A House Is A Machine For Living In: 13 Things About Le Corbusier

House at Weissenhof, by Le Corbusier, at Stuttgart, Germany, 1927

Shodan House, at Ahmedabad, India, 1956
1) He was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887. When he was 29, he went to Paris, where he soon after adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Le Corbusier, as his pseudonym. Jeanneret had been a small-town architect; Le Corbusier was a visionary. He believed that architecture had lost its way. Art Nouveau, all curves and sinuous decorations, had burned itself out in a brilliant burst of exuberance; the seductive Art Deco style promised to do the same. The Arts and Crafts movement had adherents all over Europe, but as the name implies, it was hardly representative of an industrial age. Le Corbusier maintained that this new age deserved a brand-new architecture. "We must start again from zero," he proclaimed.

The new architecture came to be known as the International Style. Of its many partisans — among them Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany, Theo van Doesburg in Holland — none was better known than Le Corbusier. He was a tireless proselytizer, addressing the public in manifestos, pamphlets, exhibitions and his own magazine.

2) Le Corbusier loved Manhattan. He loved its newness, he loved its Cartesian regularity, above all he loved its tall buildings. He had only one reservation, which he revealed on landing in New York City in 1935. The next day, a headline in the Herald Tribune informed its readers that the celebrated architect finds American skyscrapers much too small. Le Corbusier always thought big. He once proposed replacing a large part of the center of Paris with 18 sixty-story towers; that made headlines too. Witold Rybcynski

Le Corbusier shows his work Sculpture, in wood and iron, that is part of an exhibition at the Modern Arts Museum in Paris in 1953
Just as Descartes avoided any reference to previous thinkers in his pursuit of truth, so the rationally planned city pays no heed to the structures that preceded it. L'Enfant's plan for Washington, New York City's grid, Le Corbusier's boxes in the sky—these ordered visions are all the products, in Kingwell's view, of a hyper-rational "Cartesian" way of thinking. Even more troubling to him is the way that urban planners design their projects without taking ordinary citizens into consideration.From book review here.
3) International Style of architecture usually includes:
Square or rectangular footprint
Simple cubic "extruded rectangle" form
Windows running in broken horizontal rows forming a grid
All facade angles are 90 degrees.
4) The International style was a major architectural style of the 1920s and 1930s. The term usually refers to the buildings and architects of the formative decades of Modernism, before World War II. The term had its origin from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson written to record the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932 which identified, categorised and expanded upon characteristics common to Modernism across the world. As a result, the focus was more on the stylistic aspects of Modernism. Hitchcock's and Johnson's aims were to define a style of the time, which would encapsulate this modern architecture. They identified three different principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry and the expulsion of applied ornament. All the works which were displayed as part of the exhibition were carefully selected, as only works which strictly followed the set of rules were displayed.

National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan, completed March 1959.
5) "Unlike the confined urban locations of most of Le Corbusier's earlier houses, the openness of the Poissy site permitted a freestanding building and the full realization of his five-point program. Essentially the house comprises two contrasting, sharply defined, yet interpenetrating external aspects. The dominant element is the square single-storied box, a pure, sleek, geometric envelope lifted buoyantly above slender pilotis, its taut skin slit for narrow ribbon windows that run unbroken from corner to corner (but not over them, thus preserving the integrity of the sides of the square)."—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism




Le Corbusier described five guiding principles in his design:
6) Freestanding support pillars
7) Open floor plan independent from the supports
8) Vertical facade that is free from the supports
9) Long horizontal sliding windows
10) Roof gardens


11) United Nations Headquarters is one of my favourite areas in NYC. The complex was designed as a colaborative affair including board consisted of N.D. Bassov of the Soviet Union, Gaston Brunfaut (Belgium), Ernest Cormier (Canada), Le Corbusier (France/Switzerland), Liang Ssu-cheng (China), Sven Markelius (Sweden), Oscar Niemeyer (Brazil), Howard Robertson (United Kingdom), G.A. Soilleux (Australia), and Julio Villamajo (Uruguay).

12) "The museum is on pilotis through which the building is entered into an open court from which a ramp, similarly opened to the sky, leads to the exhibition levels. One enters the main level in a nave of spiral squares 14 metres wide, consisting of 7x7 m structural bays. All precautions are taken against the excessive temperature of the day. It is assumed that visits to the museum will be made particularly in the evening and night-time; they will wind up on the roof which will offer a wonderfully flowered surface formed by more than 45 basins, of 50 square meters each, all filled with water to a depth of 40 cm."
— Hans Girsberger, ed. Le Corbusier 1910-60

13) Le Corbusier was one of the 20th century's most important architects, whose cerebral and provocative designs are still poorly understood by most non-architects. In his effort to shape a better social order through functionalist forms and techniques, he didn't often make room for organized religion. He designed only three religious structures, all in France, and just two of these were realized: the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp and the monastic college of La Tourette.

The church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy, celebrated its topping out ceremony April 2005, more than 40 years after its conception. The last of Le Corbusier's unfinished projects is finally taking shape. From NYT's here

Related Links:

Great Building
Wikipedia
International Style
Modernity
Furniture

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