Le Corbusier Essay Examples | Kibin Le Corbusier Essay Examples Le Corbusier's Domino house project allowed the cladding or ``skin'' of building to be free of the structure. Discuss this in relation to Le Corbusier's later work, where concrete is used as the dominant material. Charles Charles-Edouard Jeanneret Edouard Jeanerett better known as Le Corbusier. This name derived from his a... 1,297 words 'Petite maison' Le Corbusier Introduction This is the little house that Le Corbusier built in 1923-1924 in the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The house was built in terms of Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanerette. The program and plan of the house were developed. The paper will discuss the design of the house an... 1,214 words Characteristics of Literature During the 20th Century as an Intense Awareness and Reshaping of Fundamentals The literature of the 20th century has been characterized by an intense awareness and reshaping of fundamentals.

Just as the architectural vanguard led by Le Corbusier reinvented structural form, or the Cubists made new visual space the writers working with narratives renewed and heightened their concern with how time... 2,663 words An Introduction to the Life of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret an Influental Swiss Architect 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 propagand... 2,809 words An Introduction to Architecture and Urbanism through the Swiss Architect Le Carbusier Architecture is the design of individual building and garden projects that make the realm of the voids visible, memorable and ultimately, useful. Crucial to the making of any city is the clear distinction of such projects by scale and character. Firstly, the definition of buildings and landscape that builds an urban collect...

1,577 words The Life and Death of Charles Edouard Jeaneret Born Charles Edouard Jeaneret in the Swiss town of la Chaux-des-Fonds on October 6th, 1887. He was an artist at first, then he took his eventual name of Le Corbusier in 1920 when he knew his life would be that of architecture rather than strictly art. Though he was never schooled officially, he was influenced by many, this... 608 words GREAT ART - Elements of Design: MODERNISM - Le Corbusier Le Corbusier also had a long extramarital affair with Swedish-American heiress Marguerite Tjader Harris. Le Corbusier took French citizenship in 1930. Urbanism For a number of years French officials had been unsuccessful in dealing with the squalor of the growing Parisian slums, and Le Corbusier sought efficient ways to house large numbers of people in response to the urban housing crisis. He believed that his new, modern architectural forms would provide a new organizational solution that would raise the quality of life for the 'lower classes'.

His 'Immeubles Villas' (1922) was such a project that called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of the other, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms and kitchen, as well as a garden terrace. Not merely content with designs for a few housing blocks, soon Le Corbusier moved into studies for entire cities. In 1922, he presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine). The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story, cruciform skyscrapers; steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces. At the centre was a huge transportation hub, that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and at the top, an airport. He had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. Le Corbusier segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the use of the auto-mobile as a means of transportation.

As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low-story, zigzag apartment blocks (set far back from the street amid green space), housed the inhabitants. Le Corbusier hoped that politically-minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models to reorganize society. The proposed city appeared to some an audacious and compelling vision of a brave new world, and to others a frigid megalomaniacally scaled negation of the familiar urban ambient. In this new industrial spirit, Le Corbusier contributed to a new journal called 'L'Esprit Nouveau' that advocated the use of modern industrial techniques and strategies to transform society into a more efficient environment with a higher standard of living on all socio-economic levels. He forcefully argued that this transformation was necessary to avoid the spectre of revolution that would otherwise shake society. His dictum, "Architecture or Revolution," developed in his articles in this journal, became his rallying cry for the book 'Vers une Architecture' (Toward an Architecture), which comprised selected articles he contributed to 'L'Esprit Nouveau' between 1920 and 1923.

