Remembering Le Corbusier 1887 – 1965

This month is the anniversary of Charles douard Jeanneret's (Le Corbusier's) birthday. Born October 6th, 1887 in Switzerland, Le Corbusier was a designer, painter, writer, and a Swiss-French architect. He adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920.

He became a French citizen in 1930 and had a career that spanned over fifty years. His designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India and America. Le Corbusier was dedicated to providing improved living standard for people residing in crowded cities. He was influential in urban planning and in July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Furniture - Le Corbusier was not a big fan of the expensive finely crafted, hand-made furniture that was displayed at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts. His intention was to design furniture that used inexpensive materials and could be mass-produced. To furnish his projects initially, Le Corbusier relied on ready-made furniture from a German manufacturer Thonet. In 1928, following the publication of his theories in his book, L'Art D'coratif d'aujourd'hui, he began experimenting with furniture design. He invited the architect Charlotte Perriand work at his studio as a furniture designer. Pierre Jeanneret (Le Corbusier's cousin) also collaborated on the designs.

Thonet had already begun making chairs with tubular steel, a material originally used for bicycles. Le Corbusier admired the design of Marcel Breuer and Bauhaus, who in 1925 had begun making sleek modern tubular club chair. Mies van der Rohe began making his version in a sculptural curved form with a cane seat in 1927.

The early collaboration between Le Corbusier and Perriand produced two types of chairs made with chrome-plated tubular steel frames. 1927/28 the LC4, Chaise Longue with a covering of cowhide. 1928/29 the LC3, a club chair with a tubular frame that resembled the comfortable Art Deco club chairs that became popular in the 1920s. These chairs were designed specifically for two of his projects, the Maison la Roche in Paris and a pavilion for Barbara and Henry Church. Both chairs clearly showed the influence of Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. In 1929 the furniture range was expanded with additional designs for Le Corbusier's Salon d? Automne installation.

Despite Le Corbusier?s original intention that his furniture should be inexpensive and mass-produced, his pieces were originally costly to make and were not mass-produced until many years later!

See our inexpensive version of a Le Corbusier L3 arrangement here