Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in the region known as Watch Valley, to a piano teacher mother and a father who enameled watch dials. With no formal architectural training and an early horror of the profession, he was pushed toward building by his art teacher Charles L’Eplattenier, who took him hiking in the Jura Mountains. His first house, built at 18, was a decorated alpine chalet. He then sketched the Parthenon for weeks, worked with reinforced concrete under Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens, and in 1914 and 1915 devised the Dom-ino system of slabs on thin columns. In Paris he co-founded Purism with Amédée Ozenfant, took the name Le Corbusier in 1920, called the house a machine for living in, and set out five points realized in the Villa Savoye of 1928 to 1931.

His 1925 Plan Voisin proposed flattening central Paris for 60-story cross-shaped towers, and his Ville Contemporaine imagined three million people in zoned high-rises among highways. The sources document that he wrote for fascist-leaning syndicalist journals, sought commissions from the Vichy regime, expressed anti-Semitic views in private letters, advised a eugenics foundation, and drew Algiers plans that marginalized the local population. After a decade without major work, he built the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille from 1947 to 1952, raw concrete housing for 1,600 with an internal shopping street and a rooftop school. He planned Chandigarh for Nehru, surprised critics with the curving chapel at Ronchamp, and died in 1965 at 77 while swimming in the Mediterranean.

• The Dom-ino frame that freed outside walls from carrying weight, opening the way to ribbon windows
• The five points: pilotis, free facade, open plan, ribbon windows, and a roof garden
• Interlocking L-shaped duplexes in Marseille giving most units both east and west balconies
• Jane Jacobs’ argument that towers in empty parks kill the street life that keeps cities safe
• The Open Hand monument at Chandigarh and a legacy of 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites