Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  IN THE SPRING OF 1900, when Albert and his mother were playing in the orchestra of a local production of Snow White, Edouard took the role of the gnome Sarcasm. His father, unsettled that his son would voluntarily assume a character trait he disdained, accused Edouard of sending everyone into a tailspin. But the part suited the contrary teenager who had dropped down to the lower half of the class and begun to be absent from school without explanation. His algebra teacher in 1901 reported, “Student careless and negligent” his French teacher complained that he talked in class and dropped things on the floor. In history class, the naughty lad “left his seat in an unwarranted and noisy manner.”27 Required to write a three-page essay on the proper behavior of a student, he made matters worse by failing to do so.

  At age thirteen, however, Edouard had started taking courses at the local art school, an establishment founded in the nineteenth century to train engravers who specialized in watch decoration. Then, at age fourteen and a half, he left the traditional secondary school—he would have needed to stay for two more years to graduate—to go to the School of Applied and Industrial Arts, a tuition-free institution funded and run by the local commune. Claiming he wanted to follow his father’s footsteps as a designer and engraver of watchcases, for sixty hours a week he studied engraving, design, and artistic drawing in an Art Nouveau style.

  Young Sarcasm, however, quickly deemed the family profession “a useless métier, a wretched and outdated métier…. This was how Charles-Edouard Jeanneret learned quite early that the practice of decoration for decoration’s sake is absurd, and the worker who persists in it may well die of it: a severe lesson not easily forgotten when as a young person one has learned it at one’s own expense…. Moreover, it had never occurred to the boy Jeanneret to be engraving flourishes on watch-cases all his days, all his entire life. Without saying a word, he waited for the first occasion to break his apprentice’s contract.”28 So Le Corbusier later explained, through his mouthpiece Gauthier, his pivotal decision not to emulate his father as expected.

  While decoration disgusted him, he was becoming a proficient watercolorist, patiently and systematically recording the visual world before his eyes: chalets, trees, flowers, fields, as well as simple interiors. He regularly hung out his neatly executed watercolors to dry on his mother’s clothesline. In their remarkable legibility and graceful application of color, these gentle responses to the local scenery reflect exceptional discipline and control.

  They also reveal the obsession Edouard shared with his father over weather conditions and seasonal change. In 1933, Le Corbusier wrote, “Over civilizations, as over trees and animals, passes the play of seasons…. There is winter when only dead wood is visible…. There is spring when the squat buds break out, where the direction of stems and branches appears, where the explosion is universal, life itself! What movement all of a sudden! How joyous it is.”29 The fluctuation between the darkness of winter and the flush of spring and between dark rainy days and bright sunny ones—evident in his early paintings—was increasingly echoed in his psyche.

  7

  Into his twenties, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was so determined to escape his stultifying milieu that he fastened zealously onto individuals who offered hope. The first of these hero figures was Charles L’Eplattenier, who taught at l’Ecole d’Art.

  Charles L’Eplattenier, ca. 1905

  Born in 1874, the son of Swiss peasants from a village between La Chauxde-Fonds and Neuchâtel, L’Eplattenier demonstrated an alternative to life and death in the world of Swiss watchmakers. Attracted to the visual arts early on, he had taken off first for l’Ecole des Arts Appliqués in Budapest and from there had gone to Paris to study painting, sculpture, and architecture at l’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and then at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. With fourteen-year-old Edouard Jeanneret, he continued the education Georges Jeanneret had begun by teaching that the technical perfection as well as the aesthetic charms of trees, plants, and the larger landscape could be the models of all creativity. In turn, art based on nature could exceed nature itself with certain attributes.

  Le Corbusier later wrote, “My master, an excellent teacher, free of all routine, a true man of the forests, made us men of the forests as well…. Mymaster had said, Only nature inspires, nature alone is true and capable of supporting human endeavor.”30 That insight changed him forever. Even in his purest and most rational architecture, Le Corbusier invoked the givens of the universe as the ruling force. He invited the natural world inside and made growth and change central to his design. L’Eplattenier also gave his student the initial push to design buildings. “I had a horror of architecture and of architects,” Le Corbusier later recalled, but “I accepted the verdict and I obeyed; I committed myself to architecture.”31

  8

  Certain books that L’Eplattenier put in the art-school library took hold of Jeanneret. One was The Grammar of Ornament, a historical anthology of decorative design motifs, written by the Englishman Owen Jones in 1856.32 Jones’s premise was consistent with the beliefs already burgeoning in the young man: “Beauty arises naturally from the law of the growth of each plant. The life-blood—the sap, as it leaves the stem, takes the readiest way of reaching the confines of the surface, however varied that surface might be; the greater the distance it has to travel, or the weight it has to support, the thicker will be its substance.”33 This sense that a physical structure, be it a plant or a building, gains its proportions and skeletal organization in response to the life that occurs within it is at the essence of Le Corbusier’s greatest achievements.

