Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a Swiss watchmaking town, to a father who was a watch enameller and a mother who was a pianist and music teacher. Admitted in 1900 to the town's School of Art, he was steered towards architecture in 1905 by his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier and, with the help of René Chapallaz, built his very first building, the Villa Fallet. From 1907 to 1911 he travelled across Europe, from Italy to Vienna, Paris and Munich, worked from November 1910 to April 1911 in Peter Behrens's office, and amassed a quantity of notes and drawings that would feed his work for the rest of his life. In 1911 the "Voyage d'Orient" took him from Prague through the Balkans towards Turkey and Greece. He had no architecture degree: in 1940 a ministerial decision allowed the non-graduate architects Auguste Perret, Eugène Freyssinet and Le Corbusier to practise.

He settled in Paris for good in February 1917. With Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée he founded the journal L'Esprit Nouveau in 1920, in which he took the pseudonym Le Corbusier to sign his architecture articles. From 1922 he worked with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret; Vers une architecture appeared in 1923 and, on 18 September 1924, he opened the studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, which he would occupy until his death. The Plan Voisin (1925), proposed for the centre of Paris, takes its name from the aircraft and car manufacturers who gave financial support to the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, where the study was shown: the centre of Paris, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret write in the Œuvre complète, "must be rebuilt upon itself". The Dom-Ino system, devised in 1914, a frame of posts and slabs, frees the plan and the façades. The five points of a new architecture (pilotis, ribbon window, roof garden, free plan, free façade), theorised in 1927, appeared as early as 1923 in the Maison La Roche in Paris; the Villa Le Lac, at Corseaux on Lake Geneva (1923-1924), brings together three of them, and the Villa Savoye in Poissy (1928-1931) illustrates them. At Pessac, the Cité Frugès (1924-1926) is the first experiment with his social theories of architecture. In June 1928, with Siegfried Giedion and Hélène de Mandrot, he organised the first International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), at the château de La Sarraz. He obtained French nationality by decree of 19 September 1930.

He moved to Vichy in January 1941 to obtain from the new authorities the running of reconstruction; he received only temporary assignments and seats on commissions without power, and left the town for good on 1 July 1942. That stay and, more broadly, his political positions are the subject of controversy and of debate among historians. Between 1943 and 1950 he developed the Modulor, a system of proportions based on the height of a man of 1.83 m (six feet), which provides the measure for the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, commissioned in July 1945 and inaugurated in 1952: a reinforced-concrete block raised on pilotis to leave the ground to greenery as well as to pedestrians and cars, at the centre of a wooded park. The Radiant City, whose principles he took up again in a book published in 1935, must, he wrote in 1964, be placed "under the masterly aegis of the conditions of nature: sun – space – greenery". From the 1950s his work answers to the characteristics of Brutalism: materials left raw, formwork marks left visible. Several of his works deal with light and the framing of the landscape: the 11-metre window of the Villa Le Lac opens on Lake Geneva and the Alps; the two windows of the Cabanon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (1951) frame, one the Mediterranean, the other a centuries-old carob tree; the concrete chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) expresses itself in curves, light and colour, with painted glass; at the Sainte-Marie de La Tourette convent (1953-1960) he deploys light cannons, light machine-guns, slits, light wells and glass panels.

From 1950 he was general consultant for Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, whose construction site was run by his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. He received the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects on 27 April 1961. He died on 27 August 1965 of a heart attack during his daily swim in the Mediterranean, at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. A state funeral was held on 1 September in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, with a funeral oration by André Malraux; his urn joined that of his wife Yvonne in their tomb at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Of the 79 buildings or groups of buildings he completed, 65 survive. Since 17 July 2016, seventeen buildings or sites, spread across seven countries (Germany, Argentina, Belgium, India, Japan, Switzerland, France), have been inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List as "The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement": among them the La Roche and Jeanneret Houses in Paris, the Villa Savoye, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, the chapel at Ronchamp, the La Tourette convent, the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh and the Curutchet House in La Plata.