LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Le Corbusier: Buildings
built 631 days ago
Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965), born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, was an architect famous for what is now called the International Style, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Theo van Doesburg. He moved to Paris at the age of 29 and adopted "Le Corbusier", his maternal grandfather's name, as a pseudonym. Key buildings: Villa Savoye Unite d'Habitation Chandigarh. Usually wore big round black glasses.
Source:
In Le Corbusier's world, there were no first names. [How very bourgeois. - ed.] Instead, each person was free to choose that one specific name which identified himself or herself only as an abstraction, as opposed to a member of some uselessly-traditional family or ethnological grouping. Le Corbusier said "by law, all buildings should be white" and criticized any effort at ornamentation. He ... ruled that once his buildings were finished, nothing in them could be allowed to interfere with the purity of his architectural vision, including such needless "gewgaws" as openable windows, windowshades, curtains, doors, lights, or bathrooms.
Source:
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.
Source:
After his United Nations project, Le Corbusier began a personal movement that initiated his change toward vertical development. He applied this style to the cities that he planned afterward. In Marseilles, he completed an apartment house called he Unité d'Habitation in 1952. He moved on to the court buildings of Chandigarh, India. By 1956, most of the court buildings exhibit his new style.
Source:
Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city of the turn of the century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries.
Source:
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.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Buildings