Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Alone on the quai Saint-Michel, Jeanneret relished his “fruitful hours of solitude, hours during which one undermines, when the lash bites into the flesh.—Oh, if only I had a little more time to think, to learn! Real life, paltry as it is, gobbles the hours.”20 He was to refer to the flagellating whip for the rest of his life.

  In his hermetic existence, the sole encounters he valued were with Grasset and other elderly men who had devoted their lives to art: “Such men’s hair has turned white; yet it is they who are keepers of the true devouring flame. Such men have the already idealized, already paradisiac faith of those initiates who have seen and know the truth. One leaves their presence scourged but with a high heart.”21

  Jeanneret counted on L’Eplattenier to understand all this. He wrote his master, “It is by thought that today or tomorrow the new art will be made. Thought withdraws and requires combat. And to encounter thought in order to give battle, one must proceed into solitude. Paris affords solitude to those who ardently seek silence, the aridity of retreat.” If he acted properly, this magical metropolis was a place to be productive: “Time in Paris is fruitful for those who seek, from the passing hours, a harvest of strength. Paris the great city—of thoughts—in which one is lost unless one is severe and pitiless to oneself.”22 It was a religious quest, worth the requisite sacrifices because it replaced his anguish of Vienna with values and purpose.

  “Vienna having given the death blow to my purely plastic conceptions of architecture (no more than the search for forms), and having arrived in Paris, I felt an enormous void and said to myself: wretch! you still know nothing at all, and alas you don’t even know you know nothing.” His self-prescribed program in the French capital had succeeded: “I suspected from the study of the Romanesque that architecture was not a matter of the eurythmia of forms.” His instruction in “mechanics” and “statics” had added to his growth: “It’s arduous, this mathematics, but beautiful—so logical, so perfect!”23

  Now that he had recovered from Switzerland and Austria, his ascendancy was under way.

  7

  Paris had effected his metamorphosis. “These eight months in Paris shout: logic, truth, honesty, behind the dream of the arts of the past. Eyes open, forward! Word for word, with all the value words can have, Paris tells me: Burn what you have loved and worship what you were burning,” he wrote to L’Eplattenier. This outburst was also a diatribe: “You, Grasset, Sauvage–Jourdain, Paquet, and the rest, you are liars—Grasset, that model of truth, a liar, because you don’t know what architecture is—but the rest of you, architects all, liars all, yes, and cowards as well.” He was enraged that none of his former mentors had led him toward the realization that “the architect must be a man with a logical brain…a man of knowledge as well as of heart, artist and scientist.”24

  Jeanneret charted his course accordingly. A new art would be born in Paris, and he would be part of the breakthrough. His excitement took him over the edge of logical thinking: “As a tree on a crag which has taken twenty years to anchor its roots and which generously concludes: ‘I have struggled—my offspring will gain by it!’ and lets its seeds fall on the few patches of soil mottling the crag, soil which the tree itself has formed with its dead leaves—with its pain; the crag warms in the sun, the seeds flourish, and the rootlets grow—with what vigor! what joy! to stretch the tiny leaves to the sky…. But the sun heats the crag; the plant in anguish feels the stupor of excessive heat; it tries to send its rootlets into the shade of its great protector. Yet the tree has taken twenty years to anchor its roots, and with what a struggle—its limbs filling the crannies of the rock. In anguish, the seedling reproaches the tree that has created it. The seedling curses the tree and dies. It dies of not having lived—by itself…. That is what I see in this country. Hence my anguish. I say: create for twenty years and dare to continue creating still: aberration, error, prodigious blindness—unheard-of pride. Trying to sing when you do not yet have lungs! In what ignorance of your very being must you be plunged?…The parable of the tree inspires me with fear…fear for the tree that prepares itself for suffering. For you are a being so full of love that your heart will be plunged into mourning to see the incandescent life—the life that must be gained in order to struggle against it—coming like a cyclone to burn the little plants which so proudly, so joyously aimed their leaves at the sky.”25

