Once upon a (Corbusier's) time...

1887 Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, he didn't change his name to Le Corbusier until much later, with the belief that everyone can reinvent themselves.

1900 Entered the Art School in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, where he received arts and crafts training.

1907 Visited the Carthusian monastery of Ema, near Florence. These were the beginnings of his studies for a dwelling at human scale. From this he envisioned a modern city majestically set on a hill. Its' vision stayed with him forever and he returned to the site again in 1910. He found it to be the noblest silhouette in the landscape, and the uninterrupted crown of monks' cells left him flabbergasted. Each cell had a view on the plain, and opened on a lower level on an entirely closed garden. Each cell opened by a door and wicket at its’ back end onto a circular street which was covered by an arcade (the cloister). The monastery services (ie. prayer, visits, food and funerals) operated through here. Corbusier thought he'd never seen such a happy interpretation of a dwelling before.

1908 Worked a bit with Auguste Perret in Paris.

1910-11 Completed a study on the Decorative Art Movement in Germany.

1912 His Villa Jeanneret, and Villa Favre-Jacot were strongly influenced by Behrens's neoclassical houses.

1914-18 World War I lasted far longer than expected, extensive damage done to people and buildings. Many were trumped into thinking it'd be short enough to start rebuilding destroyed houses early.

1914 Dom-ino frame, first embodiment of his idea for building in cellular units: concrete as a means towards the industrialization of the building process. This house was a response to replacing ruined houses during the war. Although it never served this purpose its' form evolved for and was used in his later projects.

1916 Villa Schwob was strongly influenced by Perret's use of a concrete frame.

1917 Moved to Paris (permanently).

1920 Citrohan House project.

1920-5 Founded L'Esprit Nouveau with Paul Dermée (who was later kicked out) and irregularly published the magazine. Wrote under pseudonyms, started using Le Corbusier. Co-wrote with Ozenfant. Its' principle theme studied problems in the relation between art and industrial society (Corb's magazine believed the new aesthetic would be classical in spirit -so the pages were often, juxtaposed with the old and the new). The work questioned need for decoration of any kind, praising work that served, but didn't master human needs. It covered topics from architecture to almost all cultural aspects of modern life. The two writers came up with an interesting idea, that "the complete man is both sensual and cerebral." He realized the need to exercise both instinctual and intellectual sides of his character (thus often spending mornings studio painting, and afternoons doing more pragmatic affairs).

1922 Ville Contemporaine schematic proposed a city of 3 million people on an ideal site, to address the issues of hygiene and circulation. To slow the city's increasing congestion and the consequent escape of inhabitants to the suburbs, Corbusier saw it necessary to increase the city's density but decrease the area covered by buildings. Modern technology (ie. American skyscrapers) allowed the combination of the Garden City advantages with those of the traditional city, and therefore the suburbs move into the city instead.

1923 Maison Ozenfant was associated with purism and a strong order in composition.

1925 At the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (aimed at reasserting French dominance in the field) Corbusier's pavilion interior make-up challenged the tradition design view point. It was a generic apartment, of the post-war mass consumption and production economy type. Corbusier used fixed and moveable furniture (Loos' idea) but expressed by the industrial age. The furniture was of objet-type class.

1927 Published his Five Points for a New Architecture.

1927 His public buildings (or proposals) around this time were broken up into component parts (mainly linear bars containing repeating modules like offices, and centralized volumes i.e., for public assembly).

League of Nations Building for Geneva design competition that remained unbuilt. Although his and Jeanneret's submission was one of the few serious modern and practical proposals (ie. the existing landscape had been respected as much as possible through his use of pilotis, so that informal gardens could continue beneath and beyond most of the new structures) it didn’t win. Despite this disappointment, it created lots of uproar that helped advance the cause of modern architecture, and equally importantly, Corbusier's career.

1928 Corbusier, Giedion, and other leading architects of the modern movement came together to form CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne). At its' beginnings it was mostly a defensive alliance of architects and planners who believed that the United Nations competition and other fiascos required them to stick together. The first meeting discussed principles such as "city planning", "modern technology and its consequences", and "education of young architects". It was powerful in the modern movement, and its influence could still be felt in the 70s in certain architecture schools.

1928-1932 Admired fishermen building their huts (intuition leading followed by reason), at Le Piquey near La Rochelle where he spent many vacations and wrote about them in Une Maison, un Palais his long interest with vernacular architecture became apparent. Participated in Neo-Syndicalist group.

1929 His typological analysis of his work revealed his four basic house types. Showed concept of a Platonic exterior, a functional interior and the dialectic between the two (forms of order existing side by side).

