Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was the professional name of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-French architect and urban planner whose work shaped twentieth-century modernism. Born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura, he trained at the local art school under Charles L'Eplattenier and travelled through Italy, Vienna, and the eastern Mediterranean before settling in Paris in 1917.

With his cousin Pierre Jeanneret he opened a studio at 35 rue de Sèvres in 1922 and adopted the pen name Le Corbusier the next year. His 1923 book Vers une architecture set out the call for a house as a machine for living, and his Five Points of a New Architecture, formulated in 1927, listed pilotis, free plan, free facade, ribbon window, and roof garden as the elements of modernist design. The Villa Savoye at Poissy, completed in 1931, became its showcase.

After the Second World War he built the Unité d'habitation in Marseille in 1952, the chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp in 1955, and the monastery of La Tourette near Lyon in 1960. Between 1951 and 1965 he planned the new Punjab capital at Chandigarh in India, designing the Capitol Complex with its Assembly, High Court, and Open Hand monument.

He drowned while swimming off Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in 1965. UNESCO inscribed seventeen of his buildings on the World Heritage List in 2016. His urbanism remains contested for its scale and his interwar political associations.

The pen name Le Corbusier was adapted from his maternal grandfather's surname Lecorbésier and means roughly the crow-like one. He used it as a masculine professional identity throughout his career.