting remained a constant discipline; with Amedee Ozenfant he refined a visual language that paralleled his architectural search for order. He published Urbanisme, La Ville Radieuse, and later Le Modulor (1950) and Modulor 2 (1955), books that systematized a proportional canon derived from the human body, the golden section, and a Fibonacci-like sequence. He applied brise-soleil, color, and murals to mediate climate and scale. His intervention of murals at Eileen Gray's house E-1027 near Cap Martin, however, drew criticism and has continued to spark debate about authorship and respect within the modernist milieu.

Personal Life
Le Corbusier married Yvonne Gallis in 1930, and their home life in Paris intertwined with an intense studio practice. His circle was professional and cosmopolitan, anchored by Pierre Jeanneret and expanded by collaborators, clients, and students who visited his studio and sites. Though often portrayed as austere, he cultivated friendships across the arts and maintained correspondence that reveals a complex mix of dogged conviction and occasional self-doubt.

Later Years and Legacy
Recognized internationally, he received the Royal Gold Medal from the RIBA in 1953 and the AIA Gold Medal in 1961. He died in 1965 while swimming at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Mediterranean coast, not far from sites where he had drawn, built, and vacationed. After his death, the Fondation Le Corbusier was established to steward his archive and legacy. In 2016 a transnational group of his buildings was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, affirming the breadth of his contributions.

Le Corbusier's influence extends from individual houses to city-scale visions, from furniture to philosophical treatises. Through alliances with figures such as Auguste Perret, Peter Behrens, Amedee Ozenfant, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand, Sigfried Giedion, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry, and through dialogue with political patrons like Jawaharlal Nehru and clients including the Savoye and La Roche families, he helped set the terms of modern architecture. His work remains both a touchstone and a provocation, admired for its clarity and audacity, scrutinized for its social implications, ensuring that the conversation around his ideas continues.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Le, under the main topics: Art - Deep - Life.

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