Swiss-French architect, urban theorist, and painter; the most consequential single figure in twentieth-century architecture and the principal theoretical representative of what later critics — Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford in particular — would come to call the modernist planning consensus, the set of prescriptions for the wholesale rebuilding of cities that dominated Western urban practice from roughly 1925 to 1970 and that Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was written to dismantle.
Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, he took the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920 when, with Amédée Ozenfant, he founded the journal L'Esprit Nouveau. The early theoretical books — Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture, 1923), Urbanisme (The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925), La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City, 1935) — advance the program that his later critics would argue against: the house as "a machine for living in"; streets to be replaced by the free circulation of automobiles; dense low-rise urban fabric to be demolished in favor of towers in open green space; zoning into separated functional districts (residence, work, recreation, circulation); planning from above by the architect-technician. The 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris — which would have demolished most of the Marais and replaced it with a grid of eighteen 60-story cruciform towers — was never executed but defined what the program would look like if taken seriously.
The built work is more varied than the polemics suggest and better than its worst imitators. The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1929–31) is the classic statement of the "five points" of the new architecture. The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1947–52) is the most serious housing project he built and a surprisingly livable one. The pilgrimage chapel Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950–54) and the monastery of La Tourette (1953–60) turned against the rationalist surface of the earlier work toward a sculptural and religious architecture. The late government buildings at Chandigarh (1951–65), for the new capital of Indian Punjab, are his most extensive executed urban commission.
The long critical reception — Jacobs, Mumford, Christopher Alexander, Charles Jencks, and many after — has argued that the program as applied (by others, often without Le Corbusier's direct supervision) produced a century of destructive urban renewal: housing projects that isolated residents, downtowns ripped open for arterials, and neighborhoods whose complexity was replaced by segregated single-use zones. More recent scholarship has also documented his significant overlap with interwar fascist and Vichy circles, which had been underemphasized in the postwar reception. The canonical status of the work and the gravity of the criticism are both by now settled; both belong to the standard account.
Le Corbusier is the graph's principal counter-example rather than hero: the most consequential twentieth-century figure on the relation between architecture and politics, and the position against which Jacobs, Mumford, Alexander, and most of the graph's urbanist critics are arguing.