Monday, February 23, 2009

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of form in light

Le Corbusier's Chapel

Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier né Charles Édouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) was a Swiss born architect. He developed the Modulor system using the golden ratio as Da Vinci did in the Vitruvian Man. He was a consultant on the building of the United Nations building in New York and he later got into furniture design and urban planning. His working motto, as written in Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), was "the house is a machine for living in." His five points of new architecture, formulated in 1926, are: (1) the pilotis elevating the mass off the ground, (2) the free plan, achieved through the separation of the load-bearing columns from the walls subdividing the space, (3) the free facade, the corollary of the free plan in the vertical plane, (4) the long horizontal sliding window and finally (5) the roof garden, restoring, supposedly, the area of ground covered by the house. One of his most important works,Villa Savoye in Poissy, France (a suburb of Paris), employs this idea.


3 comments:

  1. I love the white house - I'm a fan of anything contemporary with simple lines, good flow inside and lots of windows. There is architecture in California called mid-century modern (the name of the creator slips my old mind) - wonder if you are familiar with it?
    suZen

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  2. I love mid-century modern. I think one of the California architects famous for it is Eichler. hmmm, perhaps an idea for my next post...

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  3. One of the greatest architect of modern architecture. He has inspired a lot of the great architects of today and I think his works would definitely be part of history.

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