Introduction

Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), ranks among the most influential and controversial personalities in modern architecture. Born and raised in Switzerland, Jeanneret moved to Paris in 1917. He began using the pseudonym “Le Corbusier” in 1920 and was active worldwide as an architect, urban planner, designer, author, and artist.

He passionately advocated for the radical redesign of residential and urban space to improve the quality of people’s lives and to create a new outlook on life. His goal was to harness the possibilities of technical progress and combine them with classical aesthetic principles. Le Corbusier’s unification of architecture, design, art, and theory remains distinctive and radical to this day.

This exhibition focuses on Le Corbusier’s working process before architecture – the artistic experiment in his “atelier of patient research,” as he referred to his approach. For him, “research” meant developing ideas in studies and sketches and the exploration of form and color, composition and space, material and construction. But it also meant engaging with phenomena in society and the environment, nature and technology, the past and the present – from objects found on the beach to the architecture of antiquity.

Order

In the 1920s, the term “order” came to occupy an important place in Le Corbusier’s thinking. Design was a process of giving order to things. He thought the timeless task of art and architecture was to make the world understandable and to shape it through organization. It was only through order, he believed, that people could liberate themselves from the whims of nature, chance, and arbitrariness, and develop spiritually.

The principle of order initially refers to the desire to bring form and color, light and space into harmonious relationships. Le Corbusier aligned himself with classical tradition in art and architecture, especially the architecture of antiquity. His goal was to create modern spaces that satisfied the human needs for rest and relaxation, light and warmth, security and freedom.

Le Corbusier’s preoccupation with order was also a response to the challenges of his time: the poor living conditions in industrial cities, the devastation of the First World War, the impact of technological progress on everyday life, the revolutions in Europe, and the economic crises of the 1920s. At the same time, he shared avant-garde artists’ vision of questioning tradition and fundamentally reshaping people’s lives.