Editing Le Corbusier (section)

==Travel and first houses (1905–1914)==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="150px">
File:Cdffallet.jpg|Le Corbusier's student project, the [[Villa Fallet]], a chalet in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (1905)
File:Maison blanche 01.jpg|The "Maison Blanche", built for Le Corbusier's parents in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1912)
File:Villa Favre-Jacot 2.JPG|The Villa Favre-Jacot in [[Le Locle]], Switzerland (1912)
</gallery>

Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and philosophy, visiting museums, sketching buildings, and constructing them. In 1905, he and two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz, designed and built his first house, the [[Villa Fallet]], for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier. Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-Fonds, it was a large chalet with a steep roof in the local alpine style and carefully crafted colored geometric patterns on the façade. The success of this house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same area.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=49}}

In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland, going to Italy; he then spent the winter traveling through Budapest to Vienna, where he stayed for four months and met [[Gustav Klimt]] and tried, without success, to meet [[Josef Hoffmann]].{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=48}} In Florence, he visited the [[Florence Charterhouse]] in [[Galluzzo]], which made a lifelong impression on him. "I would have liked to live in one of what they called their cells," he wrote later. "It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise."<ref>Letter to Eplattenier in Dumont, ''Le Corbusier, Lettres a ses maitres'', vol. 2, pp. 82–83.</ref> He travelled to Paris, and for 14 months between 1908 and 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect [[Auguste Perret]], the pioneer of the use of reinforced [[concrete]] in residential construction and the architectural designer of the [[Art Deco]] landmark [[Théâtre des Champs-Élysées]]. Two years later, between October 1910 and March 1911 he traveled to Germany and worked for four months in the office of [[Peter Behrens]], where [[Mies van der Rohe]] and [[Walter Gropius]] were also working and learning.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|pages=32–33}}

In 1911, he traveled again with his friend August Klipstein for five months;<ref>{{Cite book|title=Klip and Corb on the road|last=Žaknić|first=Ivan|publisher=Scheidegger & Spiess|year=2019|isbn=978-3-85881-817-1|location=Zürich}}</ref> this time he journeyed to the [[Balkans]] and visited Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and 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). He spoke of what he saw during this trip in many of his books, and it was the subject of his last book, ''Le Voyage d'Orient''.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|pages=32–33}}

In 1912, he began his most ambitious project yet: a new house for his parents, also located on the forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds. The Jeanneret-Perret house was larger than the others, and in a more innovative style; the horizontal planes contrasted dramatically with the steep alpine slopes, and the white walls and lack of decoration were in sharp contrast with the other buildings on the hillside. The interior spaces were organized around the four pillars of the salon in the centre, foretelling the open interiors he would create in his later buildings. The project was more expensive to build than he imagined; his parents were forced to move from the house within ten years and relocate to a more modest house. However, it led to a commission to build an even more imposing villa in the nearby village of [[Le Locle]] for a wealthy watch manufacturer, Georges Favre-Jacot. Le Corbusier designed the new house in less than a month. The building was carefully designed to fit its hillside site, and the interior plan was spacious and designed around a courtyard for maximum light, a significant departure from the traditional house.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|pages=48–9}}