Le Corbusier (with Amédée Ozenfant and others) co-founded the journal L'Esprit Nouveau, a key platform for Purist aesthetics and the architectural arguments that fed directly into his International Style writings of the 1920s.
Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture, a manifesto-like collection of essays (many first appearing in L'Esprit Nouveau) that argued for an architecture aligned with industrial modernity and helped define the intellectual foundations of the International Style.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed the Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, a major early built demonstration of his modern domestic vocabulary (including promenade-like spatial sequencing) in Paris’s Auteuil district.
Commissioned by industrialist Henri Frugès, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret built the Cité Frugès de Pessac as an experimental modern workers’ housing estate, advancing standardization, modular planning, and polychromy in a proto–International Style neighborhood.
Le Corbusier proposed the Plan Voisin (never realized), advocating high-rise slabs/towers and radical clearance of parts of central Paris—an influential, controversial statement of functionalist urbanism associated with International Style planning ideals.
For the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret built the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, a built manifesto promoting standardized housing and modern living against decorative Art Deco norms.
Le Corbusier articulated the Five Points of a New Architecture (pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, roof garden), consolidating principles that became closely associated with International Style form and construction logic.
Frederick Etchells published the first English translation of Vers une architecture as Towards a New Architecture, greatly expanding the book’s influence in Anglophone architectural culture and International Style discourse.
The Deutscher Werkbund’s Stuttgart exhibition Die Wohnung (The Dwelling) opened, with the Weissenhof Estate serving as an international showcase of modern housing; Le Corbusier’s contributions became emblematic of the emerging International Style.
Designed with Pierre Jeanneret and built 1928–1931, the Villa Savoye became a canonical built synthesis of the Five Points and one of the most recognized icons of International Style domestic architecture.
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret completed the Immeuble Clarté, an apartment building exploring free-plan living and modern construction, extending International Style principles into multi-family urban housing.
Le Corbusier’s Cité de Refuge opened in Paris as a major modern institutional building; it is frequently cited among early International Style works engaging social programs at an urban scale.
At CIAM IV (held during a 1933 voyage between Marseille and Athens under Le Corbusier’s leadership), the principles later associated with the Athens Charter were developed around the idea of the “functional city.”
Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1946–1952) was completed in Marseille, translating modernist/International Style planning into a dense vertical “mixed-use community” with communal facilities and standardized dwelling units.
Le Corbusier published Le Poème de l'Angle droit as a limited-edition artist’s book, an important late synthesis of his visual and written thinking that complements (rather than replaces) his better-known architectural manifestos.
Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts was completed as Le Corbusier’s only building in the United States designed primarily by him, showcasing late-career modernist vocabulary (ramp circulation, brise-soleil, béton brut).
Le Corbusier died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, marking the end of a career that fused buildings, polemical writing, and urban proposals central to the International Style and broader Modern Movement.
Le Corbusier: International Style projects and writings (1920–1965)
