Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (Le Corrbusier) (Essay Sample)

LE CORBUSIER’S ARCHITECTURE
Name
Course Title
Institutional Affiliations
Instructor
Date
Born in Switzerland in the year 1887, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris better known as Le Corrbusier was an architect and a city planner. He was and still is recognized as the most effective and diligent architect of the 20th century. His books, buildings, and even his characteristics, effect to date our idea of modern architecture and modernism in general. Despite all the criticism encountered by his work, Le Corbusier still influences town planning as well as architecture to this day.
His father, Edouard Jeanneret, was an artist who painted dials in their town’s renowned watch industry, and his mother, Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, was a musician as well as a piano teacher. Having got education as an artist, Charles usually travelled a lot through the East and Germany. In year 1917, he moved to Paris and assumed the name Le Corbusier, and it is here where he began to develop most of his ideas regarding art. He began to study under Auguste Perret, and abruptly absorbed the artistic life and culture of the city. At this time, Le Corbusier got interested in the synthesis of different arts. Most of Le Corbusier’s early works were related to nature, although his ideas started to mature and he developed the Maison-Domino. The Maison-Domino was one of the basic building and prototype for the mass production that has rigid floors and free-standing pillars. After settling in Paris, Le Corbusier together with a painter called Amde Ozenfant began formulating ideas of Purism, which was an aesthetic based on the simple and pure geometric forms of everyday objects.
In his architecture, he worked with elemental geometric forms and chiefly built with steel together with reinforced concrete. Additionally, his paintings emphasized clear structures and forms, which corresponded to his architecture. His early works included theoretical plans for mass produced housing and skyscraper cities. Works from the 1920’s, such as the Villa Savoye at Poissy in France, had raised structures on slender concrete pillars, long strip windows, open floor plan, and roof terrace. This established him as one of the major proponents of the International Style. Le Corbusier together with other architects worked with this style in order to establish clean Modernist lines. Although this was so, Le Corbusier became the first architect that come up with the studies using rough-cast concrete, a method that gave his work a notably sculptural and expressive quality.
His later works included the lyrical chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp and the Unit d'Habitation in France. During the Second World War, Le Corbusier created some identified theories on his modular building scale and utopian ideals. This enabled him to start developing architecture that was different from the norm. He outlined in “Vers Une Architecture” that his main ideas were about perfection and standards. He believed that the automobile machine features were as a result of the engineer’s goal combined with the industrial production exigencies.
This created a set of standard elements whose refinement brought the car closer to perfection. With this thought in mind, he wanted to apply this idea to architecture. He felt that all people had similar needs and each house should be a “machine for living.” This led him into setting standards for contemporary architecture and searching for universal elements, which, when combined, create structures for the use of all people. Additionally, he sorts to explore more expressive alternatives that were often influenced by the local and "peasant" architecture. Instead of smooth perfect finishes, he started incorporating rough stone walls into buildings.
In 1947, he began his Unite d'habitation. This building was relieved with highly colored walls and sculptural roof-lines. However, it received justifiable criticism from various individuals due to its massive post-war dwelling blocks. In addition, Le Corbusier's experimental housing blocks failed to multiply as they were truly expensive to construct and maintain. Like all walks of life, architecture goes through different fashions and styles trends with time. Le Corbusier’s architectural styles also transformed through time due to various factors. It is evident that the post-war years signaled a new episode in British history. During this time, Europe had an exciting future and was headed towards a brighter a future. Additionally, technology began to move apace, and the welfare state started providing care to individuals from cradle-to-grave. These changes were also evident in building technologies. The most notable change was that of concrete technology. This technology enabled buildings to be erected swiftly and relatively cheaply when compared to other forms of traditional construction methods.
It is during this era that Le Corbusier began experimenting with what he called ‘beton brut’ which meant raw concrete. This experiment turned out to be an overarching trend of the time which came to be known as the modernist Brutalist style. The new brutalism style used rough together with heavy forms of stone, stucco, concrete, and glass. The buildings that were constructed with this new style were typically highly linear, resembled fortresses and had a blockish shape, often with a predominance of concrete. The pinnacle of le Corbusier’s career came with the construction of Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. It was arguably the first Brutalist project. The construction of Unité at Marseilles was done by reinforced concrete that was the same rank, natural material as a stone, terra cotta or wood. Le Corbusier’s construction considered concrete as a reconstructed stone, commendable of being exposed in its natural state.
Le Corbusier, in common with many architects of the modern movement was convinced of the social role of architecture. In a great political and social change era, Le Corbusier perceived architecture as a crucial instrument in addressing the ills of contemporary society. In 1920's Le Corbusier was into constructing buildings that would promote socialization. He embarked on constructing mass production houses. He perceived houses as machines for individuals to live in. The development of new structural and material technologies in the 1920’s was the core base for the new architectural movements. These technologies not only enabled proper functional realization and visualization of the Modernist ideas but also made the designs appropriate for mass-production and international adaptation all over the world. This was where the term "Internationalism" arose. Le Corbusier’s works were based on his five points for new architecture which stated that buildings had to have reinforced concrete column frames, flat roofs with terraces, free interior plans, horizontal strip windows and a composition of the freed façade.
He additionally suggested that all parts of a building had to be visually equal. This meant that there would be no front or back, and two-story open halls to connect different levels. The use of ramps was also incorporated into his architecture. His work was mainly focused on architectural theory together with the modern applications of these ideas. Le Corbusier designed plans with open floors that highlighted the use of concrete slabs. These concrete slabs would be supported by thin concrete columns. Le Corbusier’s design became the foundation of his architectural designs for a long time.
The new brutalism style adopted by Le Corbusier is evidently different compared to his contemporary architectural design. For example, in his early works, the buildings were constructed using steel material, they had perfectly smooth finishings and had unblemished concrete surfaces, however, in his late work, he employed the brutalism architecture, which established concrete as a dominant material for construction and used other materials that would directly express the design and theme.
Another difference is that Le Corbusier early work was related to nature. He created ideal structures that were timeless in their beauty and perfect in their proportions. For example, his white-stuccoes and cubist-style villas of the 1920s were considered as ‘machines for living in’, making the most light and space through open-plan interiors. However, during the post-war period, he began creating structures based on functionality which would solve problems arising from urban growth and chaos. They were more expressive with rough unfinished exteriors. In addition, the materials used for constructing post-war buildings rejected his earlier utilized vernacular materials and industrial forms, brute concrete and articulated structures.
During Le Corbusier’s early work, he mostly used steel as the predominant material for construction, His earlier buildings were elevated from the ground, they were also smooth, they were made of white concrete and had enormous glass structures. He called these buildings pure prisms. However, in the late 1940s, he adapted the new brutalism model, which used rough, heavy forms of stone, stucco, concrete and glass.
Concrete was the major building material after World War 2. Among the various reasons given is that, after the world war, steel and other materials used to construct buildings during the pre-war period were scarce and hard to find. In addition, they were very expensive due to their scarcity. Studies reveal that concrete was instrumental in meeting the exact standards required to achieve a perfectly spherical shells. Le Corbusier noted that concrete outp...