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 in the USSR
Le Corbusier submitted designs for the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1931, which he lost and in effect would end his relationship with the Soviet Union. After he submitted his design for the first entry, Le Corbusier was informed that his submission had caused considerable stir. No winner was announced for this first round, but he was notified that as a formidable contestant in first entry his project would go on to the second round of the competition. With this, Le Corbusier had reasonable grounds to believe that his project would be among the finalists, if not the winner. But on February 28, 1932, when Boris Iofan’s neo-classical entry was announced as the winner of the second public competition by the Soviet judges, Le Corbusier was unprepared. Le Corbusier was outraged by the decision, and wrote letters illustrating such feelings, in effect only showing to the Soviet judges his great egotism. But, with the winner announced, it was evident that Le Corbusier’s modernist style was losing ground in the Soviet Union. Even national newspaper, which only a few years earlier heralded his first visit to the city of Moscow, now mocked his design entry as a “congress hangar.” The high modernism that young Soviet architects aspired to only a few years earlier was being replaced by a socialist realism best illustrated by neo-classical architecture. Le Corbusier’s failure in this project, which in the eyes of the world marked a spectacular reversal in soviet architectural style, would prove to be his final dream and ultimate humiliation in his Moscow adventure. In the end, Le Corbusier’s relationship with Russia would end in disappointment.