[8] Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

Some of his urban planning ideas have been criticized for their indifference to pre-existing cultural sites, societal expression and equality, and his alleged ties with fascism, antisemitism, eugenics,[10] and the dictator Benito Mussolini have resulted in some continuing contention.

[22] In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland, going to Italy; then that winter travelling through Budapest to Vienna, where he stayed for four months and met Gustav Klimt and tried, without success, to meet Josef Hoffmann.

[25] In 1911, he travelled again with his friend August Klipstein for five months;[26] this time he journeyed to the Balkans and visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, as well as Pompeii and Rome, filling nearly 80 sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw—including many sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923).

The project's name was a reference to the French Citroën automaker, for the modern industrial methods and materials, Le Corbusier advocated using in the house's construction as well as how he intended the homes would be consumed, similar to other commercial products, like the automobile.

He declared that in the future the decorative arts industry would produce only "objects which are perfectly useful, convenient, and have a true luxury which pleases our spirit by their elegance and the purity of their execution and the efficiency of their services.

The second floor of the Villa Savoye includes long strips of ribbon windows that allow unencumbered views of the large surrounding garden, which constitute the fourth point of his system.

In 1926, he entered the competition for the construction of a headquarters for the League of Nations in Geneva with a plan for an innovative lakeside complex of modernist white concrete office buildings and meeting halls.

The earlier villas he constructed all had white exterior walls, but for Pessac, at the request of his clients, he added colour; panels of brown, yellow and jade green, coordinated by Le Corbusier.

Seventeen leading modernist architects in Europe were invited to design twenty-one houses; Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe played a major part.

Those attending included Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Auguste Perret, Pierre Chareau and Tony Garnier from France; Victor Bourgeois from Belgium; Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Ernst May and Mies van der Rohe from Germany; Josef Frank from Austria; Mart Stam and Gerrit Rietveld from the Netherlands, and Adolf Loos from Czechoslovakia.

At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions.

Le Corbusier contributed a highly original plan, a low-level complex of circular and rectangular buildings and a rainbow-like arch from which the roof of the main meeting hall was suspended.

He moved to Vichy for a time, where the collaborationist government of Marshal Philippe Petain was located, offering his services for architectural projects, including his plan for the reconstruction of Algiers, but they were rejected.

Dautry agreed to fund one of his projects, a "Unité habitation de grandeur conforme", or housing units of standard size, with the first one to be built in Marseille, which had been heavily damaged during the war.

[68] Le Corbusier made another almost identical Unité d'Habitation in Rezé-les-Nantes in the Loire-Atlantique Department between 1948 and 1952, and three more over the following years, in Berlin, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy; and he designed a factory for the company of Claude and Duval, in Saint-Dié in the Vosges.

Corbusier worked on the plan with two British specialists in urban design and tropical climate architecture, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, who moved to India and supervised the construction until his death.

Le Corbusier, as always, was rhapsodic about his project; "It will be a city of trees," he wrote, "of flowers and water, of houses as simple as those at the time of Homer, and of a few splendid edifices of the highest level of modernism, where the rules of mathematics will reign.

Pierre Jeanneret wrote to his cousin that he was in a continual battle with the construction workers, who could not resist the urge to smooth and finish the raw concrete, particularly when important visitors were coming to the site.

[84] At the time of his death several projects were on the drawing board: the church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy, finally completed in modified form in 2006, a Palace of Congresses for Strasbourg (1962–65) and a hospital in Venice (1961–1965), which were never built.

[92] Le Corbusier hoped that politically minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models to reorganize society.

As Norma Evenson has put it, "the proposed city appeared to some an audacious and compelling vision of a brave new world, and to others, a frigid megalomaniacally scaled negation of the familiar urban ambient.

He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture.

[98] Le Corbusier placed systems of harmony and proportion at the centre of his design philosophy, and his faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden section and the Fibonacci series, which he described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another.

Le Corbusier was an eloquent critic of the finely crafted, hand-made furniture, made with rare and exotic woods, inlays and coverings, presented at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts.

While Le Corbusier sought commissions from the Vichy regime, particularly the redesign of Marseille after its Jewish population had been forcefully removed,[102] he was unsuccessful, and the only appointment he received from it was membership of a committee studying urbanism.

[citation needed] Alexis Carrel, a eugenicist surgeon, appointed Le Corbusier to the Department of Bio-Sociology of the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, an institute promoting eugenics policies under the Vichy regime.

One of his most influential detractors has been Jane Jacobs, who delivered a scathing critique of Le Corbusier's urban design theories in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In the United States, Shadrach Woods; in Spain, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza; in Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer; In Mexico, Mario Pani Darqui; in Chile, Roberto Matta; in Argentina, Antoni Bonet i Castellana (a Catalan exile), Juan Kurchan, Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Amancio Williams, and Clorindo Testa in his first era; in Uruguay, the professors Justino Serralta and Carlos Gómez Gavazzo; in Colombia, Germán Samper Gnecco, Rogelio Salmona, and Dicken Castro; in Peru, Abel Hurtado and José Carlos Ortecho; in Lebanon, Joseph Philippe Karam; in India Shiv Nath Prasad; in South Korea, Kim Chung-up.

Maison La Roche is now a museum containing about 8,000 original drawings, studies and plans by Le Corbusier (in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret from 1922 to 1940), as well as about 450 of his paintings, about 30 enamels, about 200 other works on paper, and a sizable collection of written and photographic archives.