Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret)

In 1923, in his book Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), architect and designer Le Corbusier declared houses to be “machines for living in.” While this phrase speaks to his belief that good design should be functional, Le Corbusier was equally invested in marrying utilitarianism with “poetry, beauty, and harmony.” Rejecting earlier movements like Art Nouveau for their celebration of ornament, historical nostalgia, and lack of functionality, he embraced the work of American engineers—in the form of machines, factory complexes, and grain silos—as a foundation for a new, modern architectural language.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted the name “Le Corbusier” (derived from a family surname, Lecorbésier) for his architectural persona in 1920. A prolific writer and lecturer, he founded the influential magazine L’Esprit nouveau with French painter Amédée Ozenfant and Belgian writer Paul Dermée in 1919. In the journal’s first several issues, Le Corbusier articulated his thoughts about “volume,” “surface,” and “plan,” which he considered the central components of modern architecture and urban planning. He republished these essays in Vers une architecture, in which he also famously described the "five points of architecture”: pilotis (reinforced-concrete columns), the free plan, the free facade, horizontal bands of windows, and the roof garden.

In 1932, the architect incorporated these concepts into the Villa Savoye, a weekend house outside Paris. He also expanded the application of his five points to mass housing, most successfully in the form of the Unité d’habitation, a model for concrete apartment housing; its best-known iteration was built in 1945 in Marseille, France. The Unité was the only realized architectural component of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), a proposal for a utopian megalopolis that would allow for the seamless integration of humankind with nature and the 20th century’s technological innovations.

In the 1950s, Le Corbusier came to more widely embrace curvilinear, organic forms alongside the linear geometry that had informed much of his early work. While this shift can be seen in projects such as the Chandigarh Assembly Hall, nowhere is it more evident than in his Notre-Dame du Haut, a chapel constructed in 1955 in Ronchamp, France. Its curved masonry walls, created partially with rubble in reference to pre-industrial building techniques, are punctuated by an irregular array of stained-glass windows.

Le Corbusier’s emphasis on the purity of geometric form and revolutionary work in reinforced concrete still loom large within the field of architecture today. He was also a visual artist, producing work ranging from Cubist paintings to figurative tapestries. He may have emphasized simplified, streamlined volumes and shapes, but his aims were anything but modest; good architecture, he argued, has the capacity to reach to the core of human existence. In his words, “The architect, through the ordonnance of forms [...] determines the diverse movements of our minds and our hearts; it is then that we experience beauty.”

Note: Opening quote is from Le Corbusier, Almanach d'Architecture Moderne (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crès et Cie, 1925), 5, as reproduced and cited in Boyer, M. Christine, and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier : Homme de Lettres. 1st ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 19.

Mallory Cohen, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, 2023