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Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, b. La Chaux-de-
fonds, Switzerland, Oct. 6, 1887, d. 1965, was a Swiss-French architect who
played a decisive role in the development of modern architecture. He first
studied (1908-10) in Paris with August Perret, and then worked (1910) for
several months in the Berlin studio of industrial designer Peter Behrens,
where he met the future Bauhaus leaders Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter
Gropius. Shortly after World War I, Jeanneret turned to painting and
founded, with Amedee Ozenfant, the purist offshoot of cubism. With the
publication (1923) of his influential collection of polemical essays, Vers
une architecture (Towards a New Architecture, Eng. repr. 1970), he adopted
the name Le Corbusier and devoted his full energy and talent to creating a
radically modern form of architectural expression.
In the 1920s and '30s, Le Corbusier's most significant work was in
urban planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922),
the Plan Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-
36), he advanced ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-
rise communities proposed by earlier garden city planners. During this 20-
year span he also built many villas and several small apartment complexes
and office buildings. In these hard-edged, smooth-surfaced, geometric
volumes, he created a language of what he called "pure prisms"--rectangular
blocks of concrete, steel, and glass, usually raised above the ground on
stilts, or pilotis, and often endowed with roof gardens intended to
compensate for the loss of usable floor area at ground level.
After World War II, Le Corbusier moved away from purism and toward the
so-called new brutalism, which utilized rough-hewn forms of concrete,
stone, stucco, and glass. Newly recognized in official art circles as an
important 20th-century innovator, he represented (1946) France on the
planning team for the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City-
-a particularly satisfying honor for an architect whose prize-winning
design (1927) for the League of Nations headquarters had been rejected.
Simultaneously, he was commissioned by the French government to plan and
build his prototypical Vertical City in Marseille. The result was the Unite
d'Habitation (1946-52)--a huge block of 340 "superimposed villas" raised
above the ground on massive pilotis, laced with two elevated thoroughfares
of shops and other services and topped by a roof-garden gymnasium that
contained, among other things, a sculptured playground of concrete forms
and a peripheral track for joggers.
His worldwide reputation led to a commission from the Indian
government to plan the city of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab,
and to design and build the Government Center (1950-70) and several of the
city's other structures. These poetic, handcrafted buildings represented a
second, more humanistic phase in Le Corbusier's work that also was
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