Famously known as Le Corbusier, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was a Swiss-French architect (1887-1965). His architectural excellence can be seen in buildings throughout Europe, India, and America. He was instrumental in the development of modern architecture and the Urbanism movement.
Famously known as Le Corbusier, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was a Swiss-French architect (1887-1965). His architectural excellence can be seen in buildings throughout Europe, India, and America. He was instrumental in the development of modern architecture and the Urbanism movement.
Le Corbusier studied visual arts at the La-Chaux-de-Fonds Art School. His architecture teacher was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier’s earliest house designs.
As a young scholar, he spent a lot of time travelling around Europe. In 1907, he visited Italy, Budapest and Vienna. In 1908, he starting working for Auguste Perret, the French pioneer of reinforced concrete. It was at this stage that Le Corbusier began to explore his own ideas about art and architecture. In 1910, he worked in Berlin for the renowned architect Peter Behrens. During this time, Le Corbusier began to critically assess general living conditions of people. He believed that all people should have the opportunity to live as beautifully and peacefully as the monks he witnessed in the sanctuaries at the charterhouse.
Devoted to providing improved living conditions for residents in crowded cities, Le Corbusier founded the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) – an organisation that was committed to improving housing quality.
During 1011, Le Corbusier continued to travel to various European countries, filling 80 sketch pads with architectural inspirations that he encountered throughout his travels. He then worked for four in Switzerland, focusing on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. Among these was his project for the Domino House (1914–1915). This model proposed an open floor plan of concrete slabs supported by a minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns around the edges. A stairway providing access to each level was located on one side of the plan. This design became the foundation for most of his architecture over the next ten years.
In 1918, Le Corbusier met the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant. Rejecting Cubism as irrational and “romantic”, the Le Corbusier and Ozenfant co-published their manifesto, Après le cubisme, and established a new artistic movement known as Purism.
One of Le Corbusier’s most renowned residential designs was the Maison “Citrohan”. He proposed a three-floor structure, with a double-height living room, bedrooms on the second floor, and a kitchen on the third floor, as well as a sun terrace on the roof. The house used a rectangular plan, with exterior walls that were not filled by windows but left as white, stuccoed spaces. Le Corbusier designed many of these private houses for clients around Paris.
In 1922, he developed a new concept designed for three million people, Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City). This concept designed sixty-story, steel-framed office buildings encased in walls of glass. Referred to as towers in a park, these skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular, park-like green spaces. These designs continued to generate new urban ideas. In 1925, Le Cobusier hosted an exhibition Plan Voisin, in which he proposed the steel towers from the Contemporary City. His plan was largely criticised by French politicians and industrialists, and yet it did pave the way for a new structure and style for urban layouts.
In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism. He was highly praised by the US President Lyndon B. Johnson who said, “His influence was universal and his works are invested with a permanent quality possessed by those of very few artists in our history”.
Le Corbusier began diverting onto furniture design in 1928. He described furniture as works of art, saying “Long live the good taste manifested by choice, subtlety, proportion, and harmony”. He became world-renowned for his invention of the Grand Confort chair. The Grand Confort is a cube-shaped high armchair. It has leather cushions that are mounted inside chrome-plated steel. Described by Le Corbusier as the Cusion Baskets, these chairs have been designed with a modernist look and feel. They are more commonly referred to as the petit confort and grand confort depending on their size.
In 1964, Cassina S.p.A. of Milan acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture his furniture designs. Today many copies exist, but Cassina is still the only manufacturer authorized by the Fondation Le Corbusier to manufacture Le Corbusier’s timeless furniture designs.