Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jean­neret, defined the trajec­tory of archi­tec­tural modernism. His prac­tice was grounded in a program of stan­dard­iza­tion and the appli­ca­tion of indus­trial logic to the domes­tic sphere. By the late 1920s, he had codi­fied his method­ol­ogy into the ​“Five Points of a New Archi­tec­ture,” a system that empha­sized struc­tural inde­pen­dence and the liber­a­tion of the floor plan.

His collab­o­ra­tion with Char­lotte Perriand and Pierre Jean­neret extended these archi­tec­tural prin­ci­ples to furni­ture, utiliz­ing tubular steel and modular compo­nents to create objects that func­tioned as ​“equip­ment” for living. In his postwar work, exem­pli­fied by the Unité d’Habitation, he moved toward the use of béton brut, or raw concrete, empha­siz­ing the tactile and sculp­tural weight of the mate­r­ial. Through­out his output, Le Corbusier main­tained a focus on propor­tion and the social impli­ca­tions of design, posi­tion­ing the built envi­ron­ment as a precise tech­ni­cal response to the require­ments of the twentieth century.