Le Corbusier

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures but of entire concepts of modern living. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America.

Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier lacked formal training...

Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier lacked formal training as an architect. He was attracted to the visual arts; at the age of fifteen, he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, which taught the applied arts connected with watchmaking. Three years later, he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the painter Charles L’Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. Le Corbusier wrote later that L’Eplattenier had made him “a man of the woods” and taught him painting from nature.

Le Corbusier's paintings started shortly after he moved to Paris in 1917. The following year, he met Amédée Ozenfant, a French painter related to the cubist movement in art. Pablo Picasso was a pioneer of that artistic trend, based on geometrized figures, almost to the point of becoming abstract objects.

Until 1920, Le Corbusier used his birth name Charles-Edouard Jeanneret but decided to adopt his famous pseudonym that year in a search for reinventing himself.

Le Corbusier and Ozenfant together defined a new movement in art, which they called purism and also established L'Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), an art magazine published from 1920 until 1925 that they used to promote their art. Purist art was an interpretation of cubism and stated that art admitted all deformations of the objects and consisted on the conception of pure elements. Purism also believed that the search for nature shouldn't mean copying it.

During the years of L'Esprit Nouveau, most of Le Corbusier's paintings followed the ideas of purism. The motifs were usually still lives (artistic compositions of different inanimate objects like flowers, food, and man-made objects) and representations of single inanimate objects. He painted ordinary objects disposed of ornaments in what he considered their purest form and commonly used oil on canvas for his work.

Le Corbusier died of a heart attack at age 77 in 1965 after swimming at the French Riviera. Le Corbusier designed an art gallery beside the lake in Zürich for gallery owner Heidi Weber in 1962–1967. Now called the Centre Le Corbusier, it is one of his last finished works.