Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in the French-speaking Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, 5 km across the border from France.

It was an industrial town, devoted to manufacturing watches.

Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L'Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude).

Le Corbusier would later describe these as "my guide, my choice" and as his "time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism."

In 1905, he and two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz, designed and built his first house, the Villa Fallet, for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier.

Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-fonds, it was a large chalet with a steep roof in the local alpine style and carefully crafted coloured geometric patterns on the façade.

The success of this house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same area.

In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland, going to Italy; then that winter travelling through Budapest to Vienna, where he stayed for four months and met Gustav Klimt and tried, without success, to meet Josef Hoffmann.

In Florence, he visited the Florence Charterhouse in Galluzzo, which made a lifelong impression on him.

"I would have liked to live in one of what they called their cells," he wrote later.

"It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise."

He travelled to Paris, and for fourteen months between 1908 and 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect Auguste Perret, the pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in residential construction and the architect of the Art Deco landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Two years later, between October 1910 and March 1911, he travelled to Germany and worked for four months in the office Peter Behrens, where Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were also working and learning.

In 1911, he travelled again with his friend August Klipstein for five months; this time he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, as well as Pompeii and Rome, filling nearly 80 sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw—including many sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923).

He spoke of what he saw during this trip in many of his books, and it was the subject of his last book, Le Voyage d'Orient.

In 1912, he began his most ambitious project; a new house for his parents, also located on the forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds.

(He adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920.) His father was an artisan who enamelled boxes and watches, and his mother taught piano.

His elder brother Albert was an amateur violinist.

He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods.

Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier lacked formal training as an architect.

He was attracted to the visual arts; at the age of fifteen, he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds which taught the applied arts connected with watchmaking.

Three years later he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris.

Le Corbusier wrote later that L'Eplattenier had made him "a man of the woods" and taught him about painting from nature.

His father frequently took him into the mountains around the town.

He wrote later, "we were constantly on mountaintops; we grew accustomed to a vast horizon."

His architecture teacher in the Art School was architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest house designs.

He reported later that it was the art teacher L'Eplattenier who made him choose architecture.

"I had a horror of architecture and architects," he wrote.

"...I was sixteen, I accepted the verdict and I obeyed. I moved into architecture."

Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and philosophy, visiting museums, sketching buildings, and constructing them.

He was born in Switzerland and acquired French nationality by naturalization on 19 September 1930.

His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America.

He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".

Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings there, especially the government buildings.

On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement.

Le Corbusier remains a controversial figure.

Some of his urban planning ideas have been criticized for their indifference to pre-existing cultural sites, societal expression and equality, and his alleged ties with fascism, antisemitism, eugenics, and the dictator Benito Mussolini have resulted in some continuing contention.

Le Corbusier also designed well-known furniture such as the LC4 Chaise Lounge Chair, and the ALC-3001 chair, both made of leather with metal framing.