What years did Le Corbusier live?
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier (), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America.
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier, as always, was rhapsodic about his project; "It will be a city of trees," he wrote, "of flowers and water, of houses as simple as those at the time of Homer, and of a few splendid edifices of the highest level of modernism, where the rules of mathematics will reign.". His plan called for residential, commercial and industrial areas, along with parks and a transportation infrastructure. In the middle was the capitol, a complex of four major government buildings; the Palace of the National Assembly, the High Court of Justice; the Palace of Secretariat of Ministers, and the Palace of the Governor. For financial and political reasons, the Palace of the Governor was dropped well into the construction of the city, throwing the final project somewhat off-balance. From the beginning, Le Corbusier worked, as he reported, "Like a forced laborer." He dismissed the earlier American plan as "Faux-Moderne" and overly filled with parking spaces roads. His intent was to present what he had learned in forty years of urban study, and also to show the French government the opportunities they had missed in not choosing him to rebuild French cities after the War. His design made use of many of his favorite ideas; an architectural promenade, incorporating the local landscape and the sunlight and shadows into the design; the use of the Modulor to give a correct human scale to each element; and his favourite symbol, the open hand; ("the hand is open to give and to receive'.") He placed a monumental open hand statue in a prominent place in the design.