Switzerland - Culture & History

Switzerland

does not have a strong artistic heritage, even though many foreign writers and

 

Chillon Castle, Geneva Lake, Switzerland

 

artists (such as Voltaire, Byron, Shelley, James Joyce and Charlie Chaplin) have sojourned there.

Conversely, many creative Swiss such as Le Corbusier, Paul Klee, Alberto, Diego and Bruno Giacometti and Jean-Luc Godard left the country to make their name abroad.

 

Alberto Giacometti

 

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887. When he was 29, he went to Paris, where he soon after adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Le Corbusier, as his pseudonym

  Le Corbusier's chapel

He loved Manhattan. He loved its newness, he loved its Cartesian regularity, above all he loved its tall buildings. He had only one reservation, which he revealed on landing in New York City in 1935. The next day, a headline in the Herald Tribune informed its readers that the celebrated architect finds American skyscrapers much too small. Le Corbusier always thought big. He once proposed replacing a large part of the center of Paris with 18 sixty-story towers; that made headlines too.

 

                  Zurich University