1887 La Chaux-de-Fonds
1965 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

Le Corbusier, whose real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, was born at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1887. From 1900 he studied painting at the local École d'Art and from 1904 architecture. In 1907 Le Corbusier worked for Josef Hofmann in Vienna, where he also made the acquaintance of Adolf Loos. Another important influence on he was working in Paris in 1909 for over a year in the practice of Auguste Perret, a pioneering exponent of building with reinforced concrete. During that stay in Paris Le Corbusier also visited Tony Garnier, an architect and urban planner, in Lyon. It was not long before he was focusing on modern reinforced concrete architecture. In 1917 Le Corbusier moved to Paris. Since he only had a few commissions in architecture, he spent time painting, producing mainly still lifes. In 1919 Le Corbusier joined the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the poet Paul Dermée to found the journal "L'Esprit Nouveau"; there he began using his pseudonym in 1920. In 1922 Le Corbusier produced an urban-planning concept for a Ville Contemporaine - a "contemporary city with a population of three million"; in 1925 he collaborated with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, on designing a two-storeyed pavilion for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The avant-garde architecture of that pavilion was complemented by furnishings of functional design and paintings by Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Léger, Lipchitz and others. By 1927 Le Corbusier was among the leading practitioners of the New Architecture designing the housing for the Weißenhof Setttlement in Stuttgart. From 1927 he produced, in collaboration with P. Jeanneret and C. Perriand, designs for functional furniture - including the LC4 chaise longue - which they showed at the 1929 Paris Salon d'Automne. Around 1942 he formulated his "Modulor" theory. That was Le Corbusier's term for a system of proportion based on the Golden Mean and the male figure for use in determining the proportions of building units. His architectural designs, especially his large-scale urban-planning projects, were based on it. Modulor was intended to facilitate architecture on a human scale based on an objective system - even today this doctrine is one of the most controversial of Le Corbusier's theoretical approaches to architecture. Le Corbusier also made substantial contributions to architecture theory as a co-founder of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), a think tank of Internationalism which first convened in 1928. One outcome of the CIAM meetings was the "Chartre d'Athènes", drawn up in 1933 but not published until 1942, which contained important guidelines for urban planning. In 1952 the first Unité d'Habitation was finished in Marseilles after Le Corbusier's Modulor, followed by other modular residential units at Nantes and Berlin-Charlottenburg, where they were known as the "Wohnmaschine". Le Corbusier designed the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamps in 1955.

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

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