Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, April 15, 20234: Le Corbusier, a French architect, painter, designer (#1998)

Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965) was visionary writer, theorist, and architect, and painter. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, he adopted his moniker when he began to author architectural designs and paintings. He had a fascination with proportion, modularity, and geometry, often taking his cue from classical architecture theory.

Le Corbusier is credited with introducing a sense of order into Cubism, especially in relation to color. he developed a grid system for painting, organizing overlapping objects and planes, and keeping each patch of color distinct, avoiding “the visual muddiness that can result when patches of color run into each other.” Architecture meets art meets graphic design.

His designs, however, were modernist and industrial. He fondly called houses “machines for living in,” and said that the base principal for design is that “it must be beautiful.” Le Corbusier was interested in solving what he called the problem of urban co-habitation, and produced a great number of designs for houses and apartment buildings. Le Corbusier worked at the atelier of Peter Behrens, the training grounds of other architectural masters like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.

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