Still Life with Objects

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.

1925

The Esprit Nouveau Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition

For the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, Le Corbusier, with Ozenfant and Pierre Jeanneret, built a pavilion: a white “cell” of a future apartment block, with a tree growing through the roof. The furious organisers screened it with a fence, removed only on the order of the Ministry of Fine Arts, and critics ridiculed it.

1925

The Plan Voisin: to raze central Paris

The pavilion displayed a model of the Plan Voisin: bulldoze much of central Paris north of the Seine and replace it with cruciform towers set in parkland. French politicians and industrialists met it with criticism and scorn.

1925

Meets Konstantin Melnikov

At the 1925 Exposition Le Corbusier met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov and admired his Constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building there besides his own.