Swiss-French writer, painter, perhaps the most famous architect of the 20th century, both renowned for his architectural projects and theoretical thought. In his early writings and designs Le Corbusier demonstrated that architecture is a combination of simple forms and utilitarian needs. After WW II Le Corbusier developed his own system of proportion, which became an integral part of his practice. His style also took influences from archaic past and grew increasingly expressionistic and sculptural. Le Corbusier's books include Towards a New Architecture (1923), The City of Tomorrow (1925), and When the Cathedrals Were White (1937).

"The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our senses to an acute degree and provokes plastic emotions; by the relationships which he creates he wakes profound echoes in us, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty." (Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier, translated from the thirteenth French edition with an introduction by Frederick Etchelles, London: John Rodker, 1931, p. 1)

Le Corbusier was born Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a provincial town of some 27,000 people in the Swiss Jura. Edouard, as he was usually called at home, was the second son of Georges Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, a watch-enameller, and Marie Charlotte Amélie (née Perret), a pianist and music teacher. Georges Édouard continued the family business, but with the emergence of mass production his trade was doomed. "Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit," Le Corbusier wrote in Towards a New Architecture. (Ibid., p. 6)

Artistic pursuits were encouraged in the family. Edouard's brother Albert became a musician and Edouard himself started to paint early. In 1902 he enrolled in the Ecole d' Art n La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he studied engraving. Under the influence of his teacher, Charles L'Éplattenier, he decided devote himself to architecture. His first house Le Corbusier designed at the age of nineteen with a local architect.

As a designer Le Corbusier was largely self-taught. He researched architecture on his tours to various countries and made copious notes. His pilgrimage to Acropolis Le Corbusier made in 1911. Later, when he presented his views on the necessity of standardization in architecture, he argued that even the Parthenon had been standardized in all its parts. This Voyage d'Orient lasted for some five months.

Excepts from Le Corbusier's notes appeared in the newspaper Feuille d'Avis in 1911, but his travel diary remained unpublished until 1966. In Paris Le Corbusier worked in the office of Auguste Perret and studied art history, mathematics and engineering. He also worked in Berlin in the architectural office of Peter Behrens, the training ground for an entire generation of young architects, among them Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. After returning to La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Corbusier taught architecture in L'Éplattenier's industrial art school, the new section of Ecole d'Art, which was established in 1912. His own office Le Corbusier opened in the same year.

For the Jewish industrialist Anatole Schwab, whose factory held the patents for Tavennes and Cyma watches, Le Corbusier completed somewhat mysterious house in 1917. The construction costs were much higher than originally estimated. By local residents the building was baptized as the "Turkish villa." This was still relatively mild reaction compared with the criticism of Le Corbusier's truly original and bold designs.

In 1952, the locals in Marseilles nicknamed Le Corbusier's residential unit, La Cité Radieuse, the "crackpot house." The architect himself was labelled as "blind" and the apartments in the immense building were judged "narrow and suffocating."

Le Corbusier left in 1917 La Chaux-de-Fonds behind and moved to Paris. There he started as a consultant architect to Max Du Bois's Société a'Application du Béton (SABA), a company which designed and realized reinforced concrete buildings. In 1918 he lost the sight of one eye, a traumatic event, which affected his spatial orientation. In photographs of Le Corbusier's early houses his owl-eye glasses can occasionally be detected lying on a table or a mantelpiece. Since his childhood, Le Corbusier had suffered from poor eyesight.

In Paris Le Corbusier did not give up painting. Through his friend, Amédee Ozenfant, he familiarized himself with avant-garde art, especially the abstract aspects of painting. As an architect he started to use the pseudonym Le Corbusier, taking it from his great-grandfather, called Monsier Le Corbezier of Brussels (or Lecorbesier). His friends gave him the nickname "Corbu," which referred to the word corbeau (raven) and his raven-like features. Wearing a close-fitting black suit, a black bowler hat, exactly circular, horn-rimmed glasses, and riding on a bicycle he attracted attention even in the bohemian Quertier Latin, where he lived.

