Le Corbusier | EPFL Graph Search

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 - 27 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier (UKlə_kɔːrˈbjuːzieɪ , USlə_ˌkɔːrbuːˈzjeɪ,_-ˈsjeɪ , lə kɔʁbyzje), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc". Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings there, especially the government buildings. On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier remains a controversial figure. Some of his urban planning ideas have been criticized for their indifference to pre-existing cultural sites, societal expression and equality, and his alleged ties with fascism, antisemitism, eugenics, and the dictator Benito Mussolini have resulted in some continuing contention. Le Corbusier also designed well-known furniture such as the LC4 Chaise Lounge Chair, and the ALC-3001 chair. Both made with leather with metal framing. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in the French-speaking Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, across the border from France. It was an industrial town, devoted to manufacturing watches.

The Big Building

Marta Meira Brandão

Large hybrid objects integrating multiple functions and whose scale, over 100'000 m2, is halfway between the fragment of a city and that of a large-scale building: these are the key features of the complex projects that are triggering new debates on the subject of Design Complexity, usually referred to as Big Buildings. Recurrently bearing the predominance of housing, the paradigms of these mixed architectural forms - « cities within cities » developed either horizontally or vertically - may recall Le Corbusier's Unités d'Habitation, or even the American Hybrids, due to the multiple simultaneous conditions they succeed to accommodate within their generic envelopes. In Europe, either as a consequence of the urban densification and the resulting need for restraining the urban sprawl, or driven by political and economical dynamics of speculation and globalization, we are assisting to the echoed emergence of projects of this kind, often located nearby mobility interfaces or in old industrial areas in process of regeneration, normally with privileged connections to the city centres. The development of such projects is hypothetically becoming a trigger for the creation of new ways of producing collective housing, integrated within a more complex system of activities, bearing new strategies of articulation between housing and other programs, new models of public space, new typological experiments on the dwellings or new ways of invigorating social mix. Our intention is to investigate how effective is, then, the planning of collective housing within the massiveness of the Big Building and how can the design of housing inside this specific milieu generate new potentials and new knowledge in the architectural domain of Housing.

EPFL2017

Usine climatique. Un centre de recherche sur le design passif à Getafe (E)

Gilda Gysin

Avant l'avènement des technologies, le seul moyen permettant de créer des espaces confortables reposait sur la maîtrise des éléments naturels. L'analyse des dispositifs archaïques utilisés pour la régulation du confort dans le bâtiment met en évidence à quel point ces principes sont actuels dans le cadre du design passif. L'usine climatique à Getafe s'inscrit dans le développement du parc Scientifique et Technologique promu par l'université de Madrid en tant que centre de recherche sur le design passif. Le climat chaud-tempéré et sec du centre de l'Espagne permet la réutilisation de divers systèmes: les tours à vent, “badgir”, et les écrans de protection solaire, “mashrabyia”, typiques de l'architecture iranienne, la récupération des eaux de pluie très utilisée par les romains ou encore le portique ventilé japonais “engawa”. Les trois typologies: la tour de bureaux, le bâtiment de laboratoires et le centre de congrès, montrent comment les principes peuvent s'adapter selon les besoins. La géométrie rigide, dictée par l'orthogonalité du parcellaire du parc, est interrompue par les éléments naturels qui viennent imposer leur circulation aussi bien à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur des bâtiments. Les trois volumes s'érigent au milieu d'un bassin mis en place pour la récupération des eaux de pluie. L'eau, libre de circuler autour des masses, est ensuite nébulisée dans les tours à vent pour refroidir l'air qui pénètre dans l'espace intérieur. Les tours, éléments visuels prédominants, structurent le projet.

2017

Brevets de la maison en béton, 1892-1923

Gia Bao Khue Aurélie Do-Tran

Looking back at the history of concrete houses around 1900, we can discover how reinforced concrete, initially tied to construction systems of renowned inventors (and other less known), is gradually becoming autonomous and a material on its own, highlighted for its aesthetics and malleability. Also, studying the different experiments by businesses, designers, developers, engineers or architects and linked to the interpretation of the structure, yields novel ideas. The research process focuses on construction technic in North America, Western Europe as well as Australia. It is shown that the first applications of reinforced concrete, at the domestic scale (excluding the raft foundation), apply to fire-resistant lightweight floors and walls. It appears that the problem of fireproof structures remains one of the primary concerns of inventors and manufacturers during this timeframe while other constraints such as earthquakes, post-war reconstruction or portable houses for settlements will follow. In the United Kingdom, the first patents relating cements were filed by the end of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, those were followed by a proliferation of patents, spreading across many countries, involving multiple building materials such as plastics, conglomerates and, finally, reinforced concrete. Usually these patents solely focus on techniques and processes for the material development. However, around 1900, substantial changes in their content occur: the arrival of construction systems arising from abundant empirical research, material science experiments, development of calculation methods and, above all, technical solutions. Whether innovative or utopian, those solutions will help shape and define a new concrete construction theory, unveiling new fields of applications. Based on such inventions, the domestic industry, as opposed to large-scale industrial projects becomes a place for experimentations and small-scale prototyping. These projects experimented with usually individual, non-industrial dwellings built according to a ¿system¿. The period of interest, from 1892 to 1923, sees the use of concrete spreading throughout domestic architecture and is defined by two revolutionary systems. The first one is the fireproof floors of François Hennebique, followed by the weaving metal reinforcements in the Textile-Block of Frank Lloyd Wright. The research examines a series of inventions relating to different housing construction elements, from framing systems to prefabricated blocks to the single casting monolith house of Thomas Alva Edison and the standardization utopia of Le Corbusier for creating maisons en séries.

EPFL2017

Brevets de la maison en béton, 1892-1923

Gia Bao Khue Aurélie Do-Tran

EPFL2017