His preoccupation with money and hygiene dominated the letters home. He reported about a train on which he was so black from smoke that he had to go to the toilet twice to wash, differentiating himself from the Italian “swine.”34 With his need to impart personal details, he described dinner at the pensione in Florence as “an enormous plate of soup with macaroni, then meat and the problem of Italian-style vegetables, and mystery, yes, of course, good or bad, who knows what to call it: constipative… certainly!”35 The state of his bowels was a major issue for him, of which he kept his parents apprised with frequent reports of both constipation and bouts of diarrhea.
6
He was, however, as poetic as he was mundane. From Padua, Jeanneret wrote his parents, “Before falling, the leaves become gray here, a splendid, fine gray; the fields remain intensely green, and only the plowed fields strike a vibrant note. The soil of Italy is extraordinary; salmon-red, tile-red, and with the occasional groves which turn a brilliant lemon-yellow, the plowed fields with their deep and regular furrows, the clumps of small trees, the little walled gardens, the narrow paths of a rich, gray color: it all forms what the famous frescoists have left us on their walls, a gift to the eyes and to the imagination. In Ravenna, on the other hand, the grass is a raw acidic green and the earth is violet.”36
That instinctive feeling for color and nature governed Le Corbusier’s approach to architecture. He designed his buildings in close relation to their surroundings. Le Corbusier never envisioned a project merely as a static model or as blueprints and plans made under artificial office light. Rather, he acted in accord with the realizations of this eye-opening trip to Italy: buildings live and breathe in constant connection to the specific environment in which they are set, and they change with the same frequency as weather and light conditions.
CONSIDER, FOR EXAMPLE, the sight of Le Corbusier’s Atelier Lipchitz (1925) in late autumn—the same season when the future architect marveled at the subtle colors and transformation of leaves in northern Italy. Le Corbusier made this studio/residence for Jacques Lipchitz when both he and the Cubist sculptor, a friend, were enjoying their first periods of critical and financial success.
On a quiet residential street in a Parisian suburb, Lipchitz’s house is dominated by a massive, silo-shaped concrete cylinder, set down with the weight of a kettledrum against the light piccolo tone of tubular-steel balustrades and playful openings along the facade. That counterpoint between the immense central volume and the jubilant smaller elements evokes the paintings of Le Corbusier’s and Lipchitz’s mutual friend and colleague of that time Fernand Léger. But the careful orchestration of concrete, steel, and glass is only part of what occurs.
This impeccably engineered assemblage of man-made forms exists in constant interplay with nature, for Lipchitz’s house is covered in vines. Sounding the same “vibrant note” of the foliage Jeanneret observed in Padua, these vines produce a flurry of large red-and-gold leaves, bowing forward in their last moment of life. Higher up on the building walls, the vines form a bare network of infinite complexity, woven out of more elements than a spiderweb. This tracery of lacework is remarkably like the filigree patterns that so enthralled Jeanneret in Pisa. What makes the Lipchitz house so intoxicating is the coupling of architecture with the never-ending motion of the universe that caused Padua to be “a gift to the eyes and to the imagination.”37
7
The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off for a week by his subjects’ barricades, and now reigning once again.
—GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA, The Leopard
On October 25, Jeanneret and Perrin arrived in Venice. The rain was merciless. The downpours continued for five miserable days, with such intensity that one night a shower woke up a flock of ducks settled in under the windows of their pensione. Then came two days of opaque fog. The Adriatic flooded the Piazza San Marco. Having known only a mountain climate until then, Jeanneret wrote L’Eplattenier, “One feels like scratching everywhere on one’s body: are these fins breaking out…or simply mosquito bites?”38
At last, the sky shifted. The effect was to be paralleled when the clouds whipped by overhead at Le Corbusier’s funeral fifty-eight years later. The change in light was a miracle for the twenty-year-old Jeanneret, who wrote: “Two or three patches of sunshine allowed us to judge Venice at its finest, and the other evening we even observed a real apotheosis, a dramatic sky entirely covered with black clouds drowned in the yellow mist, and the brilliant sun next to the lantern of Santa Maria della Salute; sea, sky, and houses making a single enormous torch seen through tears.”39 To cry at beauty, especially after darkness, was his norm.
