Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  He then wrote an essay called “The Building of Cities.”5 In it, he extolled the merits of curved streets of varying width and incline. One should, Jeanneret proposed, imagine the donkey as one’s guide, ambling through urban space with unexpected twists and turns. Jeanneret fastened on to the diversity of old towns that invited circuitous wandering and provided the thrill of variety. The places he enjoyed and the urbanism he now advocated complemented the leaps and wanderings of his soul.

  Jeanneret pointed out that, by contrast, in a plan based on a grid—a large square subdivided into smaller squares—the only way to walk from diagonally opposite corners is by following a ridiculous zigzag path. He mocked such orderly layouts and the unimaginative bureaucrats who imposed them on people. La Chaux-de-Fonds, of course, was built on such a stifling concept, with no relationship to the life and vitality of the larger universe and no sense of progression or hope. Fortunately, Milan and Pisa had introduced Jeanneret to the marvelous variability that occurs where every small street stemming from a piazza leads to a different adventure.

  As he wrote “The Building of Cities,” the zealot came alive. Eventually, he refined its ideas in his 1924 book Urbanism (also translated as The City of To-morrow).6 For the rest of his life, he espoused these ideals, by which he hoped to give millions of people lives full of diversion as well as calm.

  3

  In mid-October, Jeanneret traveled to Berlin to attempt to work for the architect Peter Behrens. Nineteen years his senior, Behrens was well established as a designer for German industry. He had developed a streamlined functionalism that was a radical break from all past architectural traditions. Behrens had just finished his renowned AEG Turbine factory, a powerful exaltation of machined forms. His name topped the list of architects Jeanneret admired.

  Behrens denied him an interview. The twenty-three-year-old fell into a downtrodden state that echoed his humor in Vienna three years earlier: “Berlin has not conquered me; once you leave the grand boulevards, everything is horror and filth…. Exploring the museums disgusts me in advance. My moods have taken a pathological turn. Yesterday I visited the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, and I can assure you the experience was anything but gay.”7

  To his new friend William Ritter, who believed that cities had their own personalities and exercised a powerful effect on their inhabitants, Jeanneret reported that the German capital induced “a feeling of the blackest desolation. Even London could not show me a great city under so monstrous an aspect.”8 But the possibility of working with Peter Behrens justified staying, and Jeanneret was so persistent that he wormed his way into his hero’s office and landed a job. Ten days into it, Jeanneret described his forty-two-year-old boss to his parents: “A colossus of daunting stature. A terrible autocrat, a regime of terrorism. Brutality on parade. All in all, a type. Whom I admire, moreover. My masochism thrills at taking the bit between my teeth when the horseman has such style.”9

  Jeanneret was eager that his parents know him as he knew himself: “I must confess that my anxious soul is increasingly tormented. The goal is terrible. Why have I placed it so high? What devil has placed it so far from my myopic eyes? Everything conspires to destroy serenity: lowest details and the highest ideals…. Doubt is a horror. The further I advance, the higher IT rises. Doubts, Stumbles, Hesitations, painful Shocks.”10

  As a draftsman for Behrens, he was broke, depending on his commissions from the work at home to pay the twenty-eight marks per month—heat and dinner included—for the room he had rented. “The boss doesn’t pay; it’s all a huge exploitation. The salaries are ridiculous.”11 But at least he was directly exposed to the making of architecture that was unprecedented in its blend of brave simplicity and visual charm. He wrote L’Eplattenier, “Behrens, a severe master, demands rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me.”12

  Jeanneret worked from 8:20 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.—with Saturday afternoons and Sundays free. Soon he began to receive two hundred marks per month—a pittance, but sufficient to change his housing. He was delighted to move from an overstuffed room whose comforts were anathema to his taste to an austere but blissfully isolated garret. He wrote his parents: “I am…abandoning my huge bedroom for an attic, my armchairs for kitchen stools, pier glasses for a tiny shaving mirror, and racket for peace. There we are. Besides, the slate roofs of Paris are inscribed in my memories, and an attic is much more poetic than too many armchairs, glistening armoires, objects of the most deadening banality which yours truly cannot endure more than a fortnight.”13 One’s surroundings and one’s inner state were inseparable.