In this book, Le Corbusier followed the influence of Walter Gropius and reprinted several photographs of North American factories and grain elevators. Theoretical urban schemes continued to occupy Le Corbusier. He exhibited his "Plan Voisin," sponsored by another famous auto-mobile manufacturer, in 1925. In it, he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers from the 'Contemporary City', placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space. His scheme was met with criticism and scorn from French politicians and industrialists, although they were favourable to the ideas of Taylorism and Fordism underlying Le Corbusier designs. Nonetheless, it did provoke discussion concerning how to deal with the cramped, dirty conditions that enveloped much of the city. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in 'La Ville Radieuse' (The Radiant City) of 1935.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the 'Contemporary City' and the 'Radiant City' is that the latter abandons the class-based stratification of the former; housing is now assigned according to family size, not economic position. Some have read dark overtones into 'The Radiant City': from the "astonishingly beautiful assemblage of buildings" that was Stockholm, for example, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He dreamed of "cleaning and purging" the city, bringing "a calm and powerful architecture" — referring to steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete. Though Le Corbusier's designs for Stockholm did not succeed, later architects took his ideas and partly "destroyed" the city with them. 'La Ville Radieuse' also marks Le Corbusier's increasing dissatisfaction with capitalism and his turn to the right-wing syndicalism of Hubert Lagardelle. During the Vichy regime, Le Corbusier received a position on a planning committee and made designs for Algiers and other cities. The central government ultimately rejected his plans, and after 1942 Le Corbusier withdrew from political activity.

After World War II, Le Corbusier attempted to realize his urban planning schemes on a small scale by constructing a series of "unités" (the housing block unit of the 'Radiant City') around France. The most famous of these was the 'Unité d'Habitation of Marseilles' (1946–1952). In the 1950s, a unique opportunity to translate the 'Radiant City' on a grand scale presented itself in the construction of the Union Territory Chandigarh, the new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana and the first planned city in India. Le Corbusier designed many administration buildings including a courthouse, parliament building and a university. He also designed the general layout of the city dividing it into sectors Le Corbusier was brought on to develop the plan of Albert Mayer.

Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture It was Le Corbusier's 'Villa Savoye' (1929–1931) that most succinctly summed up his five points of architecture that he had elucidated in the journal 'L'Esprit Nouveau' and his book 'Vers une Architecture', which he had been developing throughout the 1920s. First, Le Corbusier lifted the bulk of the structure off the ground, supporting it by 'pilotis' – reinforced concrete stilts. These pilotis, in providing the structural support for the house, allowed him to elucidate his next two points: a free façade, meaning non-supporting walls that could be designed as the architect wished, and an open floor plan, meaning that the floor space was free to be configured into rooms without concern for supporting walls. The second floor of the Villa Savoye includes long strips of ribbon windows that allow unencumbered views of the large surrounding yard, and which constitute the fourth point of his system. The fifth point was the roof garden to compensate for the green area consumed by the building and replacing it on the roof.

A ramp rising from ground level to the third floor roof terrace allows for an architectural promenade through the structure. The white tubular railing recalls the industrial "ocean-liner" aesthetic that Le Corbusier much admired. As if to put an exclamation mark after Le Corbusier's homage to modern industry, the driveway around the ground floor, with its semicircular path, measures the exact turning radius of a 1927 Citroën automobile. The Modulor The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the 'Imperial system' and the 'Metric system'. It is based on the height of an English man with his arm raised. It was used as a system to set out a number of Le Corbusier's buildings and was later codified into two books.

the Golden Ratio Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man Le Corbusier developed the Modulor in the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and other attempts to discover mathematical proportions in the human body, and then to use that knowledge to improve both the appearance and function of architecture. The system is based on human measurements, the double unit, the Fibonacci numbers, and the golden ratio. Le Corbusier described it as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things." With the Modulor, Le Corbusier sought to introduce a scale of visual measures that would unite two virtually incompatible systems: the Anglo Saxon foot and inch and the French Metric system. Whilst he was intrigued by ancient civilisations who used measuring systems linked to the human body: elbow (cubit), finger (digit), thumb (inch) etc., he was troubled by the metre as a measure that was a forty-millionth part of the meridian of the earth.

