Le Corbusier: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Villa Savoye near Paris

Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 - August 27, 1965) was the pseudonym of Charles Edouard Jeanneret. He was an architect famous for what is now called the International style, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Theo van Doesburg.

Born in Switzerland, he moved to Paris at the age of 29 and adopted "Le Corbusier", his maternal grandfather's name and French for "the crow", as a pseudonym. He usually wore big round black glasses.

Le Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. One of the first to realize how the automobile 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 most completely adopted by the builders of public housing in the United States. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier said "by law, all buildings should be white" and 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. The city plan of Brasília was based on his ideas.

Since his death, Le Corbusier's contribution has been hotly contested. At the level of building, his later works expressed a complex understanding of modernity's impact, yet his urban designs have drawn scorn from critics.

The interior of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France

Key buildings

• 1928 - Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France
• 1933 - Tsentrosoyuz, Moscow, USSR
• 1945 - Unité d'Habitation de Marseille, Marseille, France
• 1950 - Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France
• 1952-1959 - Buildings in Chandigarh, India
  • 1952 - Haute Cour
  • 1952 - Musée et Galerie d'Art
  • 1953 - Secrétariat
  • 1953 - Club Nautique
  • 1955 - Assemblée
  • 1959 - Ecole d'Art
• 1961 - Carpenter Visual Arts Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts