Le Corbusier biography
Synopsis
Born on October 6, 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier was an internationally influential Swiss architect and the first architect to make a studied use of rough-cast concrete, a technique that satisfied his taste for asceticism and for sculptural forms. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture and was their most able propagandist.
CONTENTS
Synopsis
Education and early years.
The first period.
The war years.
The second period.
(born October 6, 1887, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland—died August 27, 1965, Cap Martin, France) internationally influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture and was their most able propagandist in his numerous writings. In his architecture he joined the functionalist aspirations of his generation with a strong sense of expressionism. He was the first architect to make a studied use of rough-cast concrete, a technique that satisfied his taste for asceticism and for sculptural forms.
Education and early years.
Le Corbusier was born in a small town in the mountainous Swiss Jura region, since the 18th century the world's centre of precision watchmaking. All his life he was marked by the harshness of these surroundings and the puritanism of a Protestant environment. At 13 years of age, Le Corbusier left primary school to learn the enamelling and engraving of watch faces, his father's trade, at the cole des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. There, Charles L'Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier later called his only teacher, taught him art history, drawing, and the naturalist aesthetics of Art Nouveau.
It was L'Eplattenier who decided that Le Corbusier, having completed three years of studies, should become an architect and gave him his first practice on local projects. From 1907 to 1911, on his advice, Le Corbusier undertook a series of trips that played a decisive role in the education of this self-taught architect. During these years of travel through central Europe and the Mediterranean, he made three major architectural discoveries. The Charterhouse of Ema at Galluzzo, in Tuscany, provided a contrast between vast collective spaces and “individual living cells” that formed the basis for his conception of residential buildings. Through the 16th-century Late Renaissance architecture of Andrea Palladio in the Veneto region of Italy and the ancient sites of Greece, he discovered classical proportion. Finally, popular architecture in the Mediterranean and in the Balkan peninsula gave him a repertory of geometric forms and also taught him the handling of light and the use of landscape as an architectural background.
At the age of 30 he returned to live in Paris, where his formation was completed a year later when he met the painter and designer Amédée Ozenfant, who introduced him to sophisticated contemporary art. Ozenfant initiated Le Corbusier into Purism, his new pictorial aesthetic that rejected the complicated abstractions of Cubism and returned to the pure, simple geometric forms of everyday objects. In 1918 they wrote and published together the Purist manifesto, Aprs le cubisme. In 1920, with the poet Paul Dermée, they founded a polemic avant-garde review, L'Esprit Nouveau. Open to the arts and humanities, with brilliant collaborators, it presented ideas in architecture and city planning already
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