  He announced to L’Eplattenier, “My struggle against you, my beloved master, will be against this error.” His “struggle against friends” was “the struggle against their ignorance…. They do not know what Art is.” He, on the other hand, recognized his pathetic state: “I know I know nothing.” As he beat the evil out of himself, Jeanneret swooned over the new truth he at last glimpsed: “Vienna gave me too strong a shock. At present I am a man without resources, incapable of creating or of executing anything. I no longer see in works of art, or in nature when I go for a walk, anything but life, the mad sinuous curves and spirals, the shoots opening into magical palmettos. I say ‘seeing them’ it would be more correct to say that I foresee them. But the shock of Vienna was so powerful, the disgust so deep, that I am no longer attached to execution; only fragments of art delight me. And so I do not know one iota of my trade.”26

  8

  Jeanneret read Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus.27 He marked the most hypnotic passages and wrote their page numbers on the title page.28 Language he was to use for the rest of his life came from Renan’s phraseology.

  Jeanneret drew excited lines next to “Jesus is not a spiritualist; for him everything has a palpable realization. But he is a fulfilled idealist, for him matter is only the sign of the idea.” In the margins, the young architect scribbled: “And I herewith create everything anew! This is the feature all reformers share.” He marked with a double line the statement that Jesus “had renounced politics; the example of Judas the Gaulonite had shown him the futility of popular sedition.” Renan’s Jesus was his model, or at least his excuse, when he later worked with any regime that would allow him to build. By declaring politics insignificant, he revealed to the world this truth: “that the nation is not everything.”29

  The other text he double marked was the single sentence “For him, freedom is truth.” And he pressed his pencil so hard that he dented the margin next to Renan’s conclusion: “Inevitably a moral and virtuous humanity will have its revenge, and one day the sentiment of the honest man, the poor man, will judge the world, and on that day the ideal figure of Jesus will be the confusion of the frivolous who have not believed in virtue, the selfish who have been unable to achieve it…. A sort of magnificent divination seems to have guided the incomparable master here, and to have sustained him in a generalized sublimity embracing many kinds of truths at once.”30 The man who would make himself another “LC” was to rail forever at those frivolous and selfish creatures who could not recognize a savior in their midst.

  9

  On May 12, 1908, Georges-Edouard and Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Georges wrote in his diary, “Thanks be to God this quarter of a century of life together has brought us more intimate days than pains, aside from everyday cares; we have acquired a modest comfort, at least our daily bread is secured for the morrow; our two sons have caused us no moral torments, their behavior has been excellent, their moral nature is intact: their careers are not yet certain, yet they pursue them with great and cheerful energy. My wife has been a discreet helpmate who never flinched from duty. Our health, aside from a few minor cares, has remained good. The four of us live in harmony, closely linked by affection.”31

  Georges could overlook his rage at Edouard’s trip to Italy and subsequent move to Paris now that the younger son had a job. That was more than could be said for Albert, who, after earning his “diploma of virtuosity” from the music conservatory in Geneva, went off into the mountains alone. Albert declared himself utterly confused, unable to do much of anything. Although he then returned to Geneva to teach and perf
ormed publicly in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in March 1909 Albert said that he had to stop playing the violin for at least a year, as he was suffering from pains in his arms. Making matters worse, a lull in Georges’s work meant that Marie’s piano teaching was their main source of support.

  At the end of 1908, when Edouard had finally returned home after an absence of a year and a half, he had begun to assume the role of the easier child. Georges reported in his diary in January, “Though he still dresses rather deplorably, we found him to be a good talker, of solid morals and firm opinions (despite the complete modification of his beliefs and his faith); tall, with a new reddish-blond beard; still confident in the future, energetic, and in good health!”32

