Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  For three weeks, the Rebutatos had delivered Le Corbusier the meals he ate in solitude. They were concerned about his condition. But when the local doctor visited two days before Le Corbusier died, he assured them that, while the architect was far from strong, there was no need for alarm.

  Robert Rebutato, the son of the restaurateurs, was an architect in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio. For many summers, he had been Le Corbusier’s constant companion for the vacation routine of two swims a day, one at the end of the morning, the next in the late afternoon, each followed by an aperitif. Over ritual drinks, Le Corbusier would hold forth to his acolyte about architecture, nature, color, or whatever the passionate theme of the day was.

  Robert had been troubled by a conversation with Le Corbusier the day after the doctor’s visit, when the junior architect was about to head off to Venice, to work on the hospital Le Corbusier was designing there. Le Corbusier asked his young friend to take a manuscript edited by Jean Petit—a publisher and loyal devotee of the master—for the book Corbusier Himself.2 Le Corbusier had marked his self-propagandizing text with corrections and changes and asked Robert to give it to the editor in Paris. Robert said that since Le Corbusier would be returning to Paris himself at the start of September, he would most likely get there before Robert arrived from Venice. For Le Corbusier to hand over such an important document was completely out of character; he always dealt with such things on his own.

  But Le Corbusier insisted. Reluctantly, Robert took the envelope. It made him uneasy: “It shocked me. I found it bizarre,” he said later.3

  Robert recognized that the world-renowned architect who liked to present himself as a straight shooter, resolute in his convictions, with a bawdy, friendly wife, had his mysterious sides. But like most everyone else, Robert had no idea of the extent to which Le Corbusier was morbid and plagued by demons. The celebrant of life who exalted nature in his sun-infused murals and tapestries often experienced moments of crushing darkness.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Simon Ozieblo and Jean Deschamps, two fellow vacationers, found Le Corbusier floating dead near the shore. His head was turned “toward the bottom.” They brought his body onto the beach at about 10:00 on that sunny August morning.

  Roughly an hour earlier, Ozieblo and Deschamps had seen him swimming with great difficulty. “Each time he returned to the edge, he experienced the greatest difficulty climbing the boulders separating him from the path along the creek,” they said.4 But when they had offered to help him, which they did a number of times, he had refused with a smile.

  For much of Le Corbusier’s life, swimming had been his way of bringing himself to his preferred mental state. Almost forty years earlier, when he was anxiously awaiting the results of the competition for the Palais des Nations in Geneva and was feeling highly impatient toward his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, with whom he was collaborating, he had vigorously stroked his way toward equilibrium. From the small house he had built for his parents in Vevey on the shore of Lac Leman, Le Corbusier wrote to his “little Vonvon”—Yvonne Gallis, the Monegasque woman whom he was to marry three years later—“If I hadn’t had the chance to get into the water (and I swim amazingly well) I would have been completely disgusted.”5 Having grown up landlocked and taught himself to swim in his twenties, he had discovered that moving weightlessly through water under the open sky was his salvation.

  Entering the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, August 1965

  Ozieblo tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for three quarters of an hour. “There was still a pulse, the heartbeats were irregular, but I already knew that death would do its work: a thread of blood was running down from the victim’s mouth,” he said.6 He and Deschamps learned the identity of the old swimmer only after the local firemen arrived. For another half hour, the firemen continued to attempt artificial respiration with oxygen and “shots of solucamphire,” but to no avail. In the previous months, Le Corbusier had been rereading his well-worn, marked-up copy of Don Quixote, a favorite book of his youth.7 He had bound it with a piece of coarse-haired hide from a beloved dog. Now, like Cervantes’s hero, he seemed to have picked the time, and way, to die.

  LE CORBUSIER’S LIFELONG task had been to exercise control, corral his emotions, determine the appearance of buildings, and promulgate his gospel. Death was an inalienable part of nature; so as not to fail in relationship to it, one must work with it intelligently. In a private letter to his mother in January 1927, a year after his father’s death, he referred to “the injection he had been given which allowed him to leave this earth without being buried in it. Hour by hour, I kept seeing dear papa in his bed: sunset. His beloved voice, his last words.”8 It was euthanasia with poetry.