The apotheosis continued: “The blue sky is a miracle. At such moments, everything sings. I have seen the most extraordinary colors in the canals. The theory of complementaries set to work by a superior magician.”40 And if San Marco, the Ca’ d’Oro, and the Palazzo Ducale enraptured him by daylight, they were even better at night. Brightly lit by “the glow of gas lamps,” they became “a marvelous and supernatural specter.”41 Now, even more than in Milan and Florence, Jeanneret dreamed of making public architecture that could stir the soul.
8
The travelers’ next destination was Vienna, where they hoped to find work in an architect’s office. Jeanneret became obsessed by his clothing. He wrote his parents about “my shoes, which gaped all around the soles, the toes were likely to extract sighs on the delicate porches of Ravenna; bought a pair for 17 f.25 (secondhand!) in town: splendid yellow ‘melon slices’ as P. would say, the envy of the entire population of Ferrara. As well as a necktie, which happened to have been embroidered one fine day by the subtlest of lace makers. Now it’s my nightshirt that’s giving up the ghost, I’m sorry mama saw fit to give me one in such poor condition, the Italian air doesn’t suit its failing lungs. I’ve bought myself an elastic collar, quite practical.”42
He was determined, as he set out to join the workforce in a sophisticated city, that his wardrobe be pleasing. He instructed his parents that he needed “another very practical zephyr shirt, size 7, collar 37 centimeters from one buttonhole to the other. In case anyone wants to buy me more, maybe in brighter colors, less drab-looking. Not any more collars, please. As for shoes, it’s pointless to mention spats and dress boots. Rubber soles, yes, and leather slippers too.” And he hoped for “my (chic) brown kid gloves.”43
He was in a state of anxiety—both about that trunk he hoped would await him in Vienna and about his first sea voyage. He enjoined Georges and Marie to participate in his nervous anticipation: “One does not leave a place like this behind without great regret. Including tonight, including the ball! Luckily the sea doesn’t look at all threatening…. Au revoir and wish me a good crossing! Kisses all around.”44 This entreaty to his parents was illogical. Surely Edouard knew that by the time they received his letter in the post, he would already have arrived at his destination. He needed, however, to imagine his mother and father cheering him on. So he would always be: a brave traveler and a child in need of comfort.
IV
1
Architecture can be seen as silent music.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE,
“Conversation with Eckermann”
Vienna hardened him. There, Jeanneret developed both the cynicism and the escape routes that enabled him to survive serious depression. His high spirits began to plummet when, after four days, he and Perrin still had not found a place to stay, the trunk he was expecting from Switzerland had not arrived, and everything was closed for an unidentifiable holiday. He had also discovered that design school was expensive and had no places for new students. The paving stones were hurting his feet in his search for “unobtainable information from undiscoverable people.”1
The man who later devoted himself to improving urban life felt crushed by this first effort to try to earn his keep in a metropolis: “Sad day; no purpose whatever; mortal boredom; one
rages, one rears up, one is a tiny angry god in solitary combat against this mocking inert mass, the inexorable indifference of the big city.” He was further appalled by the new art he saw in the large “Secession” exhibition. The rage for the stylized modernity of this popular movement convinced him that people in general were “imbeciles,” inclined to be “chic” rather than tasteful or original.2
Jeanneret was formulating his concept of how the world functioned. He wrote L’Eplattenier that in Vienna “nothing gets done unless you have connections and recommendations.” His initial impression of the modern architecture he was supposed to admire was that “the whole construction is masked and faked.” Like the people, it was “weak, oh, how weak and empty, discouraging, disconcerting (judging quite objectively, with no special pessimism!).”3 What was being done in this hotbed of modern design was “wretched, awful, absolutely zero as far as experiment goes, it’s stupid. And that’s speaking objectively.”4
After three months in Vienna, the moral corruption he perceived in the new architecture combined with his inability to find work left him sinking into melancholy. His main tool for combating the gloom was to make order in his immediate details. When his trunk finally arrived, he was overjoyed by the care his mother had taken, and at least he could put on a clean white shirt. The white that restored his state of grace was the same salubrious color as the snowcapped peaks of his childhood; the elixir of purity, it had the brightness in which he was ultimately to try to house humankind.
