"Le Corbusier" (from the french "le corbeau" or the raven) was the pseudonym of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965.
Swiss born, resident in France for most of his life.
Corbusier invented many of the idioms of "modern" architecture: buildings raised off the ground on piloti, open-plan interiors, block-like forms, curtain walls, long strips of glass vs. windows. Although a lot of his buildings (and the most highly regarded of them) aren't like that at all.
Influential? Think of the buildings you know that have those features.
He also created Le Modulor, a system of relations, based on human proportions, and thus on the Golden Grid. He applied the Modulor to the interior and exterior of his buildings. Albert Einstein said about the Modulor: "The Modulor makes it easy to do good things, and hard to do bad things."
One of my favorite buildings (and I know it only from pictures) is his Chapel at Ronchamp. -- Michael Feathers
I have twice driven several hours out my way (out of any way!) to visit Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut (pictures available from www.bk.tudelft.nl 
) and considered it remarkable both times. From the photos I always thought it was just a church built to look like a ship, but once there, I found that it is so 3-dimensional, there is no place where you can stand and get an impression of what it looks like. You just have to keep on moving, to see the changing angles, surfaces and spaces. Worth adding 1/2 a day to your trip for. -- Alistair Cockburn
[The Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut is at Ronchamp.]
"Le Corbusier" doesn't mean, as far as I know, "raven" or "crow". In french, "crow" is translated to "corbeau". Of course, these words are similar and probably related, but I don't know "le corbusier" enough to say to what extent.
Probably as much as arquebusier, which is what it reminds me most of.
You should visit la Cite Radieuse - web.archive.org
His ideas on urban planning were well intended but oppressively antiseptic.
As I saw from some of his drawings on urban planning, he is a Bad Influence and a master on creating Anti Patterns. He proposed huge constructions of concrete. One of his idea was a really huge building with an high speed driveway just over it.
It seems to me an example of Design For The Sake Of Design instead of Design For The Sake Of People. On the other side of the coin, read The Design Of Everyday Things.
I first came across a reference to Le Corbusier in the following joke.
Crowd of people: "Look, up in the sky, it's Le Corbusier!"
Random crowd member: "No, it's God. He only thinks he's Le Corbusier."
Some say he designed buildings for the admiration of other architects not the unfortunates who had to live in them.
I don't care about his buildings; his Lc Four is the masterpiece I sit on every day.
Le Corbusier was the Andy Warhol (or, less kindly, the Mark Kostabi) of architecture of the time: his talent as a self-promoter far, far outstripped whatever talent he had as an architect. Unfortunately, he had a large influence on the now-discredited "urban renewal" movement of the 50s and 60s that created "the projects" (extremely tall, dense apartment buildings in the middle of cleared-out wastelands) in many American cities. See anything by Jane Jacobs, Wytold Rabinsky, Stewart Brand, or the New Urbanists for reaction against Le Corbusier.
Of course, still to this day, architecture students idolize Le Corbusier (not to mention Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and Brutalist Achitecture) and dream of when they will get to design buildings that win awards while being totally useless for living/working in.
I recall from my student days that Hampshire College has two buildings of the sort you might call "Cambridge Mass Debrutalist" design which were actually stolen from Chandigarh, or another Corbu city design project.
This would be the Library and the Cole Science Center... the right-angle siting on a plaza is copped, the buildings are a little smaller, and a second building identical to Cole Science Center on that side is omitted. Corbu's were concrete and 4 floors. These are brick/concrete and 3 floors.
Here are the best links I can find on these buildings:
www.hampshire.edu (the movie has to run about 50% of the way before you see the science center)
www.hampshire.edu (the library)
Can anyone I.D. the Corbu buildings? A web search on Chandigarh and Corbusier gets you the same 7 or 8 photos. Can anyone supply an image?
Can't recall the architects who did the Hampsire College buildings, but they were not happy and never answered a letter I sent them asking if they realized their design and siting looked suspiciously akin to a photo in a works-of-corbusier book. The date would have been 1973 or 1974 so the book would have had to be published before then.
See original on c2.com