🇨🇭Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret — who would rename himself Le Corbusier, after a distant ancestor, in 1920 — was born in 1887 in the watchmaking town of La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura mountains. He trained as a watch engraver, but his teacher, recognizing the breadth of his visual intelligence, steered him toward architecture. He never attended a university architecture school; instead he educated himself through a series of working pilgrimages across Europe, studying in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann, in Paris with Auguste Perret (the great innovator of reinforced concrete), and in Berlin with Peter Behrens (whose office simultaneously employed Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius). These encounters gave him the vocabulary of European modernism, but the synthesis was entirely his own.

In 1917 he settled permanently in Paris. He began painting in the Purist style he developed with the artist Amédée Ozenfant — a kind of corrected Cubism, stripping the movement of its emotional turbulence and insisting on clarity, order, and the machine aesthetic. His paintings and his buildings shared the same underlying logic: everything reduced to its essential geometry, everything lit by a single rational light. In 1923 he published Vers une Architecture ("Towards an Architecture"), arguably the most influential architectural manifesto of the twentieth century. It proclaimed that "a house is a machine for living in," that the engineer's aesthetic was superior to the architect's ornament, and that the right angles and clean surfaces of ocean liners, grain silos, and automobiles were the formal precedents for a new architecture.

His Five Points of Architecture, published in 1927, were the operating system of modernism: the pilotis (slender concrete columns lifting the building free of the ground), the free plan (made possible by the separation of structure from partition walls), the free facade (the exterior wall no longer structural, therefore freely arranged), the ribbon window (a horizontal band of glass running the full length of the building), and the roof garden (the building's footprint returned to nature above). The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1929–1931) was the machine on which all five points ran simultaneously — a white cubic box levitated on pilotis above a meadow, wrapped in ribbon windows, approached by a circular ramp, topped by a sculptural rooftop garden of curved screens and sunbathing decks. It is one of the most visited buildings in France.

The interwar decades established him as the central figure of the Modern Movement. He collaborated on the League of Nations competition (losing, controversially), designed the Swiss Pavilion and the Salvation Army hostel in Paris, and produced visionary urban proposals — most notoriously the Plan Voisin of 1925, which proposed demolishing most of central Paris north of the Seine and replacing it with eighteen identical cross-shaped skyscrapers in a park. The proposal was never built, but it demonstrated with shattering clarity the utopian and authoritarian tendencies simultaneously embedded in his thought: the belief that the architect, given sufficient power, could solve not only the housing problem but the human problem.

After the Second World War, he received the commission that allowed him to test his urban theories at full scale: the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952), a slab of 337 apartments, shops, a hotel, a gymnasium, and a rooftop running track — a vertical city for 1,600 people. The building was a revelation: its facades of raw exposed concrete (béton brut, the origin of the word "Brutalism"), its scale, and its ambition were both exhilarating and troubling. Five versions were eventually built across Europe. In 1951 he received the commission to design an entire new capital city for the Indian state of Punjab: Chandigarh. He designed the Capitol Complex — the High Court, the Secretariat, and the Assembly — in a monumental late style that had shed the white Purist surfaces of his early career for raw concrete and expressive plastic forms. Chandigarh is one of the few examples in history of a great architect designing a great city.

Le Corbusier died in 1965, drowning in the Mediterranean while swimming near his tiny cabanon retreat at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin — a hut of precisely 3.66 by 3.66 metres that he had designed for himself as the minimum unit of habitation, a private joke at the expense of the grand urban theories. His legacy is enormous, contested, and inescapable. The seventeen buildings and sites inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2016 span seven countries and four continents. Every apartment building on pilotis, every curtain-wall office block, every flat roof bearing a terrace — all live in the formal world he invented. He was simultaneously a visionary and a tyrant, a liberator and an authoritarian, the man who freed architecture from its Victorian shackles and the man who, in doing so, licensed some of the worst housing estates of the twentieth century. No architect since has been able to ignore him.