  4

  On December 2, 1910, Jeanneret wrote his parents a poignant letter that obliquely indicated a sexual dysfunction and his general sense of impotence. He began by quoting one of his happy-go-lucky friends from La Chaux-de-Fonds: “Octave Matthey wrote me this week: ‘Since you’ve fulfilled all the requirements for fucking off in less than no time, why don’t you just fuck off. You know you’ll never do anything else as long as you live—it would take such an effort you’d never manage it, even if you died trying. Try it and see!’ Octave’s irony; he knows my sickness and laughs at it. As for me, what sickens me most is not being able to get well. Each day begins by opening a big hole in front of me and dropping me into it because I thought I wasn’t being an idiot, which I am, and in a way that’s disgustingly and unacceptably unfair. Of course it’s my own fault, but my sickness is right there, mocking me, frustrating me. You no longer understand such a creature, my dear parents, nor do I. I’ve given up—first victory, or already a first defeat: trying to analyse why. It’s all summed up in a single word of two syllables: Boredom.”14

  Self-portrait in a letter to his parents, June 29, 1910

  Disillusioned over his new job, he also poured out his thoughts to the receptive, warmhearted Ritter, in the first of many twelve-page letters in which Jeanneret’s fountain-pen scrawl reached all four corners of the sheet in a stream of associations: “The work I’m required to perform leaves me indifferent. I now judge quite severely a man who has allowed himself to be surrounded by the fatal cortege of fame; though a powerful personality, Behrens has become a victim of his successes. Eager to make money, he undertakes too many projects, losing all effective control over what we, his twenty nègres, often produce reluctantly, merely obedient to an authoritarian and unjust rod. I’m so fond of Behrens as a person and as a man that in order to preserve my admiration, I’ve decided he must be sick.”15

  Having initially felt warm toward his office mates, Jeanneret had become contemptuous: “My colleagues are, in every sense of the word, what last Sunday, when I was at home, you feared I might become: superficial architects with no artistic fiber, no passions but the extremely vulgar ones of drink, dancehalls, and an occasionally disorderly life.” Struck by his employer’s instability—“Behrens is a sick man and consequently intractable, unapproachable, immersed in his rebarbative ill humor”—Jeanneret was creating his concept of the ideal architect: “An architect, as I envisage him, must be above all a thinker. His art, consisting of abstract relationships which he cannot describe or depict except symbolically—his art does not require a cunning hand. Indeed, such a hand could be fatal. But this manipulator of rhythms must possess a fully developed brain of extreme flexibility.”16

  Shortly thereafter, he wrote his parents about hearing a Tchaikovsky overture remarkable for “the slow, panting, anguished release of the orgiastic orgasm of liberation painted in all the colors of experience and seen as such by the homosexual martyr Tchaikovsky.”17 In his own responses, Jeanneret himself possessed the mental suppleness he craved in others.

  5

  Soon his state of mind devolved into a “crisis of profound boredom” even more extreme than his depression in Vienna. In his despair, he asked Ritter, “What accounts for this terrible disenchantment? I’m searching my soul to find out.”18 But the ultimate sources of his misery eluded him; something far wor
se was going on during that Berlin winter than his lack of friends or Behrens’s gruffness. He had lost all hope of pleasure or serenity in life.

  To his new confidant, he obsessed about his anhedonic state: “Aesthetic joy is over and done with. Since I’ve been here, I haven’t heard one note of music. So tight is our regimen that it is impossible to attend a concert with any pleasure. It would be exhausting.”19 His absorption with his own misery made him overlook the performance where he had heard the Tchaikovsky overture. “I’m ashamed that once my lucky star guided me to you, all I’ve had to show you was an exhausted, mentally debilitated being,” he wrote. “Never, believe me, have I lived through such a lamentable period. It’s a mistake to blame external phenomena. They’re not all that unfavorable. Here’s another aphorism that I picked up somewhere: ‘All young men, after great enthusiasm, go through a period of depression.’ Perhaps the aphorism itself has done the mischief? You with your profound experience of artists’ lives could enlighten me; berate me mercilessly, or else tell me the cure.”20

  He loathed his own appearance, linking it with his unfulfilled craving for women. “Good God! Yet I could, if I really wanted to, eventually consider some young lady ‘inexpressibly lovely’! Hear me out: in my entire life as a student, I cohabited with cats, always above the gutter and never below it. The window was usually no more than a peephole. And when, in the shadows, the mirror afforded a reflection, it would be tiny, wavering, affording my imagination ‘infinite spaces.’ O Prussian inhospitality! My bedroom—I moved out two weeks ago—was a huge monstrosity, two windows took up one wall, and there was even, in the corner, an enormous pier glass, maybe six feet tall and two feet wide. The light came in from the opposite side, and I saw everything in that mirror; I couldn’t believe it, but I went on looking: I saw rickety legs and huge red dangling paws, swollen with disenchantment; a nose straight on which seemed to define the creature underneath, a wrinkled forehead, a crestfallen coiffure and a lot of skin and bones. An unhealthy complexion. The Sunday clothes—the same moreover as those of everyday—were ill fitting. I saw everything; I told you there were two big windows on the opposite wall which showed everything. There was no getting away from it.”21

