لخّصلي

Le Corbusier's early life was shaped by the austere environment of his Swiss hometown and his father's trade of watchmaking. He studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs, where Charles L'Eplattenier, his mentor, introduced him to art history, drawing, and Art Nouveau. L'Eplattenier encouraged him to pursue architecture, and Le Corbusier embarked on travels through Europe and the Mediterranean from 1907 to 1911. These journeys exposed him to architectural influences that shaped his future work: the monastic spaces of the Charterhouse of Ema, the classical proportions of Palladio's architecture, and the geometric forms and light manipulation of Mediterranean vernacular architecture.

Upon returning to Paris at age 30, Le Corbusier met the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who introduced him to Purism, a new artistic movement advocating for simple geometric forms. Together, they published the Purist manifesto, "After Cubism," in 1918. In 1920, they founded the avant-garde journal, "L'Esprit Nouveau," which championed functionalism, opposed historical styles and ornamentation, and presented ideas on architecture and city planning.

Le Corbusier was born in a small town in the mountainous Swiss Jura region, since the 18th century the world’s centre of precision watchmaking. All his life he was marked by the harshness of these surroundings and the puritanism of a Protestant environment. At 13 years of age, Le Corbusier left primary school to learn the enamelling and engraving of watch faces, his father’s trade, at the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. There, Charles L’Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier later called his only teacher, taught him art history, drawing, and the naturalist aesthetics of Art Nouveau.

It was L’Eplattenier who decided that Le Corbusier, having completed three years of studies, should become an architect and gave him his first practice on local projects. From 1907 to 1911, on his advice, Le Corbusier undertook a series of trips that played a decisive role in the education of this self-taught architect. During these years of travel through central Europe and the Mediterranean, he made three major architectural discoveries. The Charterhouse of Ema at Galluzzo, in Tuscany, provided a contrast between vast collective spaces and “individual living cells” that formed the basis for his conception of residential buildings. Through the 16th-century Late Renaissance architecture of Andrea Palladio in the Veneto region of Italy and the ancient sites of Greece, he discovered classical proportion. Finally, popular architecture in the Mediterranean and on the Balkan Peninsula gave him a repertory of geometric forms and also taught him the handling of light and the use of landscape as an architectural background.

At the age of 30 he returned to live in Paris, where his formation was completed a year later when he met the painter and designer Amédée Ozenfant, who introduced him to sophisticated contemporary art. Ozenfant initiated Le Corbusier into Purism, his new pictorial aesthetic that rejected the complicated abstractions of Cubism and returned to the pure, simple geometric forms of everyday objects. In 1918 they wrote and published together the Purist manifesto, Après le cubisme (1918; “After Cubism”). In 1920, with the poet Paul Dermée, they founded a polemic avant-garde review, L’Esprit Nouveau. Open to the arts and humanities, with brilliant collaborators, it presented ideas in architecture and city planning already expressed by Adolf Loos and Henri van de Velde, fought against the “styles” of the past and against elaborate nonstructural decoration, and defended functionalism.