14. Le Corbusier : une éducation artistique par l'ornement

Marie-Jeanne Dumont, architect, architectural historian, professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville Before becoming the leader of a movement that would boast of having done away with ornament, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was, in his native town in the Swiss Jura, an apprentice engraver and an architecture student entirely shaped and devoted to the ornamental discipline, as advocated in the second half of the 19th century by educators such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and then Eugène Grasset. At this time of renewal of the art industries which, under the various names of Art Nouveau, affected the whole of Europe around 1900, the School of Art of La Chaux-de-Fonds trained its students in floral ornament, with a view to an immediate application to the decoration of watches, clocks and other timepieces that the city exported all over the world.