Les Couleurs® Le Corbusier - rooted in nature – here’s how they bring the outside in

Le Corbusier‘s Architectural Polychromy is a unique colour theory based on standardisation and systematic selection. Not only do each of the 63 colours serve an architectural purpose, but they’re also based on colours found in nature – which is one of the reasons they can all be harmoniously combined with each other.

We live in a world that’s become increasingly detached from the natural environment, and the global pandemic has only made things worse. How do we reconnect with nature through the buildings we inhabit? One way is to look at colour.

Les Couleurs® Le Corbusier are inherently rooted in nature. From being able to create colour atmospheres of Sand, Sky, and Scenery, to mineral tones that invert interior walls, Les Couleurs® – when used with the Architectural Polychomy toolkit – can effortlessly bring the outside in.

Le Corbusier’s work and the natural environment

Whether Le Corbusier used nature as a major influence in his architecture is admittedly up for debate – Christopher Hawthorne, a Los Angeles Times architecture critic, argues that nature wasn’t the main focus in Le Corbusier’s work, while the curators of a 2013 installation exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (entitled ‘Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes’) proposed that the natural world was central to his vision. 

Indeed, Le Corbusier’s architecture is characterised by modernist, concrete-clad buildings. He famously stated that a home should be “a machine for living in”, and he envisaged efficient cities of the future, with skylines punctuated by high-rise buildings and their inhabitants stacked atop each other.

Hawthorne cites architect Peter Blake, who wrote in 1960 that Le Corbusier believed a building “should stand in contrast to nature, rather than appear as an outgrowth of some natural formation”. Yet Hawthorne also mentions in his 2013 article that he visited the Ronchamp Chapel (Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, a building that’s on the UNESCO World Heritage List), and that it was “among the most sublime readings of site and topography produced by a modernist”.

A number of Le Corbusier’s architectural masterpieces have strong natural elements: Villa Savoye, considered to be one of the most important house designs of the 20^th century, employs a roof terrace (one of Le Corbusier’s five principles of modern architecture), and Villa "Le Lac" paradoxically emphasises the landscape around it by restricting its view (the building also utilises exposed raw stone, and is designed to ‘follow the sun’).