  During the long hours he spent exploring Jones’s compendium, Jeanneret’s mind exploded with a new faith in human capability. “The plates in the book paraded past us the pure ornaments which man has created entirely out of his head,” he wrote. “Ah, but it was here that we found, to even greater degree, the natural man, for if nature was omnipresent, man himself was there in his entirety with his faculties of crystallization, his geometric formation. From nature we passed to man. From imitation to creation. This book was beautiful and true, for everything in it was the summary of what had been created, profoundly created: the decoration of savages, Romans, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians…. With this book we discovered the problem: man creates an oeuvre capable of affect.”34 Jeanneret was developing his breathtaking receptivity to visible beauty, natural or man-made, in any form and epoch.

  At the same time, with L’Eplattenier’s tutelage, he was acquiring an ability to work with the tools of his trade, as well as a steadfastness that was to stay with him forever. Le Corbusier later reflected, “At fifteen, I held the burin in my hand. A tool more than fierce. The tool of the straight path. Impossible to turn right or left. A path of loyalty, of honesty. My watch from La Chaux-de-Fonds is its symbol.” In 1962, after spending two weeks near an oven heated at eight hundred degrees Centigrade to make 110 enamel panels for great entrance doors in Chandigarh, he connected his own standards to the rigors of that early training: “If I call yesterday’s work into question, it is because it had left the right path. That is what the watch signified to me. If difficult problems arise, one must press on in spite of everything, straight ahead on the narrow path. If I am a possible architect today, it is because my training was not that of an architect. I have learned to see, with difficulty sometimes. You know, perhaps, that without the somewhat absurd and antiquated watch I had when I was 15, Le Corbusier would not be what he is so modestly now.”35

  JEANNERET ACQUIRED DISCIPLINE and skill, but he was not yet remarkable. A table clock and watchcases he designed and a wooden pencil box he carved at age fifteen, as well as an elaborate silver cane handle that he gave to his father and a wrought-iron gas chandelier for his parents’ dining room, were executed capably but without distinction. At the end of his third year at l’Ecole d’Art, he hammered and embossed a repoussé copper relief, a portrait of Dante, which won the highest prize in the school, but it, too, did not show genius.

  Th
en, when Jeanneret’s fourth year at art school began in April 1904, his father requested that he be exempted from engraving. Georges Jeanneret produced a certificate from a local eye specialist showing that Edouard was suffering from significant difficulties with his vision. The school administration accordingly reduced Edouard’s weekly hours of engraving and had him concentrate instead on interior decoration and furniture design. His physical liability pushed him in the direction of his true vocation.

  L’Eplattenier obtained authorization to start a new and independent branch of the school, open exclusively to students in their last year who wanted to specialize in a program of art and decoration geared for architects, painters, sculptors, and jewelry designers. Following a summer when he had six weeks of religious instruction at l’Eglise Protestante Indépendante and his confirmation at the end of August, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret joined “the New Section.” A revolution—within himself and in the local community—was in the making.

  9

  At the same time that Charles-Edouard was breaking out of the family mold, Georges developed a serious case of pneumonia. It was the beginning of a decline, and he was forced to retire from the Alpine Adventurers’ Club. Now selling his watchcases through Longines, he was often in a rage at the great watch company with its cumbersome and demanding administration. Georges fumed, “Little by little I retire from civic life in order to become more and more cloistered and ignored. Will I soon disappear completely!”36 Struck by his father’s glumness, intense worries about money, and struggle to validate himself, Edouard became all the more determined not to take the same path.

  Within a year, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was, without any official credentials, practicing architecture. In 1905, the seventeen-year-old designed his first building. Construction began in the spring of 1906 and took two years. Commissioned for l’Ecole d’Art and called the Villa Fallet, it was on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds.

  In later life, Le Corbusier often boasted that he had designed his first building at that young age, while declaring, “The house itself is probably dreadful.”37 In fact, the Villa Fallet has an impressive energy. Naturalistic ornament animates its surface with an abandon and spirit absent in the other houses of La Chaux-de-Fonds. The house is distinguished by its young designer’s instinct to impart movement and by his drive toward organic form. A happier structure than its neighbors, it enjoys a rare liaison with its bucolic surroundings. Unlike most of the turgid, weighty domestic architecture of La Chaux-de-Fonds, the inventive form of the Villa Fallet resembles the chalets that dot the nearby countryside, and its surfaces echo the local trees and indigenous plant life. Vividly colored leaves and stems adorn the exterior walls. Inside, Jeanneret used three different blends of mortar to create lively murals in the salon and dining room, depicting the flora and fauna of the Jura.

  The columns that support the pediment of the roof of the Villa Fallet are topped with edgy, geometric capitals that are variations of cubes. Sharply angled, with bold flat surfaces, these capitals betray an unexpected dash of modernism. In their stark whiteness and rhythmic charge, they are like a sudden explosion into free verse on the part of a young poet who until this moment has adhered diligently to the expected traditions of his trade. Breaking the rules, he had invented something new and exuberant.

  Jeanneret gleaned essential lessons for his future from the work on the Villa Fallet. He came to recognize that two important elements in any building project are the materials and the workers who handle them. He also realized that, obvious though the point seems, the plan and its execution determine the success or failure of a project. Seeing the Villa Fallet come to life, he developed a terror of traditional teaching and formulas, while feeling a faith in his own on-the-spot judgment. He knew he must listen more to stone and mortar and his own instincts than to any rule book of architecture.