  Le Corbusier once asked his Parisian doctor, Jacques Hindermeyer, his closest confidant late in life, what he would do if he was an architect. The doctor replied that he would build houses upside down. Le Corbusier was puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Hindermeyer explained, “Since you celebrate sun, space, and greenery, I would build them like pyramids to let the most in.”

  “That’s not bad,” Le Corbusier said, approving with a smile. He then answered Hindermeyer’s inquiry as to what he would do as a doctor. “I wouldn’t do anything. I would just let people die peacefully.”9

  Death, like architecture, is ideally in accord with the inescapable cycles of the universe and should have grace and proportion. Like the terraces and roof gardens of Le Corbusier’s houses, one’s way of dying should provide a direct connection to the cosmos. “How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun,” Le Corbusier had been quoted as saying on two different occasions.10

  DR. HINDERMEYER had last seen Le Corbusier at the end of July, at lunch in the doctor’s sprawling apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain. For years, they had maintained the habit of dining together shortly before embarking on their summer holidays. With their strong and trim physiques, neat haircuts, and immaculate suits, the two dignified professionals could readily have been taken for a father and son in business together, perhaps industrialists or merchants.

  Hindermeyer felt that Le Corbusier looked fatigued, which he attributed to the architect having worked especially hard of late. But he was surprised when, after having been summoned from the table for a phone call, he returned to the dining room to find his guest standing up, with his shirt off. He asked what was going on. “I don’t feel well, it’s as if there were rats in the plumbing,” said Le Corbusier.11

  The rough terminology from the building trade amused the doctor, but its message concerned him. He quickly retrieved his stethoscope and was distressed to discover Le Corbusier’s “heart in complete arrhythmia.” But there was no getting him to abandon his plan to leave for Roquebrune-Cap-Martin the next day. When Hindermeyer warned Le Corbusier of the severity of his health situation, his patient and friend answered—in his usual way of looking at himself as if he were his own astute observer—“You know me well, and you know that I don’t want to suffer physical diminution. Imagine the scene: Le Corbusier in the wheelchair and you pushing. No, not that, never.”12

  But then Le Corbusier quickly added, “I’m not ready to go, I still have so much to do.”13

  Hindermeyer phoned Le Corbusier’s cardiologist and arranged for his patient to be seen that afternoon. In the evening, Hindermeyer went to Le Corbusier’s apartment. The setting was a different world from the doctor’s own flat, with its paneled walls and mélange of family antiques evoking previous centuries in a grand Haussmannian building in the elegant faubourg St. Germain. In Le Corbusier’s stark, if spacious, digs on the outskirts of the sixteenth arrondissement, there was no molding; the furniture was streamlined; and industrial windows looked over modern Paris and the new suburbs beyond the city limits. The two-story nest had changed little since Le Corbusier had designed it, at the top of a boxlike apartment building of his own making, more than thirty years earlier.

  Le Corbusier was lying on his high-legged, platform-style bed, which was posit
ioned near the open cylindrical shower. The doctor made some recommendations for the holiday. Unable to persuade Le Corbusier to give up swimming completely, Hindermeyer insisted that the septuagenarian not dive into the Mediterranean too early in the day. Le Corbusier consented to the doctor’s further advice that he not swim too hard and confine himself to one swim a day, at noon.

  Toward the end of August, Hindermeyer was pleased to learn from the Rebutatos—such loyal, devoted guardians and protectors—that they were giving Le Corbusier all of the requisite pills and injections and that the architect was taking only short swims. But on August 25, the day before he was to return to Paris, Le Corbusier disobeyed all the advice. He had plunged in shortly after 8:00 a.m. By the time Ozieblo and Deschamps saw him, he had been swimming for nearly an hour.

