Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, urban planner, artist and writer; among the earliest architectural Modernists and co-founder of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). His pioneering use of exposed concrete (béton brut), open floor plans, concrete pilotis (pillars) and sun breakers (brise-soleil) later characterised the International Style. His diverse projects include the Swiss Pavilion dormitories, Paris (1933), Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp (1955) and the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (1960); seventeen of them were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. He planned the Indian city of Chandigarh and designed its administrative buildings, and during this time also undertook housing and institutional projects in Ahmedabad, adapting his Western Modernist architectural vocabulary to the Indian context. His seminal books include Towards a New Architecture (1923). In the 1940s he developed the Modulor, a scale of architectural proportions based on the human height.