Needing to expand his intellectual and artistic horizons, he took himself off on sketching tours of the ancient and vernacular buildings of both sides of the Mediterranean.Īnd, yet, despite the advocacy of Unesco, and more than half a century after his death, Le Corbusier remains a controversial figure. At the time he was much influenced by the English critic, John Ruskin. If you get to see any of these compelling buildings, from purist white villas of the 1920s and ‘30s like the Villa Savoye at Poissy to the post-war Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseilles, the lyrical pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, the Chandigarh Capitol Complex or Tokyo’s mid-1950s National Museum of Western Art, you may well come away with a sense that you have experienced both a lucid creative talent at work and something – a great deal in fact – of the poetry of architecture.īorn in Switzerland in 1887, the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret began his professional life as a watch engraver, although by 20 he was already designing and building a number of successful Arts & Crafts-style houses. Such is the quality of the architect Le Corbusier's work that this summer Unesco made the radical decision to list 17 of his buildings in seven countries as a collective World Heritage Site.
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