Le Corbusier

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Swiss architect, urban planner, painter, writer, designer and theorist, active mostly in France. In the range of his work and in his ability to enrage the establishment and surprise his followers, he was matched in the field of modern architecture perhaps only by Frank Lloyd Wright. He adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier for his architectural work c. 1920 and for his paintings c.1930. His visionary books, startling white houses and terrifying urban plans set him at the head of the MODERN MOVEMENT in the 1920s, while in the 1930s he became more of a complex and sceptical explorer of cultural and architectural possibilities. ...

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At the Exposition International des Arts-Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris (1924–5), Le Corbusier and Jeanneret-Gris presented their Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau. A white box derived from an L-shaped variant of the Citrohan type, it contained a model of the so-called Plan Voisin for Paris, an architectural and town-planning time-bomb, proposing the complete destruction of part of Paris east of the Louvre, between Montmartre and the Seine, and its replacement with eighteen gigantic skyscrapers. Earlier, in 1910, Le Corbusier had prepared La Construction des Villes, much influenced by Sitte, in which he analysed town-planning taking into account the existing historic cores, but this approach was to be wholly repudiated by 1925 when Urbanismecame out (translated as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1929). The Ville Contemporaine, a design for a city of 3 million inhabitants (1922), and the Plan Voisin provided the imagery for redevelopment and new towns that was to be almost universally adopted (largely through the influence of CIAM, with which Le Corbusier and Jeanneret-Gris were to be intimately connected from its beginnings in 1928) after the 1939–45 war with such disastrous results for countless towns and cities.

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자료: Wikipedia, http://www.answers.com/Le%20Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 –August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-French architect,designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International Style. He was born in Switzerland, but became a French citizen in his 30s.

He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, and one each in North and South America. He was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer, and modern furniture designer.

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Criticisms

Since his death, Le Corbusier's contribution has been hotly contested, as the architecture valuesand its accompanying aspects within modern architecture vary, both between different schools of thought and among practising architects.^[13] At the level of building, his later works expressed a complex understanding of modernity's impact, yet his urban designs have drawn scorn from critics.

Technological historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in Yesterday's City of Tomorrow,

the extravagant heights of Le Corbusier's skyscrapers had no reason for existence apart from the fact that they had become technological possibilities; the open spaces in his central areas had no reason for existence either, since on the scale he imagined there was no motive during the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter. By mating utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile hybrid.

James Howard Kunstler, a member of the New Urbanism movement, has criticised Le Corbusier's approach to urban planning as destructive and wasteful:

Le Corbusier [was] ... the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early HighModernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways. Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years – and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post-World War Two American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects ofChicago and scores of things similar to it around the country. ^[14]

The public housing projects influenced by his ideas are seen by some as having had the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community's development. One of his most influential detractors has been Jane Jacobs, who delivered a scathing critique of Le Corbusier's urban design theories in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Influence

Le Corbusier was at his most influential in the sphere of urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

One of the first to realise how the automobile would change human agglomerations, Le Corbusier described the city of the future as consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in apark-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier's theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in Western Europe and the United States. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier criticised any effort at ornamentation. The large spartan structures, in cities, but not of cities, have been widely criticised for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians.

Throughout the years, many architects worked for Le Corbusier in his studio, and a number of them became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa's city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier's thinking also had profound effects on the philosophy of city planning and architecture in the Soviet Union, particularly in the Constructivist era.

Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city of the turn of the century. He thought that industrial housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. He was a leader of the modernist movement to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow heavily influenced Le Corbusier and his contemporaries.

Le Corbusier also harmonized and lent credence to the idea of space as a set of destinations which mankind moved between, more or less continuously. He was therefore able to give credence and credibility to the automobile (as a transporter); and most importantly to freeways in urban spaces. His philosophies were useful to urban real estate development interests in the American Post World War II period because they justified and lent architectural and intellectual support to the desire to destroy traditional urban space for high density high profit urban concentration; both commercial and residential. Le Corbusier’s ideas also sanctioned the further destruction of traditional urban spaces for the freeways that connected this new urbanism to the low density; low cost (and highly profitable), suburban and rural locales; which were free to be developed as middle class single family (dormitory) housing.

Notably missing from this scheme of movement were connectivity between the isolated urban villages created for the lower middle and working classes and the other destination points in the Le Corbusier plan; the suburban and rural areas, and the urban commercial centers. This was because as designed, the freeways traveled over, at, or beneath the grade levels of the urban working and lower middle class living spaces, such as the Cabrini Green housing project. Such projects and their areas, having no freeway exit ramps, and being cut-off by the freeways rights-of-way, became isolated from jobs and the services that came to be concentrated at Le Corbusier’s nodal transportation end points. And as jobs increasingly moved to the suburban end points of the freeways; urban village dwellers found themselves without convenient freeway access points in their communities; and without public mass transit connectivity that could economically reach suburban job centers.

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