Charles Edouard Jeannerct was born on October 6, 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. His family's Calvinism, love of the arts, and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains were all formative influences on the young man who would later come to be known simply as Le Corbusier. He studied art and decoration, with the intention of becoming a painter. Charles L'Eplattenier, his "master" at the local art school, dominated his education. L'Eplattenier involved his students in his search for a new kind of ornament expressive of the Jura landscape. Seeing extreme talent in the young Corbusier, L'Eplattenier insisted that the young man also study architecture and arranged for his first commissions. After completing his first house, Villa Pallet, in 1907, "Corbu" set out on a series of travels that lasted until 1912 which took him first to Italy, then to Vienna, Munich, and Paris. They included a period of apprenticeship to architects with philosophies at odds with L'Eplattenier's teachings. Back in Switzerland, Le Corbusier designed a series of villas and embarked on a more theoretical study for a structural frame of reinforced concrete, which Le Corbusier called the Maison Dom-ino (a pun on the Latin word for house, domus, and on the playing pieces from the game). Le Corbusier envisaged it as an affordable, prefabricated system for the construction of new housing in the wake of World War I's destruction. He completed the ultimate purist house, Villa Savoye (1931), which encompassed his "Five Points of Architecture," including narrow ground-level columns that seemed to elevate the main structure, a flat roof terrace, and a clean façade of reinforced concrete with horizontal windows. He also eliminated the need for load bearing walls that he replaced with partitions; a shift in the direction of his work and life became apparent. Natural materials in a rough state appeared in his rural dwellings, then, coupled with more sophisticated technology, in his urban works, such as the Pavilion Suisse (1932). This student housing structure saw Corbu's further "brutish" aesthetic development from using narrow columns to more monumental "thighs" to elevate his structure, as well as his glazed façade which was essentially a glass wall. After Liberation, Le Corbusier was able to take part in the reconstruction of France where he had become a legal citizen. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Reconstruction, Le Corbusier began plans for the port of Marseille, which culminated in the construction of his first Unite d'Habitation. When Le Corbusier was selected as a French delegate to the architectural commission of the United Nations, he told an interviewer in New York, "For thirty years I'd been a consultant talking in a desert. Since 1945, I've led the architectural movement in France. I have arrived at a stage where things in my life flower, like a tree in season."
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