  AS WORD OF Le Corbusier’s death spread all over the world, it was said only that he had drowned—startling enough for a man of his age. But the doctor whose advice Le Corbusier had deliberately spurned, and the young colleague to whom the architect had implied he would not return to Paris, could not help wondering if it was an elegantly orchestrated suicide.

  2

  The setting of Le Corbusier’s funeral had its irony; so did the presence of all those people. He had devoted his life to trying to build spaces to accommodate the physical and emotional requirements he considered inherent in all human beings, especially the poorer masses, but he disdained “bourgeois” taste and would have distrusted many of the individuals who came to pay him their last respects, for he knew that they did not really grasp or advocate what mattered to him.

  Few among the shivering crowd felt any intimacy with the man they had come to honor. Most deplored his wish to raze large parts of existing cities, to eradicate the old and replace it with startling new vertical communities, and they were relieved that so few of his concepts had become reality. But most everyone recognized his relentless devotion to his beliefs. He was convinced that the buildings we inhabit in our private lives, and those where we pray and learn and run our governments, are key determinants to the thoughts and emotions that occur within them. By re-forming our physical surroundings, he had tried to alter our existence irrevocably. Even if people debated the success of his buildings, no one doubted that he had permanently changed the visible world.

  To the public, however, Le Corbusier’s personality and ways were elusive. He offered no images of café life with glamorous friends. The man himself seemed more remote than Sartre, Picasso, Freud, and other great pioneers of change in the twentieth century—although he, too, had initiated a radical alteration of thought and was recognized for his impact on civilization.

  Even his name had violated custom and shown the triumph of imagination. At age thirty-three, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had transformed himself from an ordinary person into an institution. His sobriquet echoed the “Le C.” of “Le Christus”—“Jesus Christ” in French. Additionally, with its sequence of syllables like four right angles making a square, “Corbusier” had a built, structured ring to it. It resembled a bare-bones building free of ornament and clear in structure. The “Le,” further, objectified it. Especially in its shortened form, “Corbu,” the name was also kin to “corbeau”—the French word for raven, the powerful bird of death. Like another twentieth-century linguistic invention, “Bauhaus,” it had come to symbolize modernism, in all its effrontery as well as its brave elegance. It was no surprise that Le Corbusier was the first artist ever to be honored by these obsequies before a vast audience at the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, previously reserved, on the rarest occasions, for military or government leaders.

  The Parisian newspapers called him, unequivocally, “the greatest architect in the world.” He had “achieved control of the sun.”14 Even though “in 1925 he wanted to raze half of Paris,”15 he “has liberated us from a tyrannical past.”16

  For three days following his death, Le Corbusier’s body had been lying in state in the town hall of Menton, near where it had been swept ashore. Then, on a route prepared by the police forces, it went to the monastery the architect had built near Lyon, at La Tourette, where it was displayed ceremonially throughout the night of August 31. During the afternoon prior to the ceremony at the Louvre on September 1, the casket had been in Le Corbusier’s office on the rue de Sèvres, for more intimate viewing by his friends and colleagues. It was all part of “the carnival” the architect had predicted. Referring to the way, when he built his great Unité d’Habitation in the early fifties, he was labeled with the term that in Provençale dialect means “inhabited by a fairy,” implying that he was a madman, he told Jacques Hindermeyer, “My whole life, they made fun of me and criticized me. They called Marseille ‘La Maison de Fada.’ You wait: after my death, they’ll use me for themselves. I’ll become a great man. That’s why I am telling you not to go to my funeral. It will be a masquerade.”17 In an autobiographical essay, Put into Focus, completed shortly before his death, he said that the speakers would be more interested in themselves than in the one who died.18 Someone as privy as Hindermeyer to the truths of human behavior should not have to suffer such hypocrisy.

