5 Principals of Le Corbusier

1. Pilotis; to life the house off the ground.

2. The Free Plan; the framed construction of the building allowing the
interior space to be organised as desired.
3. The Free Facade; Since the external walls were not load-bearing,
they could be divided up wherever necessary by windows or other
apertures.
4. The Ribbon Window; a long horizontal window
5. The Roof Garden; Intended to replace the ground covered by the
house and bring its inhabitants into direct relationship with nature.
• The main body of the house was to be away from ground level.
1. Internal furniture was to be designed to be functional and not
decorational. Pieces were to be built into the fabric of the building.
1. Pilotis

The rise of the first floor above the ground was made on the free-standing pillars to
create a green zone under it, a street, a parking lot, sports grounds, and recreational
places for pedestrians.
2. Free ground plan

Frame construction of reinforced concrete allows architects to make a free layout.

The load-bearing functions transferred from the walls to the frame, which made it
possible to arrange partitions on different floors in different ways. The location of the
walls is determined only by the functional purpose of the premises.
3. Free facade

The supports moved inside the house, which made it possible to remove the
load from the facade plane. This solution makes it possible to build walls of
any material and any shape.
4. Horizontal windows

The absence of load-bearing walls allows making windows of any shape and size.
Horizontal windows throughout the facade increase the level of insolation and
increase the sense of space.
Using the example of Villa Savoye, it became clear that huge windows are not
practical due to significant heat losses.
5. Roof garden

As the architect himself said, a roof with a slope violates the harmony of the shape of
the house.
The flat roof is made with additional waterproofing and internal drain, which should
save the house from the water. However, in the very first year after construction, Villa
Savoye began to leak, and it was always cold and damp inside.
Le Corbusier uses a flat roof to accommodate the garden terrace. Thus, nature
directly enters the residential zone without disturbing the structure and its forms.
The roof garden is especially useful in cities with high population density and a small
number of parks.
Swiss architect Charles-Eduoard Jenneret, best known as Le Corbusier, promoted the
International Style that the Bauhaus school helped to make popular. His designs for buildings
include geometric shapes, maximum use of space, and a lack of ornamentation. Le Corbusier
referred to his style as Purism because it relied on pure geometric shapes.

Villa Savoye is a country house he designed supports his belief that a home should not need
load-bearing walls – the steel beams support the structure, giving it much more space.
 Domino Houses (1915)
• An idea for mass production houses.
• Uses reinforced concrete structure to allow the architect to
apply non load bearing walls according to need.
• Intended to show how technology could be used to free the
architect from the constraints of traditional building materials.
• Allows for construction of varied spaces using one basic
skeleton.
 Citrohan Houses (1919-27)
• Both Citrohan House variants featured a long rectangular volume with
a glass wall that opened the double height living room to natural
elements.
• At the rear of this light filled space was a mezzanine sleeping level
comprising a cantilevered reinforced concrete slab.
• Below it was the dining area.
• Children’s rooms were placed on the terrace roof above.
• The side walls were weight bearing, reinforced concrete slabs pierced
by strip windows.
• Window glazing was flush with the wall surface and the later variant of
the Citrohan House was lifted off the ground by pilotis, both these
features serve to enhance the impression of volume, the smoothness
and rectilinear quality of the walls and lightweight construction of the
house.
• The houses Le Corbusier built at Pessac in 1925 also featured
coloured walls to emphasis their pure form and simplicity.
 The immeuble villa

• Maison Citrohan’The Immeuble-villa’ was a

maisonette unit with a double height living
space, alongside which was placed a garden.
Corbusiers intention was for each unit to be
stacked vertically, or horizontally to create small
housing blocks.’ p 13
• The Maison Citrohan was of a similar design,
but placed on stilts.
• Their designs were to be functional and suitable
for mass production.
• Only one set of these designs were built, at
Pessac new Bordeaux.
• His main designs were for wealthy families and
individuals.
• These designs relied on basic elements from the
above.
• But for appearance he developed a basic
grammer and set of 5 rules.
Citrohan house design
• In 1922 Le Corbusier exhibited the Citrohan House and a plan for a Contemporary
City. The two ideas were developed in tandem and provided a blueprint for a new
way of urban living. Whereas the Contemporary City would have required massive
state intervention, the Citrohan House was intended to evolve directly from
industrial production and market forces.

• The Citrohan House (the name evoking Citroën cars) embodied the ideas
enunciated in Vers une architecture (1923). In that book

• Corbusier had argued for a house to be mass-produced, to work as efficiently as a

motor car, and to function effectively as a machine for living in.

• The Citrohan concept was intended to provide standardized model to meet the
demand for affordable housing.

• Le Corbusier designed two versions of the Citrohan House, both of which were
intended to be prefabricated in order to provide cheap, rapidly constructed but
permanent, high quality accommodation.

• Both versions had flat roofs and roof terraces with a double heightmain living area,
in which a double-height window, made from industrial glass,occupied one wall,
flooding the interior with light.
Citrohan house design
• The second version was raised above the ground on cylindrical posts, or piloti,
providing parking, garage and boiler-room space at ground level.

• There was also a large balcony, which wrapped around the front and sides of the
building on the first-floor level, with an external staircase.

• Kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms and a maid’s room were located to the rear, with
some sleeping accommodation provided on the gallery of the living room, accessed
via an internal spiral staircase.

• The Citrohan Houses were intended, like automobiles, to revolutionize the housing
market, not to provide minimum dwellings for those on the lowest incomes.
 Ville Contemporaine
• To replace a chaotic unorganised mess with slums and a lack of nature, he
proposed a zoned city where things like housing, industry and administration
occupied specific areas.
• These would be connected by networks for cars, trains and planes.
• Concrete allowed to build high giving room for parks.
• In his city plan for 3 million at the heart was a traffic terminus, then high rise glass
skyscrapers for the central commercial district. Then housing for those who
worked in the towers.
• A green belt separates this from the manufacturing area and another divides
the housing for those working in the factories.
• However this design was seen as elitist as it subordinates the workers to the
outskirts of the city.
• The Ville Contemporaine was an unrealised project to house three million
inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922.

The centerpiece of Corbusier's utopian, urban plan was a group of sixty-

story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in curtain
walls of glass. The skyscrapers housed both offices and the flats of the most
wealthy inhabitants. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular
park-like green spaces.

At the center of the planned city was a transportation hub which would
house depots for buses and trains as well as highway intersections and at
the top, an airport.
 Pavillion suisse
• Pavillion Suisse was a residential student housing block that represented a
movement into a new phase of design.
• It was a reworking of his 5 points where there was now a grander and more
powerful architectural language.
• His design also changed eg, the Pilotis were now irregular.
• his approach to finding a completely modernist movement
 Pavillion suisse

• In 1930, Le Corbusier was tasked

with designing a dormitory that
would house Swiss students at the
Cité Internationale Universitaire in
Paris.
• At first the architect and Pierre
Jeanneret, his partner at the time,
refused to take on the project due
to tensions with the Swiss after
their handling of the architects’
proposal for the League of Nations
competition.
• Eventually, however, they agreed
to see it through and worked on a
very limited budget, which led the
building to become a summation
of Le Corbusier’s modern
principles, forcing him to focus on
dwelling before all else.
“A house is a machine for living.”
Le Corbusier
Project done by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret