 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
Le Corbusier
LifeBorn as Charles Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small town of Neuchâtel canton in northwestern Switzerland, just across the border from France, Le Corbusier was attracted to the visual arts and studied under the tutelage of the teacher at the local arts school, Charles L'Éplattenier , who had himself studied in Budapest and Paris. He himself designed his earliest houses, like the Villa Fallet , the Villa Schwob , and the Villa Jeanneret (the latter of which was for his parents) in La Chaux-de-Fonds. These houses recall the indigenous mountainous vernacular architectural styles popular in the Alps. Frequently in his early years he would escape the somewhat provincial atmosphere of his hometown by travelling around Europe. In about 1907 he travelled to Paris, where he found work in the office of the French pioneer in reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret, and between October 1910 and March 1911 he worked for the renowned architect Peter Behrens near Berlin, where he met a young Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and became fluent in German. Both of these experiences proved influential in his later career. Later in 1911 he would journey to the Balkans and visit Greece and Turkey, filling sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw, including many famous sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923). He moved to Paris permanently at the age of 29 in 1916 and in 1920 adopted "Le Corbusier", slightly altered from his maternal grandfather's name "Le Corbesier", as a pseudonym.Le Corbusier died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France InfluenceLe Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. One of the first to realize how the automobile would change human agglomerations, Le Corbusier described the city of the future as consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier's theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in the United States. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier said "by law, all buildings should be white" and criticized any effort at ornamentation. The large spartan structures, in cities, but not of cities, have been widely criticized for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians. The city plan of Brasília was based on his ideas. Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city of the turn of the century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape . He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries. CriticismSince his death, Le Corbusier's contribution has been hotly contested. At the level of building, his later works expressed a complex understanding of modernity's impact, yet his urban designs have drawn scorn from critics. Techno-historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote,
Le Corbusier's views on urban planning have also been largely discredited for encouraging the design of public plazas that are viewed by many as being sterile and divisive of urban space. The public housing projects influenced by his ideas are seen by most as having had the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community's development. One of his most influential critics has been Jane Jacobs, who delivered a scathing critique of Le Corbusier's urban design theories in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The city of Brasilia, currently the capital of Brazil, is a planned city based exlusively on the principles of Le Corbusier. Unfortunately, Brasilia is considered by most urban planners to be a colossal failure.
Key buildings
See alsoReferences
External link
The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License.
How to see transparent copy 01-04-2007 01:21:04 |
|