With Ozenfant, Le Corbusier created Purism, an extension of Cubism, which emphasized the beauty of mass-produced objects. Through their book, Après Le Cubisme (1918) and the magazine L'Espirit Nouveau, established in 1920, Le Corbusier promoted his ideas, becoming one of the leading theorists in the field of architecture. The contributors of the magazine included also the wrietrs Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Juan Gris.

In 1922, with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbuseir set up an office at 35 rue de Sèvres, Atelier 35S. At the age of thirty-six Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture (1923, Towards a New Architecture), a compilation of articles originally published in L'Epirit Nouveau. In this architectural bestseller Corbusier praised automobiles, airplanes, steamships, and mass-production, drawing the conclusion that "The house is a machine for living in." (Ibid., p. 4) The mass-production house is beautiful in the same way as tools and instruments.

Le Corbusier's theories had a strong social concern: "The machine that we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis. There is no real link between our daily activities at the factory, the office or the bank, which are healthy and useful and productive, and our activities in the bosom of the family which are handicapped at every turn." (Ibid., p. 277) Thus architecture is an instrument of restructuring the whole society, the rational alternative to revolution. In his villas, on the other hand, Le Corbusier put art before social reform.

The Pavillion of the New Spirit at the Paris Exhibition of 1925 offered Le Corbusier a change to introduce his ideas to the general public. His white, cubist dwelling unit consisted of standardized elements, except that a tree grew inside it and painting of Braque, Juan Gris, Picasso, and others hang from the walls.

The limitations and possibilities of the main building materials, ferroconcrete and steel, imposed homogeneity in building design, perhaps more than the material itself required. Plain white surfaces, an essential part of Le Corburies's aesthetics, had also deeper symbolic meanings. His ultimate aim was to create the spirit of constructing and living in mass-production houses. Architecture was the mould of modern spirit and modern man of the machine-age civilization. Le Corbusier's theories were enthusiastically read in the Bauhaus design school in Germany. However, Le Corbusier himself argued that Gropius and the Bauhaus pay too little attention to architecture and standardization.

For Michael Stein, the brother of the American writer Gertrude Stein, Sarah Stein, and Gabriele de Monzie Le Corbusier designed a luxurious villa at Garches. After seeing Le Corbusier's Church villa in Ville-d'Avary, Monsieur and Madame Savoye and their son Roger commissioned the architect to create them a country home in Poissy. The result, Villa Savoye (1928-29), also known as "Les Heures Claires," was a house built on pilars. It had steel and concrete structure, stucco walls, and steel-framed windows. During WW II, the building experienced rough times, when Nazis used it as a haystore.

The Villa Savoye fulfilled the principles of the five "Points of a New Architecture" Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret had formulated: The pilotis (columns which raised the house above the ground), free plan (due to free-standing walls, everything is optional), free façades (the exterior walls are no longer load-bearing), flat roof with roof garden (replacing land lost underneath the building), and ribbon windows. The American architect Frank Lloyd White characterized these solid cubes, which appear to rest precariously on thin supporting poles, "big boxes on sticks." Every time he read that Le Corbusier had finished a building, he said: "Well, now that he's finished one building, hell go write four books about it." (From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981, p. 52)

While returning in 1929 from South America to Europe, Le Corbusier met Josephine Baker on board the ocean liner Lutétia. Baker was famous around the world for her dance in which she was dressed in nothing but 16 bananas. Le Corbusier made several sketches of Josephine; there is also an erotic drawing of her. The fruitful voyage produced a book, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930). Soon after the return, Le Corbusier married Yvonne Gallis, a dressmaker and fashion model. She died in 1957. With the American Marguerite Tjader Harris Le Corbusier had a long extramarital affair; he left her in the early 1960s.