The organization of his own belongings gave Jeanneret a sense of equilibrium he found lacking in the world around him; it compensated for the horrors of the design scene about which he had just complained. “Everything’s in good shape now, I have a lot of drawers, and everything’s in its proper place,” he reported to his parents with glee.5 In time, he was to provide the inhabitants of his architecture with ingenious closets whose orderly shelves and bins were paradigms of crisp, charming geometry; he saw such artful organization of private details as a means to escape inner darkness.
Simple domestic grace was salvation. If contemporary Viennese art disgusted him, a dustcloth could be inspiring. “I worked yesterday, my hands in the dirt, with a determination worthy of a nobler object.”6
Yet after unpacking happily and thanking his mother for all she had done, Jeanneret harshly rebuked her for what she left out. “But why the devil didn’t you specify the following objects in the order of their primary necessity? I’m not blaming you of course, but I really don’t understand this omission,” he wrote before detailing nine categories of objects missing from the trunk. His aluminum drawing pen was absent: “What the devil do you think I can do without that?” Where was his postcard collection, his photos of rustic Swiss architecture, and his new brown gloves? He couched the exegesis with a sideways apology—“I have nothing else to say to you; furthermore you have nothing to complain about, I realize I’m in the wrong; I’m doing it quite selfishly.”7 But he needed those gloves. After all, he wanted to go to concerts. He had to put on a face to the world: “My neckties are threadbare, I’m going to buy new ones. Shoes too, though my yellow ones still arouse great interest and are of excellent—striking!—quality. Bravo Ravenna! The drape of my coat, when I turn my collar up, gives me the look of a Steinlen drawing, as Perrin would say.”8
To make his first foray into Viennese society, Jeanneret bought a felt hat—“the sponge one was just too cheap—just over six crowns!!!” The event was a concert of the Philharmonic, with Richard Strauss conducting. Jeanneret’s opinions were characteristically sharp: “Some Spohr, rather cold though very skillful, some Wagner (the ‘Faust Overture’), very tiresome, some Debussy, really stunning; such clarity after all that German blur.”9
Having gone to Vienna ostensibly to study modern art and design, Jeanneret spent most of his time there listening to music. Attending concerts every Sunday afternoon at the “Grosse saal” of the Musikverein, in his eyes the most sumptuous and beautiful place in Vienna, he determined that Tchaikovsky was a genius. When Gustav Mahler was conducting the Viennese Opera, Jeanneret stood in line for four hours in the damp cold to get a standing-room ticket. The performance of Siegfried was torture for his legs, but “as music it’s marvelous, amazingly rich, the themes imaginative, the sonorities splendid. To manage not to repeat oneself, not to go on too long even once in five hours, that’s really something. The scenic effects are magical, the lighting too.”10
Wagner’s opera had a depth and authenticity he deemed lacking in Josef Hoffmann’s silver, Gustav Klimt’s paintings, Otto Wagner’s architecture, and all the other exemplars of the new visual trends he deplored. “Here in Vienna, if it weren’t for the music, one would commit suicide—proof: each time I went out looking for art I came back with a terrible depression,” he wrote.11
TWENTY-YEAR-OLD JEANNERET believed that in this “painful moment” young architects had “no father in the movement to guide them.”12 With all that Vienna offered, L’Eplattenier was still the only teacher in whom he had retained confidence. Yet, he assured Georges and Marie, he still had one constant source of joy: “Music overwhelms me.”13
2
By the start of 1908, Jeanneret was using the vocabulary of true clinical depression. He wrote to his parents about “the demon of doubt, depressing uncertainty…. It’s precisely because I have disappointments that I feel the need to tell someone about them.” He was designing a villa to be built back in La Chaux-de-Fonds and attributed his anguish to problems with the project—as well as to one of his frequent colds. “I fumble, I make risky, almost always illogical choices, and fail to keep to the straight and narrow!”14