In 1943, in response to the French National Organisation for Standardisation's (AFNOR) requirement for standardising all the objects involved in the construction process, Le Corbusier asked an apprentice to consider a scale based upon a man with his arm raised to 2.20m in height. The result, in August 1943 was the first graphical representation of the derivation of the scale. This was refined after a visit to the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences in Sorbonne on 7 February 1945 which resulted in the inclusion of a golden section into the representation. Whilst initially the Modulor Man's height was based on a French man's height of 1.75 metres (5.7 ft) it was changed to 1.83 m in 1946 because "in English detective novels, the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always six feet tall !" The dimensions were refined to give round numbers and the overall height of the raised arm was set at 2.262m.

Graphic Representation The graphic representation of the Modulor, a stylised human figure with one arm raised, stands next to two vertical measurements, a red series based on the figure's navel height (1.08m in the original version, 1.13m in the revised version) then segmented according to Phi, and a blue series based on the figure's entire height, double the navel height (2.16m in the original version, 2.26m in the revised), segmented similarly. A spiral, graphically developed between the red and blue segments, seems to mimic the volume of the human figure. Furniture Corbusier said: "Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois". Le Corbusier began experimenting with furniture design in 1928 after inviting the architect, Charlotte Perriand, to join his studio. His cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, also collaborated on many of the designs. Before the arrival of Perriand, Le Corbusier relied on ready-made furniture to furnish his projects, such as the simple pieces manufactured by Thonet, the company that manufactured his designs in the 1930s.

In 1928, Le Corbusier and Perriand began to put the expectations for furniture Le Corbusier outlined in his 1925 book L'Art Décoratif d'aujourd'hui into practice. In the book he defined three different furniture types: type-needs, type-furniture, and human-limb objects. He defined human-limb objects as: "Extensions of our limbs and adapted to human functions that are type-needs and type-functions, therefore type-objects and type-furniture. The human-limb object is a docile servant. A good servant is discreet and self-effacing in order to leave his master free. Certainly, works of art are tools, beautiful tools. And long live the good taste manifested by choice, subtlety, proportion, and harmony". The first results of the collaboration were three chrome-plated tubular steel chairs designed for two of his projects, The Maison la Roche in Paris and a pavilion for Barbara and Henry Church. The line of furniture was expanded for Le Corbusier's 1929 Salon d'Automne installation, 'Equipment for the Home'.

The most famous of these chairs are the now-iconic LC-1, LC-2, LC-3, and LC-4, originally titled "Basculant" (LC-1), "Fauteuil grand confort, petit modèle" (LC-2, "great comfort sofa, small model"), "Fauteuil grand confort, grand modèle" (LC-3, "great comfort sofa, large model"), and "Chaise longue" (LC-4, "Long chair").[11] The LC-2 and LC-3 are more colloquially referred to as the petit confort and grand confort (abbreviation of full title, and due to respective sizes). Influence Le Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). One of the first to realize how the auto-mobile would change human agglomerations, Le Corbusier described the city of the future as consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier's theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in Europe and the United States.

For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier criticized any effort at ornamentation. The large spartan structures in cities, but not 'of' cities, have been widely criticized for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians. Throughout the years, many architects worked for Le Corbusier in his studio, and a number of them became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa's city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier's thinking also had profound effects on the philosophy of city planning and architecture in the Soviet Union, particularly in the Constructivist era. Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by problems he saw in industrial cities at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape (?).

He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions, and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries. Le Corbusier also harmonized and lent credence to the idea of space as a set of destinations which mankind moved between, more or less continuously. He was therefore able to give credence and credibility to the auto-mobile (as a transporter); and most importantly to free-ways in urban spaces. His philosophies were useful to urban real estate development interests in the American Post World War II period because they justified and lent architectural and intellectual support to the desire to destroy traditional urban space for high density high profit urban concentration, both commercial and residential. Le Corbusier’s ideas also sanctioned further destruction of traditional urban spaces to build freeways that connected this new urbanism to low density, low cost (and highly profitable), suburban and rural locales which were free to be developed as middle class single-family (dormitory) housing.

