Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jean­neret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzer­land, in 1887, trained initially as a watch engraver before turning to archi­tec­ture through appren­tice­ships in Europe, includ­ing periods with Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens. By the 1920s, he had emerged as a central figure in the devel­op­ment of archi­tec­tural modernism, publish­ing theo­ret­i­cal works such as Vers une archi­tec­ture (1923) and advanc­ing a program grounded in stan­dard­iza­tion, propor­tion, and the logic of industrial production.

Working in Paris, Le Corbusier devel­oped a series of houses and urban propos­als that rede­fined domes­tic space, codi­fied in his ​“Five Points of a New Archi­tec­ture” and exem­pli­fied by villas of the late 1920s. His collab­o­ra­tion with Char­lotte Perriand and Pierre Jean­neret extended these prin­ci­ples into furni­ture, where tubular steel construc­tion and stan­dard­ized compo­nents paral­leled his archi­tec­tural concerns. Postwar projects, includ­ing the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (1947 – 52), reflect a shift toward béton brut and collec­tive housing. Across his work, Le Corbusier posi­tioned archi­tec­ture as a social and tech­ni­cal disci­pline, closely aligned with the trans­for­ma­tions of the twentieth century.