He was completely candid with his parents about his burgeoning awareness of the opposite sex. His lack of self-confidence came through in an idiosyncratic narrative about an incident in the studio of the sculptor Karl Stemolak, where he had briefly studied drawing. “With Stemolak, I learn how to see, but I get a good talking-to every day: ganz schlecht, Herr Jeanneret, ganz schlecht! And now and then an encouragement: ‘ah ah, jetz gehts besser.’ The pretty harpist having done her number, I finished the first sketch as best I could and gave her as good as I got this morning, which gained me exactly one nice smile. I’m the one who’s assigned to the wardrobe and who helps her on with her jacket at noon (she’s twenty, and with eyes!)…. It’s a fact that the scales have fallen from mine, and since I’ve come to Vienna I’m beginning to see what a woman is, it’s the inevitable attraction of the Eternal Feminine making itself felt—rather late in the day in my case. I’ve spent my entire youth without ever having looked at a girl. Now there’s a sweet music in my ears, and I frequently soften up in-petto. It was ever thus. Have no fear, if you please, it’s all very pure and I have no nuptial intentions; proof: if I did, I’d be able to have myself a nice hump on Sylvesternacht.”15
The dour Calvinists probably recoiled from their younger son’s subsequent report of the proliferation of prostitutes at midnight on the Stephanplatz, the center of city life, and his explanation that, were he less virtuous, he could have had one of them. He described women showering kisses, with one of them practically having her clothes torn off by a mob, and continued, “More than once I’ve found myself, pushed and pushing, first in line in front of a young lady. But, without aspiring to chivalry, I confess that hugging a woman in that kind of danger would be repugnant to me. So I resisted with all my might and thereby managed to liberate one or two young goddesses. Which has not kept me from receiving a first-rate slap from one little student who, in imminent danger, distributed such treatment all around. And that was my one and only kiss!!”16 Jeanneret was consumed for years by this internal war of desire and inhibition and the fantasy of what he might have enjoyed had he not resisted it.
3
His sweetest moments in this difficult time period, he assured Georges and Marie, came when he looked at the many family photographs he had scattered all over his room. “I love you, and right away I begin shedding tears
even as I write the words,” he wrote. “The house is too sacred a thing for me ever to forget it, and the parents are a young man’s whole life before he gets married.”
“The realm of the affections has an enormous role to play in my life’s goal,” Jeanneret informed his parents in the stilted tone of an engineer discussing a machine. In the same voice, similarly poignant for the stiffness with which he expressed his emotional depth, he assured them he would let down neither them nor his teacher. “I’d be too afraid of disappointing you, of falling back into the condition of an ordinary man, whereas for twenty years you have nourished us on noble ideas. And so, my dear M. L’Eplattenier, I say this quite frankly, it’s for his sake that I’m trying to make something of myself.”17
Even more pompously, Jeanneret informed his mother and father, “My readings are not frivolous; any more than my person.”18 To drive home the point, he explained that he sometimes saved a roll from his evening meal to have for breakfast the next day. He spent his nights reading and writing letters but never let a day go by, even a Sunday, without visiting a museum or an exhibition or a corner of the city. He never permitted himself “to relax,” insisting that “a young man of my age must keep his artistic fibers vibrating on all occasions.”19 Unlike other young people, he did not seek more personal pleasure. “One is devilishly alone here,” he wrote home.20
Jeanneret was desperate for his parents to know how eager he was to improve himself. “I have a serious defect, which is always to be judging,” he wrote. “I reproach myself for it and frequently realize how exasperating it is: a constant danger for an artist, whose entire life consists in sifting and in quite coldly excluding, in being frank with himself. He becomes noble when he can keep this to himself and manage to rein in his indignation, which frequently flares up. Thank you for warning me of the danger—you must chastise me often and harshly.”21
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