Architectural Posters of Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier: Housing, Art and Sacred Space

These seven architectural posters demonstrate the extraordinary range of Le Corbusier’s work: from a private weekend house to collective housing, a Dominican monastery and a pilgrimage chapel. A survey of his career and the tapestry design for Chandigarh extend the view to urbanism and visual art. Together, the motifs document his “recherche patiente” – a lifelong search for modern architecture shaped by space, structure, light, colour and human scale.

AP 706 and AP 235 · Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928–1931

Pierre and Eugénie Savoye commissioned Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to design a weekend house on a spacious site outside Paris. The villa became a built manifesto of the “Five Points of a New Architecture”: pilotis raise the volume above the ground, the structure permits a free plan and free façade, ribbon windows open the view and a roof garden returns the occupied ground as a place to live. Inside, a ramp creates an architectural promenade from the ground floor to the roof.

AP 706 places all four elevations above one another, revealing how differently their openings respond within the white, apparently floating volume. AP 235 concentrates on the north-east elevation: the green ground floor recedes behind the columns, while the ribbon window and rooftop structure emphasise the house’s horizontal layers.

AP 211 · Le Corbusier, Réalisations et projets

This survey combines photographs, plans, sections, perspectives and urban schemes into a compact account of Le Corbusier’s work. Early houses appear beside Purist villas, large residential blocks, cultural and sacred buildings, and the plans for Chandigarh. Recurring ideas become legible across the grid: the independent concrete frame, separation of structure and façade, roof terraces, brise-soleil and the Modulor as a proportional system based on the human body. The comparisons also reveal how he altered his principles in response to climate, programme and scale.

AP 508 · Tapestry for the Palace of Justice, Chandigarh, 1954

Following the partition of India, Chandigarh was developed as the new capital of Punjab; Le Corbusier revised its urban plan and designed the principal buildings of the Capitol Complex. This tapestry design was created in 1954 for the Grande Cour of the Palace of Justice. Strong red, orange and yellow fields, black forms and small sign-like elements make a free, non-perspectival composition. As a textile expanse of colour, the work provides a warm counterpoint to the monumental exposed-concrete architecture and demonstrates Le Corbusier’s ambition to unite architecture, painting and applied art.

AP 565 · Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1945–1952

Responding to the urgent need for housing after the Second World War, Le Corbusier developed the first Unité d’Habitation as a “vertical city”. The 135-metre block contains 330 apartments in 23 types, with internal streets serving interlocking maisonettes. Shops and a hotel are joined by rooftop facilities that included a nursery school, running track and open-air theatre. The reinforced-concrete frame, proportioned according to the Modulor, stands on massive pilotis. AP 565 presents the long elevation, where coloured loggias and deep brise-soleil give the vast volume an inhabitable rhythm.

AP 707 · Sainte-Marie de La Tourette Monastery, 1953–1960

The Dominican Order commissioned a study monastery at Éveux near Lyon; Father Marie-Alain Couturier helped entrust the project to Le Corbusier in 1953. The steep site prevented the building from resting on a level platform: its upper storeys follow a common horizontal line, while pilotis and volumes of varying height descend towards the slope. Cells, communal rooms, church and cross-shaped corridors organise monastic life with great rigour. The “pans ondulatoires”, developed with Iannis Xenakis, vary the spacing of their concrete mullions like a musical rhythm. AP 707 shows the contrast between this animated façade and the closed mass of the church.

AP 236 · Notre-Dame-du-Haut Chapel, Ronchamp, 1950–1955

The pilgrimage chapel was built on the hill of Bourlémont in place of a predecessor destroyed in 1944. Here Le Corbusier departed from the rectilinear clarity of his villas: curved, white-rendered walls support a dark cantilevered concrete roof for which a crab shell found on Long Island provided an important source of inspiration. Irregular openings introduce coloured light into the interior; three chapel towers and an outdoor choir accommodate both private devotion and large pilgrim services. AP 236 depicts the sculptural south side, where roof, wall and slits of light stand in tension as distinct forms.