Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier (1887-1965), born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, was one of the defining figures of modern architecture. Over five decades he moved from the white villas of the 1920s to the sculptural concrete of Ronchamp and Chandigarh, and seventeen of his works are now listed together by UNESCO. This page gathers the ArchEyes case studies of his buildings, with photographs, plans and sections.

Key Buildings by Le Corbusier

Villa SavoyePoissy, 1931Notre Dame du Haut, RonchampRonchamp, 1955Sainte Marie de La TouretteÉveux, 1960Palace of the AssemblyChandigarh, 1962Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsCambridge, 1963Villa ShodhanAhmedabad, 1956Saint-Pierre ChurchFirminy, 2006Villa Le LacCorseaux, 1924

Understanding Le Corbusier’s Architecture

Trained as an engraver, Jeanneret learned architecture through travel and through periods in the offices of Auguste Perret in Paris and Peter Behrens in Berlin. Settling in Paris, he adopted the name Le Corbusier in 1920 and, with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, set out a program for a new architecture in books such as Vers une architecture. Early works such as Villa Le Lac, the small house he built for his parents on Lake Geneva, test the ribbon window and the roof garden at a domestic scale.

Those ideas were codified as the Five Points of a new architecture: pilotis, the free plan, the free facade, the horizontal window and the roof garden. The Villa Savoye at Poissy is their most complete statement, a white box raised on columns above a meadow, organized around a ramp that leads from the entrance to a roof terrace. The Five Points depended on reinforced concrete, which freed the plan from load-bearing walls.

After the Second World War his architecture became heavier and more expressive. Béton brut, concrete left with the marks of its formwork, became the material of the Unité d’habitation in Marseille and of the monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette. The chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp abandoned the orthogonal grid entirely for curved walls, a floating roof and deep, colored window openings. In India he planned the new capital of Chandigarh, where the Palace of the Assembly and the Secretariat anchor the Capitol Complex, and built houses in Ahmedabad such as the Villa Shodhan and the Villa Sarabhai.

His only building in North America, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, threads a ramp through a concrete block of studios. The church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy, designed in the 1960s, was completed only in 2006. Le Corbusier’s influence on housing, urbanism and Brutalist architecture remains vast, and so does the debate around his urban proposals.

The Key Buildings above are chosen by significance; the full archive below follows publication date. Each case study includes technical information, drawings where available and links to related works.