LeCorbusier - 1887 to 1965

LeCorbusier - Design & Planning Principles

Continually and simultaneously combined ideas within his architectural forms.
“Applied deeply a narrow range of conceptual implications.”

Parthenon 5 Points of Architecture

Plan Order
Contour Nature (Planning)
the House Regulating Lines
Economy Modulor
Materials Gradation
Society Axis
Parthenon
Converted the qualities
of the Parthenon into a
systematic way of thinking.
Parthenon - Athens, Greece

• Sought Classical primacy through geometrical purity

• Product of keen selection applied to a standard (language)
• On every point of the horizon, the thought is single
Plan Plan of Parthenon

The structure rises from

its base, whose rules
are written in its plan.

Plan of the Acropolis - Athens, Greece

• Light and spatial elements are fixed in the Plan

• Nature is honest - the city is man’s grip upon nature
• Form from Nature is honest
• The plan is the generator
Contour
…is free of all constraint
Call for the plastic artist.

Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut - Ronchamps, France

• Contour is what is seen and measured by the eyes

• Holes in the wall often compete with a flowing surface
• Surface encloses mass, though not competitively
• Holes must accentuate and modulate form
• Holes must remain within the mass
The House
…is the center of new
values. An expression
of mass production and
efficiency.
Villa Savoie

• The problem of the House has not been stated

• A room for cooking, eating, working, washing & sleeping
• A room is a surface over which one can walk at ease
• The house is a machine for living
• The House must be mass produced
Economy
Economic law governs
our acts and out
thoughts.

If the problem of the house were studied like the...

• Airplane - mobilized daring, imagination & cold reason
• Automobile - speedy improvement would be seen
• Steamship - freedom from an enslavement to the past
• Old styles no longer exist
Society
Style belongs to its own
period.
History - modifications
of structure and
ornament.
Villa Citroen - Mass Production house concept

• No longer heavily rooted in the soil

• Mass Production House is morally / physically healthier
• Evolution of culture: peasant, soldier, priest
• No longer solidly built to defy time and decay
Regulating
Lines
Facts of greater value
than in many
dissertations on the soul
of stones
Villa Ozenfont - Placing the right angle

• Fixes the fundamental geometry of the work

• Confine ourselves to things which can be known
• Confine ourself to the natural philosophy of matter
• Greeks and Romans have enlightened our judgement
Materials
Steel and concrete to
replace masonry.

Front facade, High Court - Chandigarh

5 Points of Architecture
A systematic vocabulary
of reinforced concrete.

DOM-INO House

1. Pilotis (columns supported raised building mass)

2. Projecting (cantilevering floor decks)
3. Free façade (large areas of glass)
4. Open interiors (partitions not load bearing)
5. ‘Flat’ Roof Garden
Order
Where Order reigns,
well being begins.

Unite de Habitacion

• The naked fact is a medium for ideas, only by reason

of the Order that is applied to it.
• Free façade (large areas of glass)
• Unit: An order which regulates the whole work
• Unit: not abstract mathematics (own scale)
Nature (Planning)
Man creating his
own universe.

Plan Voisin - central Paris

• A supreme determinism illuminates the creation of Nature

• Towers rising up from tree strewn parks
• The new city requires a new house plan
• Horizontal not vertical; the decisive moment
Modulor
Proportion costs the
landlord nothing!

The Modulor

• Proportion which expresses the human form

• Harmony and proportion incite the intellectual faculties
and arrest the man of culture
• Mathematical order cannot touch us as things no longer
respond to a need…....as things are!
Gradation
Classical hierarchy

Villa LaRoche - schematic plan sketch

• Horizontal not vertical; the decisive moment

• The new city requires a new house plan
• Gradation brings sensations
• Always you have a gradation
Axis
Phidias was the
plastic artist,
creator of the Axis
of Harmony.
Greek Ionic / Corinthian capitals

• Phidias; the great sculptor of the Parthenon

• Ictinus and Callicrates (Architects) created the contour
• Contour: Volumes seen in light
• Architecture: masses seen in light