  Two weeks before he died, Le Corbusier saw a man smashing against a rock an octopus he had just harpooned. The architect compared himself to the sea creature. “For most of my life, I have simply been smashed down. Many people were so jealous, they wanted to destroy me, to crush my head just like that octopus.”19 He never tired of finding analogies to vivify his tortured martyrdom. “They grilled me over a slow fire: grotesque!!” he cried after one failed collaboration.20 In 1953, at the ceremony in London where he was presented with the Royal Gold Medal recommended by the Royal Institute of British Architects and approved by the queen—an occasion when one glowing tribute followed another—he chose, rather than to bask in the pleasure, to declare, “If tonight I am wearing this magnificent medal, it is because I was a cab-horse for more than forty years…. I received, like a true cab-horse, many blows with a whip.”21 He was, chronically, the victim of merciless critics and bureaucratic corruption; as a result, he had not built a fraction of what he hoped to build. Nor had he been credited adequately for whatever little he had done. Unlike Don Quixote, he had never had illusions to the contrary, but, like Cervantes’s knight, he had awoken to the hard truth of a lifetime of being pummeled.

  Now, in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, he was only a hero. Following Beethoven’s solemn dirge and the impeccable staging of the entrances and the exits of the uniformed honor guard, the casket made its journey forward on that rolling sea of shoulders with magisterial choreography. In addition to the crowd packed into the vast courtyard, hundreds of thousands of Parisians, tuned in to the ceremony on their radios or televisions, heard the single, memorable eulogy that followed. The enthralling speaker with his deep, tremulous voice was Charles de Gaulle’s minister of culture, André Malraux.

  Malraux had been a champion of Le Corbusier’s work and had recently commissioned the architect to design a major new museum of modern art on the outskirts of Paris, although Le Corbusier had rejected the site. Other people in power had disdained Le Corbusier’s modernism or faulted his politics. Some had declared him pro-Soviet; others thought him fascist. There were rumblings that he had collaborated with Vichy. But Malraux was one of the few people who considered Le Corbusier’s genius more important than anything else about him, and he had been consistently loyal.

  Le Corbusier’s casket entering the Cour Carrée du Louvre, September 2, 1965

  At precisely 10:00 p.m., Malraux faced the clustered microphones. Ambassadors stood at attention, and young architects fought back tears. The broad-shouldered culture minister stood with one foot slightly twisted as he leaned on the lectern, stared downward through his black-framed glasses, and began his homily. His straight, dark hair was swept back; a white pocket handkerchief provided the only relief against his somber double-breasted suit. With gravelly timbre and priestlike cadences that imparted portent to each word, Malraux announced that a Greek
delegate would deposit a portion of earth from the Acropolis on Le Corbusier’s grave and that a representative from India would pour water from the Ganges over the architect’s remains in honor of his creation of the territorial capital of Chandigarh.

  Then this most intellectual of public figures shifted tone. Malraux had no intention of letting people forget the ignominy suffered by creative geniuses. “Le Corbusier has had great rivals, several of whom still honor us with their presence; the others are dead. But no one else has so forcefully signified the architectural revolution, for no one else has been so long and so patiently insulted. It is through disparagement that his glory has attained its ultimate luster.” Malraux touched on Le Corbusier’s achievements in painting, sculpture, and poetry. Those were the calmer realms. Le Corbusier’s battles were confined to issues of building and to urban design. “Only for architecture has he done combat—with a vehemence he has shown for nothing else, since only architecture awakened his impassioned hope for what might be achieved for mankind.”22 Le Corbusier had to stay the course like a solitary crusader and had encountered infinitely more obstacles than accolades, yet his accomplishments were such that now the minister could proudly read tributes from the presidents of the United States and Brazil, from the esteemed architects Alvar Aalto and Richard Neutra, from colleagues in the Soviet Union.

  André Malraux giving his homily at Le Corbusier’s funeral service

  Le Corbusier and André Malraux laying the cornerstone for the Assembly Building in Chandigarh in 1952

  There was one moment above all when Malraux homed in on the real work of the controversial pioneer whose body rested at his side. This was when, early in his eulogy, he quoted Le Corbusier’s own declaration of his lifelong goals: “I have worked for what mankind needs most today: silence and peace.”23