Le Corbusier was born 120 years ago

Bern/Prague - The Swiss-French architect, theorist, and painter Le Corbusier is a key figure representing two significant styles of the 20th century: purism and brutalism. His austere reinforced concrete buildings and visionary ideas for urban living brought him not only fame and admiration but also misunderstanding and condemnation. The man who claimed that "a house is a machine for living" had very vibrant connections with the Czech avant-garde. This Saturday marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of modernist Le Corbusier.
Throughout his life, he was fascinated by the precision and functionality of various machines, cars, and boats. This fascination was rooted in his original profession; he trained as a watch engraver. This craft had a tradition not only in his native region (he was born in the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds) but also in his family. However, he could not continue with it. From childhood, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, which was the architect's real name, had very weak eyesight, and by his thirties, he was even blind in one eye.
Although this handicap caused Le Corbusier problems, it could not prevent him from years of active work. He completed a total of 75 buildings on several continents (his first villa was built when he was just 19 years old), designed dozens of urban studies, wrote over 40 books, published several magazines, created hundreds of drawings and paintings, and remarkably made an impact as a furniture designer. His famous elegant lounge chair, Chaise Longue, has copies that today sell for tens of thousands of crowns.
Le Corbusier, who chose his pseudonym after his maternal grandfather and first used it in 1923 (by which time he had already been working in Paris for some time), gradually established five points or architectural elements that became fundamental to his buildings. These included pilotis, rooftop gardens, free floor plans, ribbon windows, and free facade organization. The term "Free Plan - Plan libre" describing Le Corbusier's concept was derived from this freedom of layout and facade organization.
The designer emphasized raw concrete as a unique material, placing importance on greenery, light, and space. He considered the construction of high-rise buildings as the only possible solution to combat the "sprawl" of cities. His first major realization in this direction was Le Corbusier's design for a multi-story housing complex Unité d'Habitation (1952) with 337 housing units in Marseille. Unlike earlier thoughts, he combined various functions - living, shopping, recreation, and children's facilities all in one building.
In addition to several of these collective houses (a similar building designed by Czech architects also stands in Litvínov in northern Bohemia), or what Le Corbusier referred to as "vertical garden cities", other buildings also made their way into textbooks. These include the chapel in the French Ronchamp, the monastery complex La Tourette near Lyon, the La Roche house in Paris, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, the Centrosojuz building in Moscow, the Swiss pavilion in Paris, the houses in Stuttgart, Germany, and buildings in Chandigarh, India.
Le Corbusier's relationship with the Czech Republic is also noteworthy, where functionalism found fertile ground. The architect successfully lectured in Prague several times. He was fascinated by the Veletržní Palace and was impressed by the urban planning of Baťa's Zlín - he even created construction plans that, however, were never realized. Conversely, he rated the appearance of Karlovy Vary as "a swarm of whipped cream cakes." Some local architects also worked in his studio, the first of whom was Vladimír Karfík.
As a sociologist of urbanism or an apostle of modernity (as Le Corbusier was sometimes called), he is sometimes accused of having initiated mass housing construction in the 1960s to 1980s with his theories of living in Radiant Cities, leading to an alienated environment. However, experts on modernism reject this. The architect, who died of a heart attack at sea on August 27, 1965, has numerous followers. He is buried alongside his wife in Roquebrune, a French town that became his second home.