Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
(1887-1965)
Architecture is about art, a phenomenon that provokes emotion, that goes beyond the problems related to construction, far beyond them. Construction holds things up: architecture touches people’s emotions. Swiss born, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris spent his youth travelling through Europe, coming in contact, among other things, with the Sezession environment in Vienna and with Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in Berlin. In his early thirties, he opened his legendary architecture studio in Paris. In addition to becoming immensely famous as an architect, Le Corbusier was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor and writer. His collaborations with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand were decisive. Together, they presented a revolutionary one-room studio- apartment at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1929, with furniture pieces which embodied the modernist spirit. They were conceived as instruments suitable for furnishing spaces built for the modern man; this explains why Le Corbusier loved to speak of “équipement “. These furnishings had to be useful, an expression of their function. This is the new value proposed by the coupling of form and function: the object, stripped of its ornaments, recovers its implacable and intimate sense of beauty, expressing its very nature in the harmony of its new form, simple and essential. The public’s reaction was predictably hostile. But as fate would have it, the legend was round the corner.
Architecture is about art, a phenomenon that provokes emotion, that goes beyond the problems related to construction, far beyond them. Construction holds things up: architecture touches people’s emotions. Swiss born, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris spent his youth travelling through Europe, coming in contact, among other things, with the Sezession environment in Vienna and with Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in Berlin. In his early thirties, he opened his legendary architecture studio in Paris. In addition to becoming immensely famous as an architect, Le Corbusier was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor and writer. His collaborations with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand were decisive. Together, they presented a revolutionary one-room studio- apartment at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1929, with furniture pieces which embodied the modernist spirit. They were conceived as instruments suitable for furnishing spaces built for the modern man; this explains why Le Corbusier loved to speak of “équipement “. These furnishings had to be useful, an expression of their function. This is the new value proposed by the coupling of form and function: the object, stripped of its ornaments, recovers its implacable and intimate sense of beauty, expressing its very nature in the harmony of its new form, simple and essential. The public’s reaction was predictably hostile. But as fate would have it, the legend was round the corner.