If the 1920s was for Le Corbusier a period of invention and single-mindness adherence to the "white box" style, the next decade brought with it organic forms and disappointments. Le Corbusier's commissions diminished considerably after the early 1930s, although at the same time he was hailed as the hero of modernism, or the International Style. The term was first coined in an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

During this decade Le Corbusier designed among others the Swiss House in the Paris Cité Universitaire (1930-32) and Hostel for the Salvation Army in Paris (1932-33). He made also several town-planning schemes, in which he moved away from a centralized city model toward viaduct or linear city structures. In Le Corbusier's ideal metropolis artificial, man-made elements, are integrated with environment. The city is divided in zones with green belts between the areas. Huge skyscrapers dominate the commercial center, roadways are elevated, and residential housing is grouped in great blocks of "villas."

For Algiers Le Corbusier produced several town-planning proposals. He visioned a miles long housing viaduct, which contained shops, walkways, and small house cells, running along the coast. Similar coastal megastructure he had sketched also for Rio de Janeiro.

In the Soviet Union, where construction of communist society and the subsequent cultivation of the "new man" was under work, Le Corbusier's ideas of the needs of a mass society drew much attention. Thus he was invited in 1928 to Moscow, but his high hopes soon changed into struggles with Soviet authorities and left-wing criticism. For his disappointment, Le Corbusier did not win the competition for the Palace of the Soviets. The country was not ready for modern architecture; in the 1930s the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany openly rejected modernism in favor of Neo-Classicism.

Undisputedly, Le Corbusier leaned towards fascism in the 1930s. He joined the Neo-Syndicalist movement and contributed essays to the group's journal Prélude and  Plans, which he founded with the fascist engineer and urban planner François de Pierrefeu. Influenced partly by the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the anti-parliamentary movement attracted a number of intellectuals. Some of the essays written for Plans Le Corbusier collected in La Ville Radieuse (1935).

At the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art, Le Corbusier held a series of lectures in the Unites States in 1935. He did not like New York, "a vertical city . . . a catastrophe," and later wrote: ". . . clearly and coolly I know that a proper plan can make New York the city par excellence of modern times, can actively spread daily happiness for these oppressed families—children, women, men stupified by work, stunned by the noise of the rails of the subway or elevatrds—who sink down each evening, at the end of their appointed tasks, in the impasse of an inhuman hovel. (When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People by Le Corbusier, translated from the French by Francis E. Hyslop, New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947, pp. 40-41)

A year before WW II broke out, Le Corbusier wrote a polemical book, Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis... S.V.P. (1938, Canons, Arms? No Thanks. Housing Please), which expanded arguments he had published in his pacifist essay 'La Guerre? Mieux vaut construire' (1931). Le Corbusier juxtaposed the mass production of armaments and the provision of public housing.

When Germany invaded France, Le Corbusier and his wife fled to the Pyrenees, in the small town of Ozon, and then decided to collaborate with Vichy government – Le Corbusier served in a committee overseeing habitation and urbanism. His ideas for the future of France he published in two books, Destin de Paris (Fate of Paris) and Les quatre routes (The Four Routes); both came out in 1941. And in October 1942 Le Corbusier shared his thoughts with architecture students in a lecture, in which he associated war and rebirth: "Though we must reconstruct whole provinces ravaged by the war, this is really but a fragment of the whole. After so manu stagnant years, surely a country must build and rebuild and regenerate as cells in tissues and families in homes, each new generation participating in the eternal game of life."" (Le Corbusier Talks With Student: From the Schools of Architecture, translated from the French by Pierre Chase, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p. 13; originally published in 1961)

Vichy had little interest in modernism, but Le Corburier's ideas of order were welcomed. In spite of Le Corbusier's open support to Marshal Pétain, he was dangerously linked to Bolshevism and an international Jewish conspircy  in an article written by the Swiss architect Alexandre von Senger. Le Corbusier retired to the Pyrenees. Due to his collaboration, he was nearly excluded from the rebuilding of France after the war.

