Le Corbusier

Modern living

Le Corbusier: Master builder of the future

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is generally regarded as the most influential architect of the 20th century. Whether private villas or social housing, his radical ideas, designs and writings were not about renewing individual structures, but about reinventing the entire concept of modern living.

Over the years, Le Corbusier's building projects developed from early houses in the traditional Swiss style to glistening white purist villas and dynamic syntheses of art and architecture, such as the Ronchamp Chapel and the administrative buildings in Chandigarh, India. The ability to combine functionalist approaches with a strong expressionism runs through his entire oeuvre. The social aspect of urban planning was also important to Le Corbusier - he was a founding member of the Congrès international d'architecture moderne (CIAM), which defined "architecture as social art".

This volume presents some of Le Corbusier's most striking projects and introduces an architect, thinker and pioneer of modernism who will continue to inspire future generations even through his unrealized designs.

The author

Jean-Louis Cohen was commissioned by the French Minister of Culture in 1997 to design the Cité de l'architecture, an ambitious architecture museum, in a wing of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. His research covers architecture and urban planning in the 20th century. Cohen studied architecture, specializing in Germany and the Soviet era, and has studied the work of Le Corbusier and the history of urban planning in Paris. He is the author of numerous books on architecture and curator of exhibitions on the subject.

The editor

Peter Gössel runs an agency for museum and exhibition design. He has published monographs on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra for TASCHEN, as well as several architecture titles in the small series.