Composition for a Painting

1920

Adopts the name Le Corbusier

In the first issue of L'Esprit Nouveau, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret signed himself Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name, Lecorbésier. The pseudonym reflected his belief that anyone could reinvent themselves.

1920

The magazine L'Esprit Nouveau

With financial backing from the Swiss businessman Raoul La Roche, Jeanneret and Ozenfant launched the art magazine L'Esprit Nouveau. Jeanneret ran its architecture section, where the first chapters of his book Towards an Architecture appeared.

1922

The Ville Contemporaine at the Salon d'Automne

At the Paris Salon d'Automne Le Corbusier presented his plan for the Ville Contemporaine, a city for three million people: identical towers among lower zigzag blocks and a large park. An imaginary city in an imaginary place, it did not attract the attention he had hoped for.

1922

Opens his own office with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret

Le Corbusier opened his own architectural office in Paris and took on his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, who became his permanent partner.

1923

Publishes Towards an Architecture

Le Corbusier gathered his articles from L'Esprit Nouveau into his first and most influential book. It carried his famous maxim “A house is a machine to live in”, and its cover showed not a building but the promenade deck of an ocean liner.

1924

The studio at 35 rue de Sèvres

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret rented a wing of an old Paris convent at 35 rue de Sèvres. Most of his projects were created in this makeshift studio, where young architects from many countries trained, among them Kunio Maekawa, Josep Lluís Sert and Maxwell Fry.