Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret

Born -6th October 1887, La Chaux-de Fonds, SwitzerlandDied - August 27, 1965(1965-08-27) (aged 77) FranceNationality – Swiss , France.

•He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. •Later commentators have criticized Le Corbusier's monoliths as soulless and expressive of his arrogance in pioneering his form of architecture.•His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, and one each in North and South America. •He was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer, and modern furniture designer.

• Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, a dial painter in the town's renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, a musician and piano teacher.•His family's Calvinism, love of the arts, and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier•Studied at the La-Chaux-de-Fonds Art School under Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. •His architecture teacher in the Art School was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest houses.•In his early years he would frequently escape the somewhat provincial atmosphere of his hometown by traveling around Europe. About 1907, he traveled to Paris, where he found work in the office of Auguste Perret, the French pioneer of reinforced concrete. •In 1908, He studied architecture in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann. Between October 1910 and March 1911, he worked near Berlin for the renowned architect Peter Behrens, where he might have met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. He became fluent in German. Both of these experiences proved influential in his later career.•Later in 1911, he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Greece and Turkey, filling sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw, including many famous sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923) ("Towards an Architecture," but usually translated into English as "Towards a New Architecture").

Early life

•Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds during World War I, not returning to Paris until the war was over. •During these four years in Switzerland, he worked on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques •He proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs supported by a minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns around the edges, with a stairway providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan.•This design became the foundation for most of his architecture for the next ten years. Soon he would begin his own architectural practice with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), a partnership that would last until 1940.

5 Points of modern architecture1. Terrace garden2. Flat roof 3. Column free plan unencumbered by

structural partition4. Free standing façade 5. Continuous , horizontal strip of

windows

The Modulor Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion

Ideas

•In 1918, Le Corbusier met the Cubist painter, Amédée Ozenfant, in whom he recognized a kindred spirit.•Ozenfant encouraged him to paint, and the two began a period of collaboration.•Rejecting Cubism as irrational and "romantic," the pair jointly published their manifesto, Après le cubisme and established a new artistic movement, Purism. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier established the Purist journal L'Esprit nouveau. He was good friends with the Cubist artist Fernand Léger.

Early career life

•For a number of years French officials had been unsuccessful in dealing with the squalor of the growing Parisian slums, and Le Corbusier sought efficient ways to house large numbers of people in response to the urban housing crisis. •He believed that his new, modern architectural forms would provide a new organizational solution that would raise the quality of life for the lower classes.• His Immeubles Villas (1922) was such a project that called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of the other, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms and kitchen, as well as a garden terrace. •In 1922, he presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants .

Urbanization

•The centerpiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story, cruciform skyscrapers; steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. •These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces.• At the center was a huge transportation hub, that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and at the top, an airport. He had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. •Le Corbusier segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation•As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low-story, zigzag apartment blocks (set far back from the street amid green space), housed the inhabitants.

Against his doctor's orders, on August 27, 1965, Le Corbusier went for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. His body was found by bathers and he was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. It was assumed that he suffered a heart attack, at the age of seventy-seven. His death rites took place at the courtyard of the Louvre Palace on September 1, 1965 under the direction of writer and thinker André Malraux, who was at the time France's Minister of Culture. He was buried alongside his wife in the grave he had designated at Roquebrune.

Death

•A modernist villa by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeannret for Pierre and Emilie Savoy , built between 1928-1931.•The Savoy's lived in the villa till 1940 but left during World War II.•The villa was passed to French state property , and after surviving several plans of demolition , it was again renovated by Le Corbusier in 1985•Previously the building was residential but after renovation it became modernist monumental building •The building was inspired by machinery.

Villa Savoye

Ground floor First floor

The design features of the Villa Savoy include:

•Modular design -- the result of Corbu's researches into mathematics, architecture (the golden section), and human proportion•“Pilotis" -- the house is raised on stilts to separate it from the earth, and to use the land efficiently. These also suggest a modernized classicism.•no historical ornament •Abstract sculptural design•Pure color -- white on the outside, a color with associations of newness, purity, simplicity, and health (LeCorbusier earlier wrote a book entitled, When the Cathedrals were White), and planes of subtle color in the interior living areas•A very open interior plan dynamic , non-traditional transitions between floors -- spiral staircases and ramps•Built-in furniture•Ribbon windows (echoing industrial architecture, but also providing openness and light)•Roof garden, with both plantings and architectural (sculptural) shapes•Integral garage (the curve of the ground floor of the house is based on the turning radius of the 1927 Citroen)

Notre Dame de Haut

•Notre dame de haut is a shrine for roman catholic church at ronchamp , france•Most extreme design of le corbusier’s late style.•The chapel is a simple design with 2 entrances , a main altar & 3 chapels beneath towers.•The revious chapel which was a 4th century chritian chapel was destroyed in world war II•It was reconstructed by le corbusier

• The structure is mainly made of concrete and stone .•The building is enclosed by thick walls with upturned roof supported on columns embedded within the walls•2 concrete membrane separated by a space of 6’11’’ on which the roof stands which is well insulated and water tight•This roof, both insulating and watertight, is supported by short struts which form part of a vertical surface of concrete covered with "gunite” and which, in addition, brace the walls of old Vosges stone provided by the former chapel which was destroyed by the bombings. •These walls which are without buttresses follow, in plan, the curvilinear forms calculated to provide stability to this rough masonry.

•A space of several centimeters between the shell of the roof and the vertical envelope of the walls furnishes a significant entry for daylight. •The floor of the chapel follows the natural slope of the hill down towards the altar .• Certain parts, in particular those upon which the interior and exterior altars rest, are of beautiful white stone from Bourgogne, as are the altars themselves.

•The towers are constructed of stone masonry and are capped by cement domes. The vertical elements of the chapel are surfaced with mortar sprayed on with a cement gun and then white-washed - both on the interior and exterior. •The concrete shell of the roof is left rough, just as it comes from the formwork. •Water tightness is effected by a built-up roofing with an exterior cladding of aluminum. •The interior walls are white; the ceiling grey; the bench of African wood created by Savina; the communion bench is of cast iron made by the foundries of the Lure. •Small pieces of stained glass are set deep within the walls, which are sometimes ten feet thick. The glass glows likes deep-set rubies and emeralds and amethysts and jewels of all colors.

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