  IN MID-MAY OF 1909, Georges and Marie Jeanneret visited Edouard in Paris—the first time they had ventured so far from La Chaux-de-Fonds. Georges felt that the eight francs a night they paid for their twin-bedded room at the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, convenient to Edouard’s apartment and the Louvre, was warranted. This was high living for the Jeannerets, but although the total they dispensed for the trip depleted the accumulated interest in their savings account, it did not touch the capital. The watchcase decorator and piano teacher took great pleasure in the sights Edouard had chosen for them to see, including a performance by Sarah Bernhardt. Georges made another happy diary entry: “Our son knows his town like a native and was of great assistance to us, and of great interest through his knowledge of art, his sure judgment, his amiability, his good manners, despite his unfortunate clothes.”33

  Dressed as a “rapin” in his garret at 9 rue des Ecoles, Paris (1908–1909). The rapin coat was the unofficial uniform for students in Beaux-Arts courses.

  In September, however, in one of his most bizarre missives to date, Edouard suggested to his parents that good clothing was not his only lack. “To make love, le bel amour, takes cash, fine clothes, and the gift of yourself, and for lack of cash, fine clothes, and the capacity to give myself, such a thing is quite impossible for me, since as I’ve told you I belong for the time being to Mistress Escapade, and of course all substitutes find me retrograde, inferior, and, on the other hand, sometimes quite severe!…One lives a life contra naturam, that’s obvious, and in spite of all that might be said, one needs woman, that subtle element consisting of everything we lack, but without which we are incomplete.”34

  THE JEANNERET SONS both seemed determined to jolt their parents.

  Albert, who spent a few weeks in Edouard’s room with him, reported deliriously about their drinking multiple liters of white wine one evening and cavorting in the countryside on a Sunday when the temperature reached forty degrees: “We terrified a young virgin (approximately 40–50 years old) who had ventured to accompany us, but who quickly changed direction at the sight of our extremely light garments. Unfortunately (and this will be imputed to us by daylight) we introduced certain germs into the hearts of other passers-by.” The Jeanneret boys ended up spending the night outside, sleeping on their backs with their feet practically in the Seine; “we tasted the delights of letting ourselves live.” Edouard told his mother and father, “We must find a way to walk the streets stark naked,” but added, “I find I have a character likely to overload itself with work and insufficiently disposed to enjoy life.” When he wrote that he was “stupidly delighted” in the garden of the Palais Royal with Albert, it was “not for the sake of a good time, but because it was a mistake to work with an exhausted mind.”35

  With Albert behind him at 3 quai Saint-Michel, 1908

  THEN, ON NOVEMBER 9, 1909, Edouard terminated his connection with the Perrets. Postponing his return until his money ran out, he wrote his parents, “In my hours of freedom, I feel the rebirth of an artistic fiber, and I rejoice in this vacation during which I can surrender a little to poetry.”36 At the end of the first week of December, Jeanneret returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds. His plan was to spend three months in a rented farmhouse. Although he had initially rejected L’Eplattenier’s counsel that he work in Germany, now he wrote his master that he had decided to go to Munich and then Berlin. Yet again, everything had changed except for his burning goal: to understand architecture.

  Self-portrait drawing as the “Grand Condor,” on a postcard to his parents, Christmas 1909

  VI

  1

  In the books Le Corbusier wrote or authorized about himself, his three-month return to La Chaux-de-Fonds exists solely as the occasion when he diligently took the opportunity to study reinforced concrete. But his self-imposed isolation at age twenty-two in a barn during an especially severe winter was significant in many ways.

  This primitive structure Jeanneret rented on Mont Cornu, three kilometers outside of La Chaux-de-Fonds, was dominated by a wooden-shingled roof shaped like an inverted, flattened V. The second-story hayloft and the covering of thick snow on that sloping roof were the main sources of insulation against the biting cold. The warmest place was the kitchen, a windowless room contained by masonry walls in the middle of the barn and heated by a fireplace serviced by the wide central chimney. More than forty years later, Le Corbusier’s exuberant church at Ronchamp was to restate the form of that primitive barn.

  With his parents in La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1909. Charles-Edouard’s bohemian appearance, a vestige of his new life in Paris, shocked his parents.

