Sixty years after his death, Le Corbusier remains a central and controversial figure in modern architecture. Around the world, his creations have shaped the 20th century and are now inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List. While celebrated as a visionary, he has also been criticized for his fascist involvement and an authoritarian conception of modernism.
Born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret grew up in an artisanal family environment that shared a love of work, culture, and nature. His father was an engraver and his mother a pianist. Gifted at drawing, he joined his canton's art school at age 12, where he met Charles L'Eplattenier, master of decorative arts, who became his mentor and oriented him toward architecture at 18.
Barely of age, Charles L'Eplattenier proposed that he build Villa Fallet in his hometown. This was the first house constructed by the man who did not yet call himself Le Corbusier. With the money earned, he traveled across Europe for nearly five years, multiplying sketches and notes that would feed his inspirations. In the early 1910s, several buildings emerged, including Villa Jeanneret-Perret (1912), commissioned by his parents.
It was during this period that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret grew closer to France and Parisian architecture networks. During World War I, without a real clientele, he dreamed of participating in France's reconstruction. In February 1917, he wrote to his parents: "We are dirty neutrals occupied with business," implying he would have liked to take up arms for France. The same year, he settled permanently in Paris, the capital of art and culture, and adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920. He constructed his character at the same time: round glasses, bow tie, and pipe in mouth, which would forge his legend.
In 1923, his manifesto "Towards an Architecture" erected pure geometry as an aesthetic ideal: "Primary forms are beautiful forms because they read clearly." With his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, he designed numerous dwellings as true "machines for living." In 1927, the two men formalized the famous "five points of modern architecture" (pilotis, free facade, free plan, ribbon windows, and roof terrace), which became the cornerstone of modernity.
Among his first major works were Maison La Roche in Paris (1925), an emblematic expression of purism, and the Clarté Building in Geneva (1932), where he experimented with glass facades and duplexes. These buildings translated a break with the styles of the era, announcing an architecture conceived as function, not ornament. By the early 1930s, Le Corbusier had become essential in the modern architecture debate to the point where he was forced to refuse certain commissions.
In 1934, he designed the Molitor Building, on the border between Paris and Boulogne-Billancourt, which became the first residential building with an entirely glass facade. Le Corbusier installed his apartment-workshop on the top two floors, a residence he would occupy until his death in 1965. "It was a peril for me to go live in my own architecture. In truth, it's magnificent. It's a view full of countryside with no notion of being perched on the seventh and eighth floors, thanks to architectural stratagems. No vertigo thus," he wrote to his mother upon moving in. Conceived as a fluid, modular space bathed in light, this 240-square-meter duplex became, after his disappearance, a heritage site entrusted to the Le Corbusier Foundation, classified as a historical monument in 2015.
After World War II, Le Corbusier extended his influence on a planetary scale. In France, he designed the Marseille Housing Unit (1947-1952), nicknamed the Radiant City: an eighteen-story building grouping housing, shops, school, and leisure spaces, conceived as a "vertical city." This project translated his ambition to create a new form of collective life. On the international level, his most emblematic project remains the city of Chandigarh in northern India, commissioned in 1950. Chandigarh embodies the large-scale transposition of his urban planning principles: an orthogonal and functional plan with monumental buildings such as the Assembly or the Palace of Justice. The architect also contributed to projects in South America, Japan, and North Africa.
This universal dimension led UNESCO to inscribe, in 2016, seventeen sites designed by Le Corbusier on the World Heritage List, spread across seven countries. The organization emphasizes that his achievements "testify to the invention of a new architectural language that influenced the entire 20th century." To ensure the preservation of this heritage, the Le Corbusier Foundation, created in 1968, today conserves his archives, drawings, models, and furniture, while supervising the restoration of buildings.
On August 27, 1965, Le Corbusier died following cardiac discomfort at age 77, leaving an indelible imprint on the world of architecture. His clean lines, his cult of concrete, and his vision of a "machine for living" continue to inspire architects and urban planners around the world, despite numerous criticisms. His proposals, aimed at razing old neighborhoods and replacing them with towers and highways (like the Voisin Plan for Paris in 1925), are considered by many as destructive to urban fabric.
His legacy is also tarnished by his links with fascism. After World War II, the architect was suspected of anti-Semitism and collaboration. In 2015, journalist Xavier de Jarcy published "Le Corbusier, a French Fascism," revealing the extent of the architect's dark side. Close to far-right circles, he was an urban planning advisor to the Vichy government during the war. In several letters written to his mother, he rejoiced at the French defeat in June 1940, allowing a "great cleansing" in the country: "Money, Jews, Freemasonry, everything will undergo just law. These shameful fortresses will be dismantled. They dominated everything."
After the war, Le Corbusier portrayed himself as a victim of the Pétainists. But he remained faithful to certain friendships and never reconsidered his contempt for "parasitic populations." Sixty years after his disappearance, Le Corbusier's legacy continues to provoke debates and controversies. Philosopher Roger-Pol Droit believes that the links between "fascist politics and modernist urbanism" tend to be minimized. According to him, his "housing unit of conforming grandeur" can be read as a concrete cage, much closer to a Mussolinian dream than humanist ideals.
In 2015, an exhibition dedicated to him at the Centre Pompidou provoked the anger of Serge Klarsfeld, president of the association of Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees of France. Behind the visionary architect remains a contrasted legacy, where creative grandeur and ideological positions remain inseparable.