Notably missing from this scheme of movement were connectivity between isolated urban villages created for lower-middle and working classes and other destination points in Le Corbusier's plan: suburban and rural areas, and urban commercial centres This was because as designed, the free-ways travelled over, at, or beneath grade levels of the living spaces of the urban poor (one modern example: the Cabrini–Green housing project in Chicago). Such projects and their areas, having no free-way exit ramps, cut-off by free-way rights-of-way, became isolated from jobs and services concentrated at Le Corbusier’s nodal transportation end points. As jobs increasingly moved to the suburban end points of the free-ways urban village dwellers found themselves without convenient free-way access points in their communities and without public mass transit connectivity that could economically reach suburban job centres. Very late in the Post-War period, suburban job centres found this to be such a critical problem (labour shortages) that they, on their own, began sponsoring urban-to-suburban shuttle bus services between urban villages and suburban job centres to fill working class and lower-middle class jobs which had gone wanting, and which did not normally pay the wages that car ownership required.

Le Corbusier deliberately created a myth about himself, and was revered in his lifetime, and after death, by a generation of followers who believed Le Corbusier was a prophet who could do no wrong. But in the 1950s the first doubts began to appear, notably in some essays by his greatest admirers such as James Stirling and Colin Rowe, who denounced as catastrophic his ideas on the city. Later critics revealed his technical incompetence as an architect. In his book Armée du Salut, Brian Brace Taylor went into great detail about Le Corbusier's Machiavellian activities to create this commission for himself, his many ill-judged design decisions about building technologies, and the sometimes absurd solutions he then proposed.

Posted by LE CORBUSIER - architecture museum architecture museum architecture architektuur ‎ > ‎ famous architects and trends in architecture ‎ > ‎ famous modern architects ‎ > ‎ LE CORBUSIER Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, one in North and several in South America. He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, allegedly deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, "Lecorbésier." However, it appears to have been an earlier (and somewhat unkind) nickname, which he simply decided to keep.

Early life and education, 1887–1913 He was born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) across the border from France. He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods. Young Jeanneret was attracted to the visual arts and studied at the La-Chaux-de-Fonds Art School under Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. His architecture teacher in the Art School was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest houses. In his early years he would frequently escape the somewhat provincial atmosphere of his hometown by traveling around Europe. About 1907, he traveled to Paris, where he found work in the office of Auguste Perret, the French pioneer of reinforced concrete. In 1908, He studied architecture in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann.

Between October 1910 and March 1911, he worked near Berlin for the renowned architect Peter Behrens, where he might have met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. He became fluent in German. Both of these experiences would prove influential in his later career. Later in 1911, he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, filling sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw, including many famous sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923) ("Towards an Architecture," but usually translated into English as "Towards a New Architecture"). Early career: the villas, 1914–1930 Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds during World War I, not returning to Paris until the war was over. During these four years in Switzerland, he worked on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques.[1] Among these was his project for the Domino House (1914–1915).

This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs supported by a minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns around the edges, with a stairway providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan. This design became the foundation for most of his architecture for the next ten years. Soon he would begin his own architectural practice with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), a partnership that would last until the 50s, with an interruption in the WWII years, due to Le Corbusier's ambivalent position towards the Vichy regime. In 1918, Le Corbusier met the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, in whom he recognised a kindred spirit. Ozenfant encouraged him to paint, and the two began a period of collaboration. Rejecting Cubism as irrational and "romantic," the pair jointly published their manifesto, Après le cubisme and established a new artistic movement, Purism. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier established the Purist journal L'Esprit nouveau. He was good friends with the Cubist artist Fernand Léger.

In the first issue of the journal, in 1920, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name, "Lecorbésier", as a pseudonym, reflecting his belief that anyone could reinvent themselves. Adopting a single name to identify oneself was in vogue by artists in many fields during that era, especially among those in Paris. Between 1918 and 1922, Le Corbusier built nothing, concentrating his efforts on Purist theory and painting. In 1922, Le Corbusier and his cousin Jeanneret opened a studio in Paris at 35 rue de Sèvres.[1] His theoretical studies soon advanced into several different single-family house models. Among these was the Maison "Citrohan", a pun on the name of the French Citroën automaker, for the modern industrial methods and materials Le Corbusier advocated using for the house. Here, Le Corbusier proposed a three-floor structure, with a double-height living room, bedrooms on the second floor, and a kitchen on the third floor. The roof would be occupied by a sun terrace.

