LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Le Corbusier: Designs
built 606 days ago
Along with Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe and Theo Van Doesburg, Le Corbusier was the father of Modernism. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in 1887 in Switzerland, Le Corbusier had great interest in the visual arts at an early age. At age 23, he was an active designer and during time in Berlin, met the famed Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. It was a meeting that would have vast impact on 20th century design. During his career, Le Corbusier spent much of his efforts on designing building and environments for urbanism. His designs called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of the other, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms, and kitchen.
Source:
The Le Corbusier sofa is modernism at its best. After a design created for the 1929 Salon d’Automne, this elegant sofa consists of taut leather-covered cushions supported by a shapely frame of sturdy stainless steel tubes. This chic base epitomizes Deco fashion, while the multi-density foam core cushions hold the set to high quality standards. The smooth leather and classy simplicity will make you feel twice as stylish the moment you sit down.
Source:
In 1904 Le Corbusier designed and built a small house at La-Chaux-de-Fonds, a building so picturesque that it would have fitted into the 18th-century hamlet at Versailles. Of the half-dozen villas that he built in his native town, one (1916) is as playful as any 16th-century mannerist structure by Sebastiano Serlio or Andrea Palladio. The dominating blank panel of the main facade of Le Corbusier's villa of 1916 relates to a similar motif that Palladio used on his own house in Vicenza, Italy, of 1572. Such a parallel between architects of the 16th and 20th centuries is relevant to an understanding of Le Corbusier. His system of geometric proportion, first used in the 1916 villa and expounded in two books, Le Modulor I (1950) and Le Modulor II (1955), follows in the tradition of Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, and Palladio, and his concept of "modulor man" is an extension of Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian man."
Source:
After the war, Le Corbusier concentrated on his art until 1922. After this, he began designing apartments that could be stacked on top of each other, to house people and meet their needs. This type of low-density housing was to deal with the problem of over-crowding in Paris. He said this transformation was needed, or a revolution could occur from the unhappy lower classes. He created a design for an ideal city (Ville Contemporaine) that was never built. It was a plan developed around a lot of skycrapers.
Source:
In his numerous writings, Le Corbusier remained uncharacteristically silent about his early career. This intriguing book examines his nascent years as a designer and architect, focusing on the period from 1907 to 1922—the year he changed his name from Charles Edouard Jeanneret and established his identity as Le Corbusier. The contributors to the book offer in unprecedented detail an account of Le Corbusier’s formative years and the cultural, intellectual, and artistic concerns that absorbed him as a young artist in Switzerland and Paris.
Source:
Since his death, Le Corbusier's contribution has been hotly contested. At the level of building, his later works expressed a complex understanding of modernity's impact, yet his urban designs have drawn scorn from critics.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Designs