Le Corbusier

Hello! My name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, but I had a special name that I liked to use: Le Corbusier. You can call me that. I was born a long time ago, on October 6th, 1887, in a small town in Switzerland. My town was famous for making beautiful watches. When I was a boy, I loved art and spent my time drawing pictures of nature all around me. My first job was learning how to make tiny, detailed drawings, called engravings, on the metal cases of watches. It was careful work, and I learned to love making things just right.

As I grew up, I realized that I wanted to build big things, not just decorate tiny watches. I became very curious about buildings, so I traveled all over the world to see different kinds. I saw ancient temples, modern houses, and everything in between. These trips filled my head with new ideas. I started to believe that a house should be like a “machine for living in.” That might sound funny, but I just meant that a home should be simple and useful, with lots of windows to let in the sunshine and fresh air. Around the year 1920, I moved to the big city of Paris to share my ideas. It was there that I started to call myself Le Corbusier.

I came up with what I called my 'Five Points' for new buildings. One of my favorite ideas was to lift houses up on big, strong pillars. I called them 'pilotis'. This way, the house would be up in the air, and the garden could run underneath, giving kids a special, sheltered place to play. In 1928, I designed one of my most famous houses, the Villa Savoye. It looks like a big, white box floating in the air. It has long ribbon windows that stretch across the walls and even a garden on the roof. My dreams got even bigger, and in the 1950s, I got the amazing chance to design a whole city in a country called India. The city is named Chandigarh, and it was built using my ideas about open spaces and simple, strong buildings.

I lived to be 77 years old, and I spent my whole life dreaming of new ways to build. My ideas about using simple shapes like boxes, creating open spaces for families to enjoy, and building with a strong material called concrete changed how buildings and cities look all over the world. Many of my buildings are still standing today. They remind people to be creative, to think about how we live, and to always look for a better way to build the future.