Le Corbusier Biography, Interior Designer and Architect

Essay by ValerieVallureHigh School, 11th gradeA+, May 2004

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This designer/architect created many pioneer buildings in France throughout the early 21st century. A current biography for oral or writtens ubmission is what this piece contains! Good luck

Le Corbusier Biography, Interior Designer and Architect

Le Corbusier was born in 1887 in the Swiss watchmaking town of La Chaux de Fonds. His father was a highly skilled watch enameler; his mother was a pianist and music teacher. The family was Protestant;

At the age of fifteen, Corbusier enrolled at the local trade school, L'Ecole d'Art, in order to learn the craft of watch case engraving. Corbusier's mentor at the school was Charles L'Eplattenier. L'Eplattenier's personal mission at L'Ecole was to find the most promising students alternate careers in the fine arts. He knew that eventually the craft works at La Chaux de Fonds would be replicated by machine at a cheaper price, thus destroying the local economy

L'Eplattenier saw promise in the young Corbusier.

In fact, he decreed that the young man should become an architect. Corbusier was at first ambivalent, preferring a career as a painter, but later he came to embrace the architecture profession.

Other early influences were Edward Schure's Les Grand Inities and Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament. Plato, Schure, and Jones, appear to be the most influential on Corbusier's developing worldview. From Plato, Corbusier extracted the seemingly universal ideas of Beauty, Truth, and Harmony. The forms were out there, i.e. not of this world; one only had to get beneath everyday and one's own body.

Bauhaus School in Vienna and his association with Auguste Perret, a Parisian Engineer. Under Perret's guidance, Corbusier learned the aesthetics of functionalism (the beauty of a carefully calculated structure sans ornament) and the positivism of the modern age.

Corbusier shared Perret's confidence and enthusiasm for the modern age. He envisaged a...