In Modulor (1948), Le Corbusier a proportional scale based on the male figure (Le Corbusier's man), to be used as a guide-line at the planning stage. He defined the Modulor as a "harmonious measure to the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and mechanics." (The Modulor I and II by Le Corbusier, translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 34) Time was also ripe for him to move from orthodox functionalism toward an expressionistic, anti-rational style, which borrowed from natural forms. The culmination of this tendency is found in the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, completed in 1955.

Complex and contradictionary, the Surrealistic chapel made of béton brut  (raw concrete) reconciles mysticism and Christian drama with rough concrete and physical massiveness. Its design influenced among others Alvar Aalto's Vuoksenniska Church (1955-58). 

When the Philips Industries commissioned Le Corbusier to build their pavillion for Expo '58 in Brussels, he designed with the composer Iannis Xenakis an union of architecture and electronic music. Familiar with the work by Edgard Varèse, Le Corbusier contacted him to provide a piece to be used in the pavillion. While in India, the directors of Philips tried to remove Varèse from the project. Le Corbusier's reply put a stop to any further questions: the Poème électronique cannot be carried out except by Varèse's music. Inside the pavillion, 400 loudspeakers mounted on the walls created a moving path of sound. The music was accompanied by visual projections selected by Le Corbusier.

The city of Chandigarh, India, founded as the administrative capital of the Punjab, was Le Corbusier's greatest achievement in architecture and planning. A central figure of this enterprise was prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but the design had initially been commissioned by Nehru from the American planner Albert Mayer. Differing from Gandhi, he advocated India's industrialization and modern technology.

Le Corbusier signed the contract in December 1950; his final visit to Chandigarh he made in April 1964. The huge collective effort was partly realized without the benefits of modern technology – in the capitol, construction workers carried tiny loads concrete up ramps and scaffolding tied with ropes. Le Corbusier's monumental sculpture, the Open Hand, is situated outside the High Court, made of béton brut. The Chandigarh's Capitol Complex is in the UNESCO World Heritage List. 

Le Corbusier died of heart attack while swimming in the sea off Cap Martin on 27 August, 1965. He was buried alongside his wife in the grave he had designated at Robuebrune. Le Corbusier wrote some forty books and left a body of about 32,000 architectural drawings and plans.

For further reading: Mies contra Le Corbusier: The Frame Inevitable by Gevork Hartoonian (2024); Sacred Concrete: The Churches of Le Corbusier by Flora Samuel and Inge Linder-Gaillard (2024); The Many Lives of Apartment-studio Le Corbusier: 1931-2014 by Franz Graf and Giulia Marino (2022); Le Corbusier in the Antipodes: Art, Architecture and Urbanism by Antony Moulis (2021); Le Corbusier's Practical Aesthetic of the City: the Treatise 'La construction des villes' of 1910/11 by Christoph Schnoor; manuscript translation from French and essay translation from German, Kim Sanderson (2020); Chandigarh Revealed: Le Corbusier's City Today, photographs and text by Shaun Fynn; foreword by Maristella Casciato (2017); 'The Le Corbusier Scandal, or, was Le Corbusier a Fascist?' by Simone Brott, Fascism, Volume 6, Issue 2 (2017); Le Corbusier, edited by Graham Livesey (4 vols., 2017); Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms by William J.R. Curtis (2015); Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow by Anthony Flint (2014); Le Corbusier by Jean-Louis Cohen (2005); Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India by Vikramaditya Prakash (2002); Le Corbusier by Kenneth Frampton (2001); Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture by Charles Jencks (2000); Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage by Adolf Max Vogt (1998); Le Corbusier's Formative Years, ed. by H. Allen Brooks (1997); Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms by William J. R. Curtis (1986); From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe (1981); Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis by Stanislaus Von Moos (1979); The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier, ed. by Russell Walden (1977); Le Corbusier in Perspective by Peter Serenyi (1975); Le Corbusier (20th Century Masters) by Carlo Cresti (1970); Who Was Le Corbusier by Maurice Besset (1968); Chandigarh by Norma Evenson (1966); The Master Builders by Peter Blake (1960); Le Corbusier. Architect, Painter, Writer, ed. by Le Corbusier and Stamo Papadaki (1948)