On the exterior Le Corbusier installed a stairway to provide second-floor access from ground level. Here, as in other projects from this period, he also designed the façades to include large expanses of uninterrupted banks of windows. The house used a rectangular plan, with exterior walls that were not filled by windows, left as white, stuccoed spaces. Le Corbusier and Jeanneret left the interior aesthetically spare, with any movable furniture made of tubular metal frames. Light fixtures usually comprised single, bare bulbs. Interior walls also were left white. Between 1922 and 1927, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed many of these private houses for clients around Paris. In Boulogne-sur-Seine and the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed and built the Villa Lipschitz, Maison Cook (see William Edwards Cook), Maison Planeix, and the Maison La Roche/Albert Jeanneret, which now houses the Fondation Le Corbusier.

[edit]Personal relationships While returning in 1929 from South America to Europe, Le Corbusier met entertainer and actress Josephine Baker on board the ocean liner Lutétia. Le Corbusier made several nude sketches of Baker. Soon after his return to France, Le Corbusier married Yvonne Gallis, a dressmaker and fashion model. She died in 1957. Le Corbusier also had a long extramarital affair with Swedish-American heiress Marguerite Tjader Harris. Le Corbusier took French citizenship in 1930. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) of 1935.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandons the class-based stratification of the former; housing is now assigned according to family size, not economic position.[4] Some have read dark overtones into The Radiant City: from the "astonishingly beautiful assemblage of buildings" that was Stockholm, for example, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.”[5] He dreamed of "cleaning and purging" the city, bringing "a calm and powerful architecture"—referring to steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete. Though Le Corbusier's designs for Stockholm did not succeed, later architects took his ideas and partly "destroyed" the city with them.[5] La Ville radieuse also marks Le Corbusier's increasing dissatisfaction with capitalism and his turn to the right-wing syndicalism of Hubert Lagardelle. During the Vichy regime, Le Corbusier received a position on a planning committee and made designs for Algiers and other cities.

The central government ultimately rejected his plans, and after 1942 Le Corbusier withdrew from political activity.[6] After World War II, Le Corbusier attempted to realize his urban planning schemes on a small scale by constructing a series of "unités" (the housing block unit of the Radiant City) around France. The most famous of these was the Unité d'Habitation of Marseilles (1946–1952). In the 1950s, a unique opportunity to translate the Radiant City on a grand scale presented itself in the construction of the Union Territory Chandigarh, the new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana and the first planned city in India. Le Corbusier designed many administration buildings including a courthouse, parliament building and a university. He also designed the general layout of the city dividing it into sectors. Le Corbusier was brought on to develop the plan of Albert Mayer.

It was Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929–1931) that most succinctly summed up his five points of architecture that he had elucidated in the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and his book Vers une architecture, which he had been developing throughout the 1920s. First, Le Corbusier lifted the bulk of the structure off the ground, supporting it by pilotis – reinforced concrete stilts. These pilotis, in providing the structural support for the house, allowed him to elucidate his next two points: a free façade, meaning non-supporting walls that could be designed as the architect wished, and an open floor plan, meaning that the floor space was free to be configured into rooms without concern for supporting walls. The second floor of the Villa Savoye includes long strips of ribbon windows that allow unencumbered views of the large surrounding yard, and which constitute the fourth point of his system. The fifth point was the roof garden to compensate for the green area consumed by the building and replacing it on the roof. A ramp rising from ground level to the third floor roof terrace allows for an architectural promenade through the structure.

The white tubular railing recalls the industrial "ocean-liner" aesthetic that Le Corbusier much admired. As if to put an exclamation mark after Le Corbusier's homage to modern industry, the driveway around the ground floor, with its semicircular path, measures the exact turning radius of a 1927 Citroën automobile. Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements, Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit. He took Leonardo's suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an extreme: he sectioned his model human body's height at the navel with the two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor system.

