Great Garden Influences - Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in 1887 in the Swiss watch-making town of La Chaux de Fonds. His father was a highly skilled watch enameller; his mother was a pianist and music teacher. The name he chose as an architect was actually that of his grandfather and means The Crow!

The city of the late nineteenth, and early twentieth, century was in a process of transformation. Industrialization had destroyed traditional craft works and made small-scale farming unprofitable, which brought workers into urban areas in huge waves. At the same time, the motor car began to cause the first traffic jams and and accidents and it seemed to everyone that capitalism was destroying the 'historic' city architecture. Le Corbusier's first attempt at city planning came in the form of the Contemporary City Plan for Three Million People, in which he showed how his plan would be beneficial to business sector of the city. The Contemporary City was based upon clearance of most of the Parisian landscape (a few historic monuments were to be kept), and the erection of twenty four steel and glass skyscrapers that would house the business and artistic elite. The workers were placed at the edges of the city in modern apartment structures, based on the Domino, close to their workplaces - the factories. Most of the land, around eighty-five percent, was left to natural landscapes and playgrounds. Unsurprisingly, this rather drastic scheme never got off the ground!

On the other hand, one of the most famous modern houses, the Villa Savoye, is a masterpiece of Le Corbusier's purist design. It is perhaps the best example of Le Corbusier's goal to create a house which would be a 'machine a habiter,' which translates as a machine for living in. Located in a suburb near Paris, the Villa Savoye includes:

• moduler design - later to be used in such designs as stacking chairs etc
• 'pilotis' - the house is raised on stilts to separate it from the earth, and to use the land efficiently.
• dynamic, non-traditional transitions between floors using spiral staircases and ramps
• built-in furniture
• ribbon windows
• a roof garden, with both plantings and architectural shapes
• an integral garage - the curve of the ground floor of the house is based on the turning radius of the 1927 Citroen!

Garden Le Corbusier photograph by Cameron Nordholm, used under a creative commons attribution licence