Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, completed in 1929, affirmed Le Corbusier's role as a star architect and ushered in the International Style. (Anthony Flint/Anthony Flint)

Le Corbusier, one of the 20th century’s defining architects, a controlling visionary with a complicated and contradictory personality, has long had a divisive legacy. Steadfast in his belief that “architecture only exists when there is poetic emotion,” he designed landmarks of enduring significance. His 1931 Villa Savoye, a hovering white box in Poissy, France, has long been celebrated as an icon of modernism. His 1954 Notre Dame du haut de Ronchamp, with its crab-shell-inspired roof and curving concrete form, presaged postmodernism. He was also a pioneering self-promoter — a precursor of the starchitects of today — who changed his name from Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris to help burnish his public persona and who distilled his theory of architecture into five media-friendly points. 

At the same time, Le Corbusier could be a cold and ruthless technocrat, the author of the 1925 Plan Voisin, in which he proposed solving the urban ills of Paris by razing practically the entire Right Bank neighborhood of Le Marais and building a series of imposing apartment towers and motorways. According to his most strident critics, he bore responsibility for the misguided urban renewal projects — influenced by his ideas — that left massive scars on the postwar American landscape. But nothing was quite as damning as his decision to join the Nazi-friendly Vichy government during World War II......Continue Reading

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