P I E R R E   J E A N N E R E T

Pierre Jeanneret’s life and work quickly became an obsession of sorts. His personality was as fascinating to me as the furniture he designed. In many ways, I saw his partnership with Le Corbusier as similar to George Harrison’s with Lennon/McCartney within The Beatles. Jeanneret was the 'quiet one,' the unsung hero of Chandigarh. It would not be a stretch to say that Chandigarh as we know it would not exist without Jeanneret.

Pierre Jeanneret was was born in Geneva on March 22, 1896. He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and continued his architecture studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in Paris, he reconnected with his older cousin and fellow architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who by then had taken on the pseudonym Le Corbusier and was making a name for himself as an architect, painter, and intellectual.

Le Corbusier took the young Jeanneret under his wing and introduced him to his circle of friends. By the early 1920s, they had entered into a formal partnership and thus began a collaboration that lasted until 1940. During this period they executed several important projects and developed a strong ideology of modernism.