  IN APRIL, Jeanneret took off for Germany. His ostensible goal was to learn still more about the technology of reinforced concrete. But once he was in Munich and the sole architect he admired, Theodor Fischer, did not hire him, he focused on Wagner’s operas, the paintings of Rubens and Rembrandt in the Alte Pinakothek, and the hearty cooking at inexpensive bierstuben. When he went to the Neue Pinakothek to see the latest paintings, he spent precisely seven-and-a-half minutes—he recorded the time—and then declared the visit to have been a complete waste. He preferred the force and purposefulness of Baroque architecture to the stylization and autobiographical content he disdained in more recent artistic trends.

  Jeanneret also crystallized his views on Germans in general. He admired the German people for their organizational instinct and deductive reasoning, but thought that they lacked imagination and creative genius. While the Germans credited themselves with having launched a new aesthetic movement, Jeanneret was convinced that their sole achievement was the discovery of Latin genius; for him, they were subordinate to the French, who reigned supreme in the realm of art.

  Shortly after arriving in Munich, Jeanneret met, on L’Eplattenier’s recommendation, the man who was to affect him above all others. William Ritter, a music critic from Neuchâtel, was immersed in the work of Anton Bruckner, Leoš Janácek, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Bruno Walter, all of whom he knew. Ritter was forty-two and undisguisedly homosexual in an era when to be so open was unusual. Since 1903, he had been sharing his life with Janko Czadra and would do so until Czadra’s death in 1927. Ritter’s intensity and artistic passion, and his personal courage, made him a hero to his fellow escapee from French-speaking Switzerland. For years to come, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret bared his soul to this father figure who provided him with unequaled emotional companionship.

  For now, however, the traveler’s letters were to his mother and father. “The first thing to regret is the exaggerated flight of time,” he wrote them shortly after arriving in the Bavarian capital. “The same old song. Too much to deal with, turning every which way in order to have time to realize that it’s already ten at night.”1 Georges and Marie Jeanneret, on the other hand, felt that Edouard was wasting the time he deemed so precious when, after more than a month, he still did not have a job.

  Portrait of William Ritter by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret

  Edouard replied to their admonitions with the rudeness and self-righteousness he never lost. “My dear parents, You’re absolutely right to ask for clearer details, but you’re not going to get them! Which is called the rebellion against proper authorities…. Yet I want you to know that my mystery is utterly chaste and my silence merely one virtue added to m
any others. This silence of mine is the sign of a modest, prudent spirit which regards things according to their causes and their consequences, having sounded the mysteries of human psychology.”2

  Even as he feigned control, Jeanneret continued with senseless allegories and a strained humor that bordered on hallucinatory. “Yet I hear the voice of the race, while liable like Icarus to break my neck tripping over a wire; I should like to raise you to the level of my conceptions, but let us postpone such elevation to my next, in order to avoid a flood of amphigoric terms. Speaking positively: did you know that everything depends on elegance here and that I am actually studying the cut of the frock coat I must wear! The bohemian-student type is discountenanced here. One must dress up. And all modern artistic Munich hoists the flag of elegance. And since I am trying at all costs to penetrate this milieu, I too must be gorgeous. At what cost? I who am a monster by nature! O Divinities of India, so plump, so opulent, yield something of your style to the poor admiring wretch who loves your bellies and your smiles…. And to hell with that pianist downstairs in absolute Nirvana! Divinities of India, plenitude inscribed in stone, hear my prayer, and even if you need to summon Bacchus himself, do your work!”3

  With style and wine, he might have women.

  2

  Two months after Jeanneret arrived in Munich, L’Eplattenier wrote with news that turned his life around. L’Ecole d’Art of La Chaux-de-Fonds had awarded him a grant to write a report on the applied arts and architecture in Germany, so that his findings could be applied in Switzerland. It was the first time that the future Le Corbusier was asked to offer expertise on the aesthetic and technical aspects of design and its connection to human experience. He traveled to Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Weimar, and Hamburg, visiting the latest factories, office buildings, and design studios. A modest pamphlet—Study of a Decorative Arts Movement in Germany— resulted.4