Word: jeanneret
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...Genius." The recipient of these accolades was born to the name of Charles Edouard Jeanneret in the dour Jura mountain village of La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a few miles from the French border. His parents were Protestants, descendants of the heretical Albigenses who took refuge in the town in the 13th and 14th centuries. His father, a stolid leader of the local Alpine Club, was an enameler of watch faces. His mother, who died last year at 100, trained her oldest son, Albert, to be a musician, and told Charles Edouard: "You will be a genius...
Washbasin Roof. By the age of 30, when Jeanneret was ready to leave La Chaux-de-Fonds for good ("The Swiss are cleanly and industrious and to hell with them"), he had put up a couple of chalets, an exotic dwelling of screaming yellows called the Turkish Villa, and a movie house with a bare concrete facade trimmed with blue mosaics. When the municipal authorities complained that his Turkish Villa did not go with its site, young Jeanneret retorted: "It is the setting that does not go with my house." In his chalets he scornfully abandoned the traditional Swiss peaked...
...Beaux Arts, a few men were stirring restively. Among them was a gifted builder named Auguste Ferret, who was the first to prove convincingly how effective the plebeian material of reinforced concrete could be. Another was Architect Peter Behrens of Berlin, whose glass-and-steel industrial buildings were pioneers. Jeanneret worked for both. He found Ferret's reinforced concrete studio in Paris, with its glassed front wall, "a manifesto" in itself, and harked to Ferret's belief that "decoration always hides an error in construction." At Behrens' studio, Jeanneret was apprenticed with the self-effacing...
...What Shall We Do?" One day in 1914, Jeanneret drew a skeletal plan for a two-story, prefabricated house of reinforced concrete that was so simple it might have been the design for a child's toy. It consisted of six columns, three horizontal concrete slabs, a cantilevered staircase-and that was all. But the simple plan for the Domino house contained a principle that was to be basic to all of his planning thereafter. The six-column skeleton relieved the facades and the interior walls of support functions: they could thus be moved and molded at will, giving...
...Germany, 28-year-old Walter Gropius, freshly graduated from Peter Behrens' studio, had put up his steel-and-glass Fagus factory, which was the most daring example so far of the now standard "curtain walls"-the skin of glass stretched over a steel frame. All this affected Jeanneret, but in the first years after World War I, it was painting that preoccupied...