Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-born architect, designer and writer who became a French citizen in 1930. Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, he trained at the local art school and then in the offices of Auguste Perret in Paris (1908-1910) and Peter Behrens in Germany (1910-1911). In his 1923 book Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) he compared houses to ships, cars and aircraft and called the house "a machine for living in."

He set out five points for a new architecture: pilotis (columns that lift the building off the ground), a free plan, a free facade, horizontal ribbon windows and a roof garden. The Villa Savoye in Poissy, outside Paris (1928-1931), applies all five. The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1947-1952) is a block of 337 apartments in exposed rough concrete raised on pilotis, with a shopping street inside. Its dimensions follow his Modulor, a system of proportions based on human height.

His chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-1955) has curved walls and a thick, upturned concrete roof. From 1951 he planned Chandigarh, a new capital for the Indian state of Punjab, and designed its government buildings. In 2016 UNESCO listed 17 of his works in seven countries as a World Heritage Site.