"Espacio y luz y orden. Esas son las cosas que los hombres necesitan tanto como necesitan el pan o un lugar para dormir."
Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), más conocido como Le Corbusier, uno de los padres de la arquitectura moderna habría cumplido 127 años hoy.
El arquitecto de origen suizo, urbanista, diseñador, pintor y escritor, es ampliamente considerado como uno de los pioneros del movimiento modernista en la arquitectura. A lo largo de su carrera de cinco décadas, recorrió las obras construidas de Europa, India y Estados Unidos.
Autor de la seminal "Vers une architecture", Le Corbusier y su carrera de arquitectura realmente despegó en 1914 cuando desarrolló el esquema de la "Casa Domino", un proyecto que se convirtió en una base para el futuro trabajo de diseño.
Después de mudarse a París en la década de 1910, Corbusier abrió un despacho con su primo Pierre Jeanneret. Fue allí donde comenzó a explorar realmente el concepto de una casa como "una máquina para habitar", y comenzó a desarrollar sus cinco puntos de la arquitectura.
Aunque Corbusier no construyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, continuó desarrollando sus teorías sobre la construcción modular, que más tarde se reflejó en sus bloques de viviendas masivas, las Unite D’Habitation (1947). Su carrera posterior se llevó a cabo en gran medida en la India, donde su estructura utilizaba hormigón bruto, materiales autóctonos y la estructura articulada.
El trabajo de Corbusier es uno de los más influyentes que ha visto la historia de la arquitectura, en especial en la planificación urbana. Fue uno de los primeros en anticipar la influencia del automóvil en el desarrollo urbano, y sus teorías urbanísticas han sido tratadas como cánones desde su introducción.
Algunos de sus trabajos más destacados incluyen Pabellón Philips Expo 58, Pabellón Suizo, Ville Roche, Chaise Longue LC 4, Ronchamp, Casa Curutchet, Unidad Habitacional de Berlín y la Ville Savoye
Y revisa algunos de los artículos más recientes acerca de Le Corbusier:
- Le Corbusier en Color
- 14 cosas que no sabías de Le Corbusier
- Extraño video muestra a Le Corbusier comentando su obra en su departamento en París
- Video: Recorriendo La Villa Savoye de Le Corbusier
Throughout his career, alongside his architectural work Le Corbusier was a fierce and radical campaigner for new visions of modernist urban planning. Like his early architectural work, Le Corbusier’s urban designs were focused on purely functional design and gave great primacy to the automobile. His first plan, the “Ville Contemporaine” was designed in 1922, and in 1925 he designed the “Plan Voisin,” which proposed to destroy a large area of central Paris to be replaced with a grid of modernist towers, set in a park and connected by a network of raised highways. Ten years later, Le Corbusier expanded this design into the hypothetical “Ville Radieuse,” and these proposals would go on to influence the design of his “Unités” as self-contained villages for entire communities.
Le Corbusier’s urban planning forms the basis for much of the criticism of his work and his life. Using his power as a key member of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), Le Corbusier presented his principles for the functional city in his Athens Charter, so named after the group’s destination for their fourth meeting in 1933. The Athens Charter became a foundational document for modern city planning, and in Le Corbusier’s name cities all over the world were modernized—replacing traditional, organic and often impoverished neighborhoods with high-rise modernist social housing blocks, to varying degrees of success. Le Corbusier has also been widely criticized for the political connections he kept in his attempts to realize his plans, working alongside the Vichy government of France and accepting an invitation to lecture in Rome from Benito Mussolini.
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In the 1950s, Le Corbusier was finally able to realize a synthesis of his architectural and urban planning visions when he was invited to complete the design of Chandigarh, the new capital of the state of Punjab in India. Le Corbusier designed a functional city layout, and for the city’s Capitol he designed three buildings himself: the Secretariat Building, the Palace of the Assembly, and the High Court.
Le Corbusier’s influence on contemporary architecture is immeasurable. He helped form the basis of almost all modernist architecture and urban planning, with almost all contemporary theory essentially acting as a continuation of, or a rejection of, his ideals. Beyond that, he established the very way in which architecture is now practiced: writer Hal Foster refers to Le Corbusier as an “architect-polemicist” who helped lay the groundwork for current figures such as Rem Koolhaas to emerge. [2] As a result Alan Plattus, in his introduction to Deborah Gans’ book The Le Corbusier Guide proclaims:
“The effect of half a century of commentary, criticism, research and design has not been so much to situate Le Corbusier as to dissolve him into the collective bloodstream of the century… Le Corbusier has become not so much an object for our discourse as part of the very ground upon which that discourse must be founded.” [3]
Find out more about Le Corbusier's works via the thumbnails below, and more about his influence on architecture via the links below those:
.jpg?1444146069 "Unité d’Habition, Berlin. Image © Thomas Lewandovski")
.jpg?1507259366 "Chandigarh. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu")
50 Things You Didn't Know About Le Corbusier
CIAM 4 and the "Unanimous" Origins of Modernist Urban Planning
VIDEO: Villa Savoye, The Five Points of a New Architecture
Infographic: The Life of Le Corbusier by Vincent Mahé
99 Dom-Ino: How Le Corbusier Redefined Domestic Italian Architecture
North America's Radiant City: Le Corbusier's Impact on New York
When Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier Had a Public Argument in The New York Times
Light Matters: Le Corbusier and the Trinity of Light
Drawing on the Road: The Story of a Young Le Corbusier's Travels Through Europe
7 Documentaries to Deepen Your Understanding of Le Corbusier
Material Masters: Le Corbusier's Love for Concrete
Rare Footage of Le Corbusier Discussing his Work, Poetry & the "Ideal City"
See Le Corbusier's Convent de la Tourette Come to Life in this New Video
Explore Le Corbusier's Only South American Project, the Casa Curutchet, With a Virtual Walkthrough
References
- Kenneth Frampton: Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Thames & Hudson, 2007) p.225
- Hal Foster: "Bigness," London Review of Books, November 19th 2001
- Alan Plattus: "Le Corbusier: A Dialectical Itinerary" in The Le Corbusier Guide (Princeton Architectural Press, 2000) p.12