  10

  As he saw it, every moment that he tarried he was cheating the world and the needy ones in it of his favor and assistance.

  —CERVANTES, Don Quixote

  Jeanneret was suffocating amid the tasseled curtains and antimacassars. The hideousness of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he believed, stemmed from an economy centered on mordant mechanization. The systematically processed pettiness of the watchmaking industry penetrated the lives of the local citizenry.

  In front, next to his mother, with his father and Albert behind, in the family apartment on the rue Léopold-Robert in La Chaux-de-Fonds, ca. 1905

  John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, another life-changing book for him, justified and soothed his rage at his surroundings and became his torch. Le Corbusier later recalled, “The times were intolerable: it could not last. We were surrounded by a crushing stupid bourgeoisism, drowned in materialism, garlanded with idiotic and machine-made decoration which, without our knowing how to stop it, produced all that pasteboard and cast-iron scroll-work for the delectation of Monsieur Homais. It was of spirituality that Ruskin spoke…. To this swollen mass of the elementary saturations of a dawning machine-age, he offered the testimony of honesty.”38

  “The blasphemies of the earth are sounding louder, and its miseries heaped heavier every day,” Ruskin writes.39 But building—and the making of artifacts—might alleviate the pain and replace it with joy. Ruskin opens The Seven Lamps of Architecture with the declaration: “Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power, and pleasure.”40

  The future Le Corbusier adopted this approach as his gospel and took it in his own direction. There were to be no false skeletons or columns in his work; the pilotis are really the legs of the building, the concrete walls the true body. He was to paint surfaces in vibrant hues or with lively murals but never imitatively; notions like combed graining or imitation marble, however much they dominated the vocabulary of Le Corbusier’s contemporaries, were anathema to him. Ruskin’s candor and frankness, verbal and aesthetic, became his own.

  For Ruskin, the most sacred and significant of all the arts was “architecture, [with] her continual influence over the emotions of daily life, and her realism, as opposed to the two sister arts which are by comparison the picturing of stories and of dreams.”41 Jeanneret, accepting the call, knew that his first step was to travel to places where he could be exposed, firsthand, to buildings in all their greatness.

  Life at home intensified Edouard’s urge to get away. His parents were being increasingly protective of Albert, who was showing signs of psychosomatic illness. They both pampered and favored their older son by continuing to fund his education while requiring Edouard to pay his own way with his architecture fees. Then, in October 1906, his parents moved to a new apartment, smaller but more modern, at 8 rue Jacob Brandt. Pauline ceased to live with them; the boys no longer had their own spaces. And father and younger son were increasingly at odds. On January 5, 1907, Georges wrote in his journal, “Edouard, all occupied with dancing and with girls, has just bought a pair of skis. He doesn’t appear too healthy, this boy.”42

  Inflation was so severe that Georges could not afford to create the white enamel he needed to fulfill many orders from Longines, and he was panicked that his sons might never assume responsibility for themselves. His fear and rage grew all the more intense when, that summer, Edouard declared he was going to Italy. The elder Jeanneret’s only response was: “Voilà—taken from us for one or several years. God be with him!”43

  III

  1

  These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at…school…. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important; an unconquerable will…. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words….

  I’m sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It’s
only a matter of will. I’ve got to train myself so that I’m indifferent to insult, neglect and ridicule. I’ve got to acquire a spiritual aloofness so complete that if they put me in prison I shall feel as free as a bird in air.

  —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, Christmas Holiday

  It is not surprising that Georges Jeanneret bristled. With his fees for the Villa Fallet in his pocket, the nineteen-year-old Edouard told his father, “I don’t ask you for money, don’t ask me where I am going nor what I am doing: I myself have no idea.”1

  Or so he said. Among the few things in Edouard’s backpack was John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence.2 He was on his way to meet up with Léon Perrin, one of his classmates in L’Eplattenier’s advanced course, in the Renaissance city.

  He left La Chaux-de-Fonds on September 1. When the train carried him on its spiraling tracks through the St. Gotthard Pass to the Ticino valley, the weather was so bad that he could see nothing of the canyon walls or of the Devil’s Bridge, which he was longing to view, having read a comparison of its marvelous construction, a single sweeping arch, to the vault of a Gothic cathedral. Then Jeanneret saw as never before. After the fog and storms of the evening and the hours in tunnels, he spent a magnificent morning in Lugano, where the mountain peaks were reflected perfectly in the clear lake. He thrilled even more in the cavernous glass-and-steel train station in Milan. Standing in the wide piazza dominated by the Milan cathedral, the young man from a mountain hamlet was overwhelmed. The feathery finials of its hovering triangular form and its endlessly variegated facade give a lightness to its mass that dazzled him. This marvel of human building was beyond anything he had ever imagined—larger and more physically impressive than he had fathomed from the illustrations in Ruskin and Owen Jones. The testimony to ingenuity in the center of a metropolis, forthright and graceful at the same time, was inestimably powerful. He sketched it feverishly.