Le Corbusier: Between Modernity and Controversy

Education and Early Career

Born to a petit-bourgeois Protestant family in Switzerland in 1887, Le Corbusier left school at the age of 13 to learn the enamelling and engraving of watch faces at the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. It was there that he met Charles L’Eplattenier, who would become his teacher and mentor. Under his direction, he learned to draw, studied art history and first approached architecture. In his early twenties, Le Corbusier discovered the horizons of Europe, travelling across Italy, visiting Vienna, Paris – where he worked with the Perret brothers, pioneers in the use of reinforced concrete – then Germany, Greece and Turkey.
Upon returning to Switzerland in 1912, Le Corbusier began teaching architecture and interior design but also built several houses imbued with the experiences of his travels. Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also known as the Maison Blanche, which he built for his parents, was his first work as an independent architect.

Towards Modernity

Le Corbusier moved to Paris definitively in 1917 and, encouraged by the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, focused solely on theoretical thinking and painting.
It was only a few years later that he opened an architecture studio with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret as building villas for the elite of the French capital turned out to be the perfect occasion to experiment with innovative architectural solutions driven by the possibilities offered by reinforced concrete. Simultaneously, he developed theoretical schemes, such as the Citrohan house, the immeuble-villas (‘villa apartments’), and the Ville contemporaine (‘contemporary city’), advocating his new concepts of architecture and urban planning in publications whose success reverberated around the globe.

The notoriety achieved from both the writings and architectural accomplishments led to dozen of commissions: the Maison La Roche/Albert Jeanneret (1923–1925), which now houses the Fondation Le Corbusier; the Maison Guiette in Antwerp, Belgium (1926); the Maison Cook; and, most notably, Villa Savoye (1928–1931) in Poissy.
Poised on slender concrete pillars in a lush, rural landscape, the modernist icon exemplified the five points of architecture that Le Corbusier had been developing throughout the 1920s, ultimately dictating a new approach to the design of domestic architecture.
Namely, the pilotis (reinforced concrete pillars), the roof terrace, the free design of the ground plan, the ribbon window (running the entire length of the house), and the free façade became the elements of a new vocabulary for a modern architecture filled light, air, and space.

Postwar projects

During World War II, Le Corbusier moved to Vichy and offered his services for architectural projects. However, when the war ended, he was nearly sixty years old, and none of his projects had been built in the last ten years. What seemed to be the end of his career turned out to be its breakthrough and, after 1945, Le Corbusier finally achieved many of the objectives he had been pursuing for decades. 
Commissioned by the Indian government, he designed an entire city – the only one in his career – developing the plan for Chandigarh, the new capital of the Indian state of Punjab.
For the first time, Le Corbusier was able to apply his principles of urban planning on a metropolitan scale: unfinished concrete, sculptural facades, and monumental ramps became the elements of postcolonial civic architectural identity. 

But the real turning point came from his first public commission in France: Unité d’Habitation. The architect was in fact commissioned to build a large private housing complex in Marseille for the rehousing of people left homeless by the war. The 18-story residential block embodied Le Corbusier’s vision of a social environment and housed 1,800 inhabitants in 337 two-level apartments conceived as individual units stacked in a béton-brut concrete frame. 
The building, known as La Cité Radieuse (‘the radiant city’), is arguably one of the first examples of Brutalist architecture. Conceived as a reimagined city inside a slab block, La Cité Radieuse also incorporates common facilities: shops, a school, a hotel, a nursery, an open-air theatre, and a restaurant, Le Ventre de l’Architecte. The project was completed in 1952, and the construction of two more unítés followed at other locations in Europe.

Continuing his work as a theorist and author, Le Corbusier published Modulor and Modulor 2, in 1947 and 1955 respectively, on the anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the architect himself in the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, and other attempts to discover mathematical proportions in the human body to employ them in architecture. Finally, in 1960–1963 Le Corbusier realised his only building in the United States; the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Towards the end of his life, the architect found his ideal home in his Cabanon de Vacances on the Côte d’Azur, the only building he designed and built for himself, which he had been using as a vacation home since 1951.
Ironically, the Cabanon consists of a one-roomed wooden hut designed in 45 minutes, built by traditional carpenters in the manner of a fisherman’s hut, and containing the bare minimum needed for survival. In July 2016, it was inscribed as the world’s smallest UNESCO World Heritage Site.