A House is a machine to live in…… Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, is a Swiss born French Architect, Urban designer, writer, artist and a philosopher. One of the most important pioneer of modern architecture. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout Europe, India and America. He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. EARLY LIFE Corbusier studied art and architecture and loved travelling. He worked with Auguste Perret, the french pioneer of reinforced cement concrete. In 1910 he worked for Peter Behrens, where he met Mies van der rohe, Walter Gropius and Louis I Kahn. EARLY LIFE He travelled to Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey after 1911, filling his sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw. During this period of his life, he was fascinated by the study of the Parthenon, which gave birth to his very famous principle, The Modular. EARLY CAREER During the world war I, he taught at his old school in Switzerland and returned to Paris after the war. During these four years in Switzerland, he worked on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. EARLY CAREER Among these studies, was his project for the Domino House (1914-1915). EARLY CAREER This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs supported by minimal number of thin RCC columns around the edges, with a staircase providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan. This design became the foundation for most of his buildings for the next ten years. EARLY CAREER Corbusier started his own architectural practice in 1896 until 1967 in collaboration with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. One of the most famous of Le Corbusier's works, and an icon of modernist architecture Villa Savoye succinctly summed up the five points of architecture that he had elucidated in L'Esprit Nouveau and the book Vers une architecture •Located in Poissy,(France) in a landscape surrounded by trees and large lawn •The house is an elegant white box poised on rows of slender columns, surrounded by a horizontal band of windows which fill the structure with light. •The service areas (parking, rooms for servants and laundry room) are located under the house. •Visitors enter a vestibule from which a gentle ramp leads to the house itself. •The bedrooms of the house are distributed around a suspended garden; the rooms look both out at the landscape and into the garden, which provides additional light and air. •Another ramp leads up to the roof, and a stairway leads down to the cellar under the pillars. "the Five Points of a New Architecture" are: 1. Pilotis – Replacement of supporting walls by a grid of reinforced concrete columns that bears the structural load is the basis of the new aesthetic. 2. The free designing of the ground plan—the absence of supporting walls—means the house is unrestrained in its internal use. 3. The free design of the façade—separating the exterior of the building from its structural function—sets the façade free from structural constraints. 4. The Ribbon window, which cuts the façade along its entire length, lights rooms equally. 5. Roof gardens on a flat roof can serve a domestic purpose while providing essential protection to the concrete roof. The overhang The first story "box" is supported by the base and the slender pilotis; because it is cantilevered outward, it forms a kind of loggia or porch protecting the entrance. The entrance is not signalled by elaborate ornamentation--only a black sheet metal double door and a shallow concrete step mark the threshold. View of the Courtyard Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye 1929, near Paris (in suburb of Poissy) , plan showing turning radius of the Voisin automobile as basis for ground floor plan and design of garage GROUND FLOOR PLAN FIRST FLOOR PLAN Views of the exterior ramp leading to the roof terrace Internal Stair Case INTO URBANISM For number of years, French officials had been unsuccessful in dealing with shabbiness of the growing Paris slums and Le Corbusier sought efficient ways to house large number of people in response to the urban housing crisis. He believed that his new, modern architectural forms would provide a new organisational solution that would raise the quality of life for the lower classes. INTO URBANISM Immeubles villas (1922) was such a project that called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of other, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms, kitchen and garden terrace. INTO URBANISM Not merely content with designs for a few blocks, soon Le Corbusier moved into studies for entire cities. In 1922, he presented his scheme for a ‘contemporary city’ for three million inhabitants, ‘Ville Contemporaine’ At the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1922, he presented his plan for the Ville Contemporaine, a model city for three million people The proposal: residents would live and work in a group of identical sixty-story tall apartment buildings surrounded by lower zig-zag apartment blocks and a large park. The Ville Contemporaine, presented an imaginary city in an imaginary location, did not attract the attention that Le Corbusier wanted. For his next proposal, the Plan Voisin (1925), he took a much more provocative approach; he proposed to demolish a large part of central Paris and to replace it with a group of sixty-story cruciform office towers surrounded by parkland Cruciform skyscrapers were steel framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. This idea shocked most viewers. . Le Corbusier wrote: "The center of Paris, currently threatened with death, threatened by exodus, is in reality a diamond mine...To abandon the center of Paris to its fate is to desert in face of the enemy." The plan included a multi-level transportation hub that included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and an airport. Le Corbusier had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. Le Corbusier segregated the pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways. When one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low story zigzag apartments housed the inhabitants. CHANDIGARH The new capital city for the Indian states, Punjab and Haryana and the first planned city in India. Le Corbusier designed many administration buildings including courthouse, parliament building and a university. He also designed a general layout of the city dividing it into sectors. BASIC PLANNING CONCEPTS Le Corbusier conceived the master plan of Chandigarh as analogous to human body, with a clearly defined •Head (the Capitol Complex, Sector 1), •Heart (the City Centre Sector-17), •Lungs (the leisure valley, innumerable open spaces and sector greens), •Intellect (the cultural and educational institutions), •Circulatory system (the network of roads, the 7Vs) and •Viscera (the Industrial Area). CIRCULATION: An Integrated System Of Seven Road Types • V1 : fast roads connecting Chandigarh to other towns • V2 : arterial roads • V3 :fast vehicular roads • V4 : meandering shopping streets • V5 :sector circulation roads • V6 : access roads to the houses • V7 : footpaths and cycle tracks The primary module of city’s design is a Sector, a neighborhood unit of size 800 meters x 1200 meters Each SECTOR is a self-sufficient unit having shops, school, health centers and places of recreations and worship. The population of a sector varies between 3000 and 20000 depending upon the sizes of plots and the topography of the area. CHANDIGARH Assembly building High Court CHANDIGARH Secretariat Building The Open hand monument SUMMARY OF PHILOSOPHY PROMINENT WORKS Five points of Architecture. Immeubles villas The Modular. Unite habitation A house is a machine to live The Contemporary city in. The Radiant city. Chandigarh city Chandigarh Administrative buildings Chandigarh open hand Villa Savoye