Le Corbusier
(1887 - 1965)
Le Corbusier, the pseudonym of Charles - Eduard Jeanneret, was one of the greatest exponents of architecture and design of this century.
In Paris in 1920, together with the painter A. Ozenfant, he founded the magazine "Esprit Nouveau", the vehicle for the ideas of Purism, the movement born from Cubism which established for the first time the alliance between art and industrial production. Among the key concepts which Le Corbusier developed at this time we remember the multi-use building consisting of superimposable modules for mass production building of council homes.
The house is seen as "a machine for living in or a useful object" thus recovering the concept of standard, which reponds the reasons of efficiency, precision, order and, therefore beauty. Le Corbusier applied these concepts, varying and perfecting them, in the designs of 1920 such as the Dwelling Block, in 1922 as the cellular "Immeuble Villa" and insome important town plans such as for Algiers to the complex implementation of the "Unite d'Habitation" of Marseilles (1945-52).
The creation of structural frames in reiforced concrete (Pilotis) is typical, allowing a plan free of massive supportes with flush windows, hanging gardens and facades freely articulated according to a new anthropomorphic dimensions scale, the "Modular".
The "Jaoul Houses" at Neully-Sur Seines, the "Sarabhal House" in India and the "Ronchamp Chapel" are other important examples.
As regards furnishing, Le Corbusier designed very few pieces of furniture. In the first period of his work he used anonymous wickerworks chairs, the "Thonet" chair and also the simple iron garden chair. Afterwards, due to the collaboration with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the architect Charlotte Perriand, the furniture he created was originated by a revolutionary spatial concept. A piece of furniture is no longer an extraneous body inserted into a setting, but a shape ideally suited for the human body and perfectly resolved in space.
Also careful consideration of construction, production methods and the use of "modern" materials, such as steel tubing, gave rise to unusual and surprising effects.