Le Corbusier

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier adopted his now-legendary pseudonym in 1920 and went on to become one of the defining figures of twentieth-century modernism. He acquired French nationality in 1930 and died on 27 August 1965 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France — an end the French government marked with a national funeral, a rare honour that underscored the depth of his cultural imprint. Working across architecture, urban theory, painting, and writing, he pursued a singular vision in which rational structure, machine-age aesthetics, and human proportion were inseparable concerns.

His architectural output spans an extraordinary range of scale and ambition. Among his earliest independent designs, Maison Blanche (1912) in La Chaux-de-Fonds already signals a move away from decorative regionalism toward the stripped, rational language that would define his mature work. Villa La Roche / Villa Jeanneret (1923–1925) brought that language to Paris, combining domestic space and art gallery through ramps and flowing interior vistas; the building now houses the Fondation Le Corbusier and its archives. Villa Savoye (1928–1931) in Poissy stands as the canonical statement of his Five Points of a New Architecture — pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, and roof garden — and remains one of the paradigmatic works of the International Style. The Unité d'habitation de Marseille / Cité Radieuse (1947–1952) translated those principles into collective living, integrating duplex apartments, internal streets, shops, and a rooftop terrace into a single reinforced-concrete block that became a prototype for postwar mass housing. At Ronchamp, the Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950–1955) marked a dramatic turn toward sculptural, spiritually charged form — thick curving walls, an asymmetrical roof, and layered light effects that would resonate through later expressive and sacred architecture. The Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette (1953–1960) near Lyon and the Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh (1951–1963) extended this late vocabulary into monastic and civic contexts, the latter forming the centerpiece of an entire postcolonial capital city.

Le Corbusier's practice as a painter was not peripheral to his architecture but deeply intertwined with it. His Purist oil paintings of the early 1920s — still lifes and compositions developed alongside the journal L'Esprit Nouveau — refined a vocabulary of simplified objects, planar geometry, and calibrated proportion that fed directly into his spatial thinking. Significant groups of these works are held at the Fondation Le Corbusier and the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou. His theoretical treatise Vers une architecture (1923) codified his machine-age ideals in prose and became one of the most widely read and debated architectural texts of the century. Exhibition activity across his pictorial work has remained consistent: solo presentations at Prakapas Gallery and Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York in 1984, panoramic surveys at Galerie Eric Mouchet and Galerie Zlotowski in Paris in 2015, and the major retrospective Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes at MoMA in 2013 all attest to sustained institutional and market engagement. In 2025, the Fondation Le Corbusier presented Le monde à la pointe du crayon – voyages de Le Corbusier 1907–1933 at Maison La Roche, while Galerie Pascal Cuisinier included his post-Purist works in the thematic exhibition PURISME(S). The Fondation Le Corbusier, established in 1968 and housed at Villa La Roche-Jeanneret in Paris, remains the primary authority on authentication, holding his library, architectural drawings, sketches, paintings, and correspondence as the definitive reference corpus for his work.