Le Corbusier rebuilt cities as machines for living
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), styling himself Le Corbusier from 1920, pioneered modern architecture across five decades and seven countries later gathered as UNESCO sites. Chandigarh's plan, CIAM leadership, and Dom-Ino concrete frames remade housing—while fascist flirtations and bulldozer urbanism keep his legend contested.
Watch-valley La Chaux-de-Fonds shaped a Fröbel kindergarten graduate who entered applied-art school at fifteen under Charles L'Eplattenier, drafted Villa Fallet in 1905, and learned reinforced concrete with Auguste Perret in Paris before a Behrens stint beside Gropius and Mies. A 1911 Orient journey filled nearly eighty sketchbooks; Dom-Ino from 1914 to 1915 imagined free façades on slab-and-column grids later codified as Five Points. The Schwob villa commission ended in lawsuits yet filled his books with proud photographs.
Settling in Paris in 1917 with cousin Pierre Jeanneret, he and Amédée Ozenfant launched Purism and L'Esprit Nouveau; the 1920 pseudonym marked deliberate self-reinvention. Furniture such as the LC4 chaise and LC1 chair spread the metal-and-leather gospel across interiors. He sought denser cities' relief, yet critics damn indifference to existing fabric, social texture, and equality, alongside documented ties to Mussolini-era politics, antisemitic currents, and eugenic talk.
Indian Chandigarh let him stamp government forms onto a new capital; seventeen projects across seven countries entered UNESCO's Modern Movement listing in 2016. Painter as well as planner, he left Purist still lifes beside the white villas of the machine age. The right angle and compass—Masonic echoes from home—remained his catechism for a century that still argues whether his celebrated machine for living liberated residents or flattened cherished human streets.
Source: Le Corbusier
