Applique de Marseille
Nemo – Le Corbusier, 1954

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier, is a Swiss architect, urban planner, decorator, painter, sculptor, naturalized French author, born October 6, 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland and died August 27, 1965 in Roquebrune -Cap-Martin in France.

He is one of the main representatives of the modern movement with, among others, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Theo van Doesburg and Robert Mallet-Stevens.

Le Corbusier also worked in town planning and design. He is known for being the inventor of the “housing unit”, a concept on which he began to work in the 1920s, an expression of theoretical reflection on collective housing.

Le Corbusier's architectural work comprising seventeen sites (including ten in France, the others being spread over three continents) was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on July 17, 2016.

Le Corbusier's work and thought were particularly influential on post-war generations of architects and widely disseminated, before entering, with the period of postmodernism, a phase of significant and regular contestation.

He is the father of modern architecture, being the first to replace external load-bearing walls with reinforced concrete pillars placed inside buildings.

When Le Corbusier's death was announced, Alvar Aalto admitted that he had never appreciated the dogmatic prophet or the spokesman for modern architecture. Once the first surprise of the introductions, there was only a verbose flow. But the meticulous achievements of the architect builder deserved, according to the Finnish master, a completely different consideration, by their variety and their originality, their functionality and their adaptation to the constraint, their generous spirituality or their geometric destitution, their surprising evolution with the time…