Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967), an architect and designer of furniture, be it private or urban, worked for many years with\u00a0his cousin Le Corbusier, particularly through the creation and organization of the CIAMs (International Congresses of\u00a0Modern Architecture). In the shadows and discretion that suited him, he produced an oeuvre attesting to an original and\u00a0demanding way of thinking. Between the two men there was a difference in approach. Precisely where Le Corbusier preferred\u00a0order and organization, Pierre Jeanneret had ideas which he himself described as \u201calways a bit anarchic\u201d, and, throughout\u00a0his life, he cultivated the spirit of an experimenter, for example assembling found materials, the fruit of his observation.\u00a0In spite of everything, at the dusk of his life, he declared that he was \u201cthe architect closest to Le Corbusier where action\u00a0was concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1950, at the invitation of Nehru, the two men were the principal project managers for the construction of the city of\u00a0Chandigarh, designed to become the capital of the State of Punjab, after the Indo-Pakistan war. Today, the city contains\u00a0the World\u2019s most important concentration of the works of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.\u00a0For fifteen years, Pierre Jeanneret devoted all his efforts to that project. On a surface larger than that of the city of Paris, for a\u00a0population that today exceeds one million inhabitants, what was involved was building not only a business district, an industrial\u00a0sector and an administrative quarter, but also thoroughfares and residential neighborhoods. Pierre Jeanneret surrounded\u00a0himself with a team of young Indian architects. He ended up by settling in Chandigarh and, in questioning his own ideas\u00a0and conceptions, he often adopted the Indian viewpoint. For himself and Le Corbusier he summed up the meaning of\u00a0that thoroughly excessive adventure with the striking words: \u201cIn a way, Chandigarh was for the two of us a clearing in the\u00a0human jungle\u201d.<\/p>\n
He was thus forever placing himself at the crossroads of his two main concerns: designing objects for inhabitants and asserting\u00a0the power of invention as the universal value of the modern movement. He only left Chandigarh in 1965 because\u00a0of sickness, and he died a few months later in Geneva, in 1967.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3763,"menu_order":3,"template":"","class_list":["post-5619","artistes","type-artistes","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n