Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, b. La Chaux-de-fonds, Switzerland, Oct. 6, 1887, d. 1965, was a Swiss-French architect who played a decisive role in the development of modern architecture. He first studied (1908-10) in Paris with August Perret, and then worked (1910) for several months in the Berlin studio of industrial designer Peter Behrens, where he met the future Bauhaus leaders Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.


Shortly after World War I, Jeanneret turned to painting and founded, with Amedee Ozenfant, the purist offshoot of cubism. With the publication (1923) of his influential collection of polemical essays, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture, Eng. repr. 1970), he adopted the name Le Corbusier and devoted his full energy and talent to creating a radically modern form of architectural expression.
In the 1920s and '30s, Le Corbusier's most significant work was in urban planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-36), he advanced ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-rise communities proposed by earlier garden city planners.