Le Corbusier's 1927 Villa Stein in Garches exemplified the Modulor system's application. The villa's rectangular ground plan, elevation, and inner structure closely approximate golden rectangles.[9] Le Corbusier placed systems of harmony and proportion at the centre of his design philosophy, and his faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden section and the Fibonacci series, which he described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in Man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages, and the learned." [source:wikipedia] Le Corbusier | Uncyclopedia | Fandom powered by Wikia edit His World In Le Corbusier's world, there were no first names. [How very bourgeois . - ed.] Instead, each person was free to choose that one specific name which identified himself or herself only as an abstraction, as opposed to a member of some uselessly-traditional family or ethnological grouping.

Le Corbusier said "by law, all buildings should be white" and criticized any effort at ornamentation. He also ruled that once his buildings were finished, nothing in them could be allowed to interfere with the purity of his architectural vision, including such needless "gewgaws" as openable windows, windowshades, curtains, doors, lights, or bathrooms . Le Corbusier was also instrumental in outlawing the word "house" and "home" throughout Europe . Instead, people would dwell in Machines for Living, which would free them from their petty desires for such bourgeois, materialist items such as beds, pillows, cushioned chairs , towels, and toilet paper . Le Corbusier also helped eliminate the word "building" from all known languages, although the edict was repealed by the 1945 Yalta Conference, much to his annoyance. No, instead people would go to work in Machines for Working. In Germany , Hitler 's move to secure the Sudetenland stemmed from his fear that Le Corbusier would get there first and outlaw all political movements, which he had renamed Machines for Controlling the Masses.

edit His Enemies Among his enemies was Soviet Premier Josef Stalin , who despised Le Corbusier because the Swiss man who masqueraded as a Frenchman actually made Stalin look soft. Stalin allowed his people to live in state-owned apartment buildings and work in state-owned factories. Le Corbusier's theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in the United States; he went several steps further by insisting that all human beings live and work in underground bunkers, in order to avoid "aesthetic complications" that might arise from the use of his buildings by actual people. Le Corbusier was also famous for getting into "pissing matches" (which he referred to as Machines for Pissing) with other well-known architects, including: Frank Lloyd Wright , whom Le Corbusier often referred to as l'Architect d'Provance; Frank Lloyd Wrong , who was spammed mercilessly by someone using Le Corbusier's Hotmail account; edit His critiques Is it art? No, it's Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier's feelings about on criticism were summed up best by the architect himself: "If I would not wipe your buttocks, why would I care what you think of me?" In fact, LeCorbu felt himself so far above his critics that given the chance he would kick them as if they were "dogs in heat that block my path at the moment." However his feelings about his critical comments towards others, especially their environment, were sharp and to the point. Upon visiting the Bourgeois Garden's Project in Chicago, Illinois, the architect sniffed at the nondescript buildings and wrote: “ No wonder the American people are bound for, how do you say, Hell-in-the-Hand Basket! Look at all this excess ornimentation - who needs this crap! Brick is expensive and bourgeois; raw concrete block would have been honest for this building. Look at the wasted money spent for that doorway canopy, those ramps for wheel chairs, even the grass between the cracks in sidewalk. Do you think that any of these touches make the residents any more happy than they already are? No, I say. The people who live in these buildings are unhappy because they know that these bourgeois trappings mean nothing to them but to mock them.

Brutalism: Raw concrete, and unfinished ply wood toilets will lift their spirits. Let them lick the sweaty concrete walls for their water, let them cook at the communal pot, and then they will known the joy that is life. ” edit His Downfall In 1959, LeCorbu (as he was known to his intimates) redesigned the personal massager device and re-christened it the Machine for Pleasuring. However, his reputation was dealt a severe blow when it became apparent that the new design was unsatisfactory for millions of women around the world, who selfishly insisted that the devices were necessary not for pleasure, but for hitting those "hard-to-reach areas" especially in need of tension release. Rebuffed and broken, he retreated to his Machine for Contemplation, and spent the next six years brooding about the past and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon . On 27 August 1965 [not August 27, 1965, because that would be a very, very bourgeois - ed.], the only architect that ever mattered decided that he desired a bath.

Against his doctor's orders, Le Corbusier stripped, donned his Machine for Bathing, went for a dip in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France . He disappeared, and his body was never found. It is assumed he suffered a common man's heart attack , and his body was swept away - not into the ocean, but into the Machine for Drowning (as he had renamed it). edit His "See Also" Section Le Corbusier was 'militant fascist', two new books on French architect claim - Telegraph France Le Corbusier was 'militant fascist', two new books on French architect claim Controversy erupts in France over books depicting Le Corbusier, pioneer of the modern movement in architecture, as an out and out fascist who had an office in Vichy, seat of the Nazi puppet government in France Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier Photo: STFHO/AFP/Getty Images Follow France's best-known 20th century architect, Le Corbusier , was a "militant fascist" who was far more anti-Semitic and a fan of Hitler than previously thought, two new books reveal.

The unsettling disclosures about the links of one of the world's most famous modern architects to France's wartime collaborationist Vichy regime have been released just ahead of a major Paris exhibition of his work. It has long been known that Le Corbusier, famed for his revolutionary concrete creations , including a housing project in Marseille called La Cité Radieuse, had some ties to France's collaborationist regime under Field Marshal Philippe Pétain . But the latest, far more damning, revelations have shocked admirers and threaten to cast a shadow over commemorations of the 50th anniversary of his death. Paris's Pompidou Centre, which is to open a three-month long exhibition dedicated to Le Corbusier on April 29th, faces allegations of totally failing to mention the controversy. Xavier de Jarcy, a journalist who wrote about the find in his book "Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais" (Le Corbusier, a French fascism), told AFP: "I discovered he was simply an outright fascist." The architect "was active during 20 years in groups with a very clear ideology" but that "has been kept hidden", confirmed another author, Francois Chaslin, who published Un Corbusier.

Born in Switzerland in 1887 as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, the architect moved to Paris at 20 and in 1920 adopted his nickname Le Corbusier from an ancestor. Ten years later he took French citizenship. Known as one of the main pioneers of the modern movement in architecture, he influenced France's post-war planning policy for decades with his ideas of functional apartment blocks with parks. The policy ended in 1973 over claims these were soul-destroying and led to urban ghettoisation. Paris only narrowly avoided seeing its historical centre wiped off the map in favour of one his 1925 "plans". The new books show Le Corbusier embraced fascism in Paris in the 1920s, and was close to Pierre Winter, a doctor who headed France's Revolutionary Fascist Party. Together they created Plans, an urban planning journal, followed by another called Prelude. Mr Jarcy said that in "Plans" Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in "Prelude" co-wrote "hateful editorials".

In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that "money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law". In October that year, he added: "Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe." Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed "anti-Semite sketches" by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office. The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect's memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an "extended stay" in the town. One of the foundation's experts, Jean-Louis Cohen, said he was "shocked by this controversy", saying it was "manipulative", but conceding that the research was thorough. The organisers of The Measures of Man, the Pompidou Centre exhibition on Le Corbusier, said they had glossed over the fascism controversy because their display "doesn't address the entire work" of the architect, but that a previous 1987 exhibition had done so.

However, Serge Klarsfeld, a famous French Nazi-hunter, dismissed such arguments as insufficient. "All the aspects of Le Corbusier's personality" should be included in the Pompidou Centre exhibition, Mr Klarsfeld told AFP. Mr Chaslin said the current controversy corresponded to what psychoanalysts call "le retour du refoulé" (the resurfacing of suppressed memories), saying: "When you hide something too much, one day it explodes." Le Corbusier | Highbrow Le Corbusier Episode #8 of the course “Architects who changed the world” A Swiss architect, designer, and artist, the man born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was better known as Le Corbusier. He adopted the name as a rendition of his grandfather’s name, in the belief that any person could reinvent himself. Le Corbusier was highly influential in the 20th century, often known as one of the founders of Modern architecture. His radical designs not only incorporated structural organization of a single building but often entire city blocks.

