Le Corbusier

Charles Edouard Jeaneret was born in the Swiss town of la Chaux-des-Fonds on the 6th of October 1887. He took his eventual name Le Corbusier in 1920. He came from a family of watch engravers in Switzerland, and his mother was a musician. He grew to maturity in thr intellectually stimulating city of Paris, in the early decade of this century and adopted French nationality. He was not only an architect and a planner but a painter , a sculptor, in secret a poet. Above all, Corbusier was a great humanist whose primary preoccupation was the welfare of man.

Le Corbusier was never schooled officially. He was influenced by many, the first was Auguste Perret, whom taught him about the use of reinforced concrete. He was also influenced by Peter Behrens whom he worked with in 1910. His biggest influence though came from the travelling he often did. Learnt many lessons from classical architecture of Greece especialy Acropolis in Athens and the Europan cities. He would visit the Parthenon daily and draw sketches of it from all angles. His mind was full of these classical over tones. He was also greatly persuaded by cubism painters and painted several works himself.

Le Corbusier was an architect with a great imagination, also a city planner with a vision of an ideal city. His designs combined functionalism of modernism with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He designed with the use of the grid, cube, quite often used simple geometric forms, the primary forms of the square, circle and the triangle in simple arrangements. The forms appeared often to be solid chunks of concrete that had been carved and cut like an artist molds clay. Through articulation, sculpture of space and volumes, and contrasting light that offered generous shadows, he succeeded. He emphasized the function to tradition in providing examples for contemporary purposes. Once he stated that the past was his only true master. He saw and designed the building in not 2 or 3 but 4 dimensions. The later being nature which brought time and change. Nature was sunlight, fresh air, health. He wanted to tune his architecture with the developments of the machine age, he designed the building as a "machine for living". His goal was to reinstall in our society the conditions of nature which had been disrupted; sun, space and greenery.

In 1911 he wrote, " I gabble elementry geometry; I am possessed with the color white, the cube, the sphere, the cylinder and the pyramid. Prisms rise and balance each other, setting up rhythms in midday sun the cubes open out into surface, at nightfall a rainbow seems to rise from forms in the morning they are real, casting light and shadow and sharply outlined as a drawing. We should no longer be artist, but rather penetrate the age, fuse it untill we are indistinguishable. We too are distiguished, great and worthy of past ages. We shall even do better still, tht is my belief."

Le Corbusier described five points of his architecture as pilotis, roof garden, free plan, free facade, and ribbon windows. He is one of the most żnfluential architectes of our time.

He died on the 27th of August, 1965 while swimming at Cap Martin.