1928-31 Villa Savoye, Poissy. The dialiectic tension (interior vs. exterior) climax. His five principles of new architecture were all realized, using contemporary and functional materials . He named it The Light-Filled Hours to reflect the bright and free life modern architecture had in mind, and acheived here. Corb's architecture embodied the spirit as a treatment of form proposed for a new way of living.

1929 After his lecture tour of South America, he became involved in a series of very different urban projects from his previous city plans.

1929 Ville Radieuse was a schematic design for an ideal site. Projects for Rio de Janeiro (1929) and Algiers (1932-42) were for actual sites, and incorporated his new-found interest in “l'homme reel”, and regional cultures based on local customs and geographies. He made his earlier urbanism forms more sensitive to local topographies and with monumental, collective form provided more private life.

1929-33 Cité de Refuge (Paris).

1929-35 Centrosoyus building (Moscow).

1930s Extensive travels in South America and Algeria led to a series of urban projects and proposals.

1930-5 Vernacular forms (pitched roof and masonry wall) made their appearance in several small rural houses by Corbusier and Jeanneret. They weren’t just vernacular architecture, but used natural materials reinterpreted in terms of modernist aesthetics.

1931 Palace of the Soviets for Moscow (design competition unbuilt).

1931 Villa de Mandrot, another example of vernacular models with modernist aesthetics.

1933 Ville Radieuse work and domestic life, nature and technology were juxtaposed, work and life planned for high-rise structures, cultivation of the spirit and body in the parkland.

1934-8 Radiant Farm, Village Coopératif, linked unrealized projects where modern building technologies and Modernist aesthetics were applied to agriculture (part of national plan for agrarian reform).

1936-65 Modernism went global. Totalitarian states preferred buildings that reinforced central state authority. In communist countries, architectural innovation was limited.

1939-45 World War II. Many of Europe's scientific and artistic geniuses left for America. Period of hitherto unimaginable horrors.

1946-52 Unité d'habitation in Marseilles successfully incorporated many of Corbusier's radical ideals. It was built vertically, used modern construction technology, and it was set in landscaped open spaces thus increasing housing densities while maintaining healthy, green spaces for recreation. It was built around a philosophy of unity of mutual understanding and respect. He used weather-boarded and bush-hammered concrete, which created a robust, primitive finish that provides good sound insulation (which is considerably important to allow and maintain the part-solitary lifestyle l'unité can accommodate). It was originally intended as low cost housing even though today it houses richer folk.

1950s Europe didn't like the influence of US on its' traditional culture, there was a disillusion worldwide with the effect of design and manufacture on socio-cultural implications (crises of values arose)

1950-5 Work on Pilgramage Church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. It was an example of non-historicist monumentality where buildings are more representative than utilitaria. By this time many of the modern architects who previously employed such geometrical shapes as boxes and cubes began creating more organic forms. The chapel at Ronchamp stands out as a bulbous shape of concrete reflecting the landscape of hill shapes surrounding it. Southern-orientated coloured windows project colour to its' interiors. Corbusier carefully planned the theological program (Mogens Krustrup wrote an entire book discovering the meaning of one door). Ronchamp's form was generated to stir "the psych-physiology of the feelings." Here the modulor is both a form of measurement and experience. He tried to immerse each visitor with a sense of the transforming and restorative power of harmony through colour, sound and form believing behaviour could be changed through affected feelings.

1951 Chandigarh plans began. He designed the city according to the principles of CIAM, which called for functional order. Corbusier's material choice included exposed brick, boulder stone masonry and concrete surfaces that together formed geometrical structures. His work included among other buildings the High Court. The façade to the plaza shows an inspiring composition of cutouts and niches, that reconce the courts' size with the human scale, but still express the force of the law.

1952 Built le Cabanon for his wife on Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in France. Believed it would provide her with happiness and cure her alcoholic maladies. Corbusier himself spent many summers there.

1956-9 Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, a Dominican monastery at Eveux, near Lyons. Building of small but relatively comfortable monk cells, his studies of the human body and proportions paid off. Very influential to many modern architects.

1963 Maison de l'Hommer design for Heidi Weber in Zurich. It was prefabricated, industrialized, and modern.

1960s (late) International economy increasingly unstable, caused disillusionment with materiality, the hitherto abuse of technology and resources to political and economic ends resulted in a wave of revisionist tendencies (many involving design).

1965 Corbusier's death, touched thousands, even his long-time creative rivals (ie. Picasso).


-Andjela Tatarovic


Information Sources:


Blake, Peter. The Master Builders. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1976.


Coloquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press.


Irving, Mark, Mary Cooch, Lucinda Hawksley, Carol King, Fiona Plowman, Frank Ritter, Jane Simmonds, ed. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die. New York: Quintessence, 2007.


Samuel, Flora. Le Corbusier architect and feminist. England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2004.


Smith, Viginia. Forms in Modernism A Visual Set. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2005.


Sparke, Penny. An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1986.