One of the first modern city planners, Le Corbusier envisioned large cities where people used cars as transportation, train centers would organize traffic patterns, and airplanes would land amid a field of skyscrapers. Church of Saint-Pierre, Firminy, France Born in 1887, Le Corbusier’s career didn’t begin until after World War I. During his early years he studied art and traveled Europe admiring architecture, but in his designs he used the new construction materials of reinforced concrete and stainless steel that couldn’t be found elsewhere in Europe. During this time, he developed his artistic style and published about modern art. His first attempt to redesign a section of Paris by demolishing it and building from the ground up was met with heavy resistance, but it got people to begin questioning how to handle modern urban problems of overcrowding in such ancient cities.

Le Corbusier Le Corbusier Date Recorded: January 11, 2015 Duration: 01:10:45 Anthony Flint, author of Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow (New Harvest, 2014), presents a portrait of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965). Flint, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, suggests that there is much to learn from the Swiss-French architect of the Villa Savoye and the Ronchamp chapel, who was also influential in urban planning and dedicated to developing better living conditions in crowded cities. To view the PowerPoint for this presentation, please click here . Upgrade Flash Player Le Corbusier's La Maison Blanche | Architectural Digest The Architect's Eye Le Corbusier's La Maison Blanche On the eve of MoMA’s most expansive exhibit ever on the legendary architect, Lee F. Mindel visits one of the his lesser-known masterpieces—his family residence in Switzerland Text by Facebook Le Corbusier’s family home, La Maison Blanche, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

When one thinks of the White House, visions of classical columns and a lush rose garden come to mind. Yet there is another building of note that is also referred to as the white house, or La Maison Blanche . The first independent project designed by the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—better known as Le Corbusier , the name he adopted in the early 1920s—the residence was built in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1912. La Maison Blanche was commissioned by the architect’s parents to be the family’s home, and the influences of Le Corbusier’s time in Paris with Auguste Perret and in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann are evident in the structure’s simplicity, its richness of detail, and the masterful integration of site plan and interior design. Upon a recent visit to the building, which was restored in 2005 and now serves as a museum, I was struck by its many decorative flourishes—the floral wallpaper, antique furniture, ornamental hardware, diaphonous curtains—which seem at odds with the discipline of the dwelling itself.

His parents, wanting the residential comforts one would associate with a middle-class family in 1912 Europe, engaged the services of Parisian decorator André Groult, whose work was somewhat of a compromise between tradition and modernism. One room on the upper floor, however, was designed entirely by Le Corbusier and used as his work space, revealing the architectural rigors that would manifest itself in his future work. Many years later, while discussing his own furniture designs, Le Corbusier stated, “Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.” It’s fascinating to see the two worlds coincide. Click to see my photos of this early masterpiece. “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from June 15–September 23. And beginning June 8, AD is sponsoring a two-day symposium in conjunction with the exhibit; click here to learn more .

More on archdigest.com: Le Corbusier (Author of Towards a New Architecture) edit data Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier; was an architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India, and America. He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal and AIA Gold Medal in 1961. Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, allegedly deriving it in part from the name of an ancestor, Lecorbésier.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier | Great Thoughts Treasury Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887 - ) Biography: Swiss Architect, Designer, Urbanist, Writer and Painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International style. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in his thirties. Videos Quotes Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier Birth Date: 1965 Bio: Swiss Architect, Designer, Urbanist, Writer and Painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International style. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in his thirties. Search this author only for specific quotes by keyword: Any TED Videos The images and text provided to Internet users through this web site belong to various parties and are covered by copyright. The copyright holders want you to have online access to these materials, but do not want their other rights compromised. Consequently, permission is granted only for personal viewing by individuals who receive these materials through direct Internet transmission from this website.

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Question: By what name was the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret better known?
Answer: Le Corbusier