Le Corbusier’s 15 Most Significant Architectural Works

Le Corbusier’s last design was the Heidi Weber Museum, now known as Pavillion Le Corbusier. The architect departed from his usual materials and designed the museum primarily using steel and glass. Completed in 1967, Pavilion Le Corbusier was commissioned by interior designer Heidi Weber, who was a longtime patron of the architect, as a space to display his artwork. Colorful enameled panels line the façade of the building, which is topped with a striking floating canopy and a roof garden. It was carefully restored by architects Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg and reopened to the public in 2019.

Le Corbusier designed a number of structures in Firminy, including a stadium, a housing project and the Maison de la Culture, France, but the most spectacular Église Saint-Pierre. Finally completed in 2006, 41 years after Le Corbusier’s death, the parish church is the architect’s final major realized work. Of the design, the architect said, “It must be vast so that the heart may feel at ease, and high so that prayers may breathe in it. There must be ample diffused light so that there will be no shadow, and in the whole ensemble a perfect simplicity; an immensity must be enclosed within the forms." Le Corbusier took inspiration from an earlier unrealized design at Le Tremblay and the Palace of the Assembly of Chandigarh for the conical concrete church, which incorporates his signature geometric forms.

One of the most celebrated buildings of the 20th century and an icon of modernism is Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, outside of Paris. Completed in 1931, the building, which Le Corbusier designed with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, demonstrates the architect’s five points of architecture, which include free façade design, open floor plans, pilotis (or reinforced concrete pillars), horizontal window, and roof gardens. The white International Style home seems to float, thanks to its pilotis and set-back ground floor, and was designed to be experienced in motion as part of an architectural promenade.

Le Corbusier’s only project in South America was Casa Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina, which was completed in 1953. The house was commissioned by Dr. Pedro Domingo Curuchet and included a medical office on the first floor. Le Corbusier placed the living quarters on the top two floors of the four-story building, and the roof of the office serves as a roof garden for the home. Set on a narrow lot between two existing buildings, the modern Casa Curutchet fits harmoniously within its context.

Located by Porte Molitor between Paris and Boulogne-Billancourt, Immeuble Molitor showcased Le Corbusier's principles of urbanism, which he would later present to the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) with his concept of the Radiant City. The eight-story apartment building was designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret and completed in 1934. Immeuble Molitor was the first residential building with an entirely glass façade, using a combination of glazing and glass blocks. The architect’s living space and studio occupied the seventh and eighth floors and served as his Paris residence until his death in 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.

Le Corbusier completed Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art in March of 1959. The building was commissioned to display the art collection of Kojiro Matsukata, which was returned to Japan by the French government following World War II. France, however, stipulated that the museum should be designed by a French architect. Le Corbusier worked with three of his former Japanese apprentices on the project, which features a large center hall with an open floor plan, a ramp to guide visitors through the museum, and a second-floor exhibition room overlooking the main Nineteenth Century Hall.

Le Corbusier’s first completed work is Villa Fallet, which was built by 18-year-old Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in collaboration with architect René Chapalaz and with the help of other students studying with Charles l’Eplattenier at the École des Arts Décoratifs. The home in La Chaux de Fonds took inspiration from traditional Swiss chalets and featured elaborate nature-inspired ornamentation on the exterior and interior. The future Le Corbusier also designed furniture, including a table, chairs, and a built-in sideboard, for the dining room of engraver Louis Fallet. The architect and Chapalaz would go on to collaborate on the Villas Stotzer and Jacquemet, both in La Chaux de Fonds.

For 10 years, Le Corbusier worked in La Chaux-de-Fonds—this was his final project in the town. The flat-roofed house would earn the nickname “the Turkish villa” for its Ottoman-style influences, from the flat roof to the geometry of the structure to the ochre brickwork.

When Le Corbusier moved to Paris, his work took on the more modernist aesthetic the architect is known for. Here, he designed a living space and a studio for the funerary sculptor Antonin Planeix.

Le Corbusier won an open competition to design the headquarters of the consumer cooperatives of the USSR, producing a massive building comprising three main structures. “Le Corbusier was fascinated by the density of pedestrian movement in Moscow and concluded that ‘architecture is circulation,’” writes Cohen. “He would deploy an ‘architectural promenade’ over seven stories, utilizing ramps of varying amplitude and curvature.”

“The Unite is an astonishing complex of spatial, structural, economic, and perhaps sociological, relevance,” wrote Architectural Review in 1964 of Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation, a mass housing concept the architect built in several cities in Europe, including Marseille, Paris, and Berlin. The first to be built was La Cité radieuse in Marseille, which is considered the beginning of the Brutalist style. The 12-story complex included 330 apartments, shops, a hotel, and a restaurant, as well as a kindergarten and sports facilities on the roof. Designers Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé collaborated with the architect on elements of the apartment interiors.

While in India to develop the city of Chandigarh, Le Corbusier took on a side project in Ahmadabad, producing this Brutalist building as the headquarters of the city’s Mill Owners’ Association. The term Brutalism was coined from the architect’s description of his use of concrete as “béton brut,” which literally means “raw concrete.”

After designing his personal retreat, the petite but superfunctional Le Cabanon in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, Le Corbusier built these five adjoining vacation homes on the same property, keeping them small but efficiently designed, just like his own home. The colorful structures have a Japanesque look.

Part of Le Corbusier’s Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh, India, the Palace of Assembly combines elements of Purism and Brutalism, punctuated by touches of vibrant color. The exterior is defined by a curved roof canopy supported by reinforced concrete columns, while other façades are lined with a brise soleil to provide shade and frame the views. The interior features an open floor plan, with offices and other private spaces along the outside of the center area. Le Corbusier designed a boldly colorful enameled door for the Palace of the Assembly, which is opened for ceremonial occasions.

Harvard University is home to the only American building primarily designed by Le Corbusier. (He was one of several collaborators on the United Nations Headquarters in New York.) “Le Corbusier has vigorously expressed his theory of design in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. However hostile or friendly its reception here may be, it is one of the most important buildings ever constructed at Harvard,” wrote the Harvard Crimson in May 1963, when the building was completed. The five-level Carpenter Center was a stark contrast to the more traditional buildings on the campus and brought all the university’s art programs into one space.

In 1950, Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a new Catholic Church in Ronchamp, France, to replace a stone church destroyed in World War II. The exterior of Notre-Dame du Haut features curved masonry walls, which support the sweeping concrete roof, and inside, Le Corbusier placed the main altar and three small chapels. Another chapel is located outside along one of the exterior walls, providing more space on feast days. The spectacular south wall of the church is decorated with clear, red, green, and yellow glass windows in an irregular pattern and is filled with rubble from the old church.