Selected works:

• L'Etude sur le mouvement d'art décoratif en Allemagne, 1912
• Après Le Cubisme, 1918 (with A. Ozenfant)
• L'Espirit Nouveau 1-28, 1920-1925 (with others)
• Vers une architecture, 1923
  - Towards a New Architecture (translated by Frederick Etchells, 1946) / Toward an Architecture (translated by John Goodman, 2007)
• Urbanisme, 1924
  - The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (translated by Frederick Etchells, 1987)
• L'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui, 1925
  - The Decorative Art Today (translated by James I. Dunnett, 1987)
• Almanach d'architecture moderne, 1926
• Une maison, un palais, 1929
• Précisions sur un état présent de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, 1930
  - Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (translated by Edith Schreiber Aujame, 1991)
• La Ville Radieuse, 1935
  - The Radiant City (translated by P. Knight et al., 1964)
• Aircraft, 1935
• Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, 1937
  - When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (translated by Francis Edwin Hyslop, 1948)
  
• Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis... S.V.P., 1938
• Oeuvre plastique, peintures, dessins, architecture, 1938
• Destin de Paris, 1941
• Les Quatre Routes, 1941
  - The Four Routes (translated from the French by Dorothy Todd, 1947)
  
• La Maison des Hommes, 1942 (with F. de Pierrefeu)
  - The Home of Man (translated by Clive Entwistle, 1948)
  
• Charte d'Athènes, 1943
• Les Trois Établissements humains, 1945
  - The Three Human Establishments (translated by Eulie Chowdhury, 1979)
• Propos d'Urbanisme, 1946
  - Concerning Town Planning (translated by Clive Entwistle, 1948)
• Manière de penser l'urbanisme, 1946
  - Looking at City Planning (translated by Eleanor Levieux, 1971)
• L'Unité d'habitation de Marseille, 1947
  - The Marseilles Block (translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, 1953)
• Modulor, 1948
  - Modulor 1 (translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, 1968) / The Modulor; a Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, 1958)
• Une petite maison 1923, 1954
  - A Little House (new edition, 2020)
  
• Modulor 2, 1955
  - Modulor 2 (translated by P. de Francia and A. Bostock, 1955)
• L'Atelier de la recherche patiente, 1960
  - My Work (translated by James Palmes, 1960) / Creation is a Patient Search (translated by James Palmes, 1960)
• Le Livre de Ronchamp, 1961
• Le Corbusier Talks With Students, 1961 (translated by Pierre Chase)
  
• Mise au point, 1966 (edited by Jean Petit)
  - The Final Testament of Père Corbu (translated by Ivan Zaknic)
• Le Voyage d'Orient, 1966
  - Journey to the East (edited and annotated by Ivan Zaknic; translated by Ivan Zaknic in collaboration with John Gery and Nicole Pertuiset, 1987)
• Le Corbusier: Oeuvre complète, 1946-1970 (8 vols.)
• Le Corbusier Drawings, 1978
• Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, 1981 (4 vols., edited by A. Wogensky and F. de Franclieu)
• The Le Corbusier Archive, 1982
• Voyage d'Orient. Carnets 1-6, 1988
  - Journey to the East (edited and annotated by Ivan Zaknic; translated by Ivan Zaknic in collaboration with John Gery and Nicole Pertuiset, 1987)
• Le Poème de l'Angle Droit, 1989
• Les Voyages d'Allemagne. Carnets 1-4, 1995
• Le Corbusier: Complete Works 1910-1969, 1995
• La construction des villes, 2008
  - manuscript translation from French and essay translation from German, Kim Sanderson, in Le Corbusier's Practical Aesthetic of the City: the Treatise 'La construction des villes' of 1910/11, ed. by Christoph Schnoor 2020)
• Lettres manuscrites de Le Corbusier, 2015 (édition établie par Guillemette Morel Journel)
  
• A Little House, 1923, 2020 (Une Petite maison 1923, 1954; new edition)