Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who was better known as Le Corbusier (French: [lə kɔʁbyzje]; October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India, and America.

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

Early life & education

He was born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) across the border from France. He attended a kindergarten that used Fröbelian methods.^{[citation needed]}

architect Peter Behrens, where he may have met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. He became fluent in German. More than anything during this period, it was his visit to the Charterhouse of the Valley of Ema that influenced his architectural philosophy profoundly for the rest of his life. He believed that all people should have the opportunity to live as beautifully and peacefully as the monks he witnessed in the sanctuaries at the charterhouse.

Later in 1911, he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, 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) ("Towards an Architecture", but usually translated into English as "Towards a New Architecture"). A fresh translation of "Toward an Architecture"^[2] was published in 2007 by the Getty Research Institute, with an introduction by French architect and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who spoke about the translation.^[3]