How to Pronounce Le Corbusier

Meaning and Context

Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in Switzerland in 1887, was a foundational and often controversial Swiss-French architect, urban planner, painter, and writer who became a towering pioneer of modern architecture and a leading proponent of the International Style. His revolutionary philosophy, articulated through seminal manifestos and iconic buildings, championed a new machine-age aesthetic centered on functionality, geometric purity, and the use of modern materials like reinforced concrete. He formalized his design principles into the influential "Five Points of Architecture," which included pilotis (supporting columns), a free façade, an open floor plan, horizontal ribbon windows, and a rooftop garden. These principles were realized in landmark structures such as the Villa Savoye near Paris, the Unité d'Habitation housing complex in Marseille, and the master plan for Chandigarh, India, cementing his legacy as a visionary modernist architect whose work fundamentally reshaped 20th-century urban planning and architectural design.

Common Mistakes and Alternative Spellings

The primary spelling to use is "Le Corbusier," which is the architect's adopted pseudonym and is always treated as a singular entity, despite "Le" being the French definite article. It is commonly written with a space between "Le" and "Corbusier," and the "C" is always capitalized. A frequent misspelling merges the two words into one, as in "Lecorbusier." Another common error involves the final syllable, with misspellings like "Le Corbusieur" or "Le Corbusie." In some non-English contexts, one might encounter the full name "Charles-Édouard Jeanneret" or "Jeanneret-Gris," but the pseudonym is globally dominant. Care should also be taken with the accent in "Corbusier"; while often omitted in English, the correct French pronunciation implies an acute accent on the final 'e' (Corbusier), though it is not typically written.

Example Sentences

A pilgrimage for architecture students, the Villa Savoye in Poissy perfectly embodies Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture with its slender pilotis and sweeping ribbon windows.

Critics of modernist urban planning often cite the stark, monumental concrete forms of Le Corbusier's Chandigarh Capitol Complex as both awe-inspiring and inhuman in scale.

The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille was not merely an apartment block but Le Corbusier's radical vision for a vertical "city" containing shops, a hotel, and a rooftop school.

His influential treatise, Towards a New Architecture, argued passionately that houses should be "machines for living in.

" While his plans for the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) were largely unrealized, their emphasis on high-rise towers set within parkland profoundly influenced post-war urban development worldwide.

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