  While he believed that no beautiful woman could possibly find him appealing, he perpetually imagined meeting one. “You’ll understand that I’d be moved to see the inexpressively lovely young lady!” he wrote, including Ritter’s partner, Czadra, in closing, “Some happy day I hope to make tangible my respectful admiration and my gratitude to you both. Yours devotedly, dear gentlemen.”22

  6

  At the beginning of 1911, Jeanneret’s gloom turned to fury: “With Behrens there’s no such thing as pure architecture. It’s all facade. Constructive heresies abound. No such thing as modern architecture. Perhaps this is a better solution—better than the anything-but-classical lucubrations of the Perret brothers. They had the advantage of experimenting with new materials. Behrens, on the other hand, opposes all this, so with him I’m learning absolutely nothing but facade in everything. The milieu is hateful, my life here is hateful, my life here is idiotic. Exhausting work all day and no reaction possible by night. The better I get to know these people, the emptier they seem. No friend possible except Zimmermann, whose artistic soul is inadequate. No contact, ever, with Behrens.”23

  Again, music saved him: “The Jacques-Dalcroze orchestra, virtually the antithesis of that of Richard Strauss, offers me an atmosphere of joy and health spangled with whims and impossible choices, a heaven of gold like those smooth skies of Duccio or the serenely inimitable vistas of Perugino—but resting on a faraway horizon, solemn and sometimes tragic.”24

  Everything was reduced to the battle between Latin and Germanic cultures. Strauss, he believed, suffered from uncontrolled hysteria. Similarly, “in Germany, painting and sculpture, virtually the sole metaphysical exteriorizations of our period, are stupid and always backward,” he wrote to L’Eplattenier.25 To Ritter, he lamented, “German painting has stubby wings—how clumsy it looks compared to the French school.”26 The entire German nation, he subsequently harped to L’Eplattenier, was blinded by its unwarranted “artistic pride.”27 Other German-speaking places were just as bad: Austria had been a desert, Switzerland a bastion of poor design.

  If only he could head back to Italy and even farther—to Greece, the cradle of ancient civilization! Jeanneret began to hatch a plan.

  7

  He was thinking about love as much as art. To his homosexual confidant, Jeanneret revealed his amorous musings: “I stole a kiss the other evening from a young lady; today a cat I was holding in my arms disturbed me with its glowing eyes; and this evening in the woods, under the pink sky of twilight, I stood for a long time watching a blackbird singing its heart out; incontestably he was doing his best, he wanted his song to be beautiful; and since he was alone at the edge of the woods, I wondered why he was pouring out his heart so passionately!”28

  The gloom of winter was giving way to manic enthusiasm; Jeanneret was ready to blossom. “My spring will soon be coming into its own,” he wrote. “Summer will be here all too soon. After four years of absence, they’re calling for me at home. Now I feel ready to open myself to everything. The period of deliberate concentration is past! Open the floodgates! Let everything rush out, let everything live within!”29

  He had decided to embark on a long trip with Auguste Klipstein, a friend he had met in Munich. With no timetable, no fixed destinations, and no names to call upon, they would go to unknown Balkan villages, the great cities of eastern Europe, Greece, and maybe Egypt. Again, his father disapproved, and L’Eplattenier told him he was not sufficiently mature to profit from the trip and that it was a waste. But Jeanneret, excited because Klipstein was “a boy who knows how to have a life even while he’s working away with great deliberation,” was soaring out of his gloom. “I’m making my escape after five months of penitence; gray hours, interminable weeks, leaden months,” he informed Ritter. The trees were budding, a concert of birds emanating from their branches. “Spring is approaching and with it the sun, blossoming, expanding! I feel joy again, the monotonous gray is disappearing.”30

  He was imagining naked women “in broad daylight,” the joys of a blue sky and the Aegean.31 He could picture classical architecture with its vertical columns and entablatures parallel to the line of the sea. After the trip, he would settle down to a productive life, but first Jeanneret planned to educate himself in pleasure.

  VII

  1

  What Jeanneret saw on that journey affected his life forever after. From the start of the trip, in Vienna, previously the scene of his worst misery, he was inspired by magical sights he would never forget. Its flower market was “a stunning procession that passes between the black colonnade of tree trunks bearing an immense barrel vault that recedes as far as the eye can see…. The eye becomes confused, a little perturbed by this kaleidoscopic cinema where dance the most dizzying combination of colors.”1

  Could anyone have written a more apt description of the Assembly Hall that Le Corbusier later built in Chandigarh? Its entry, a sequence of tall, tapered columns with a celestial light flooding in from above, resembles a grove of trees and a Romanesque nave. After that calm glade, the assembly itself is another “kaleidoscopic cinema.” The vision Jeanneret developed in 1911 made such an imprint that he recapitulated it more than four decades later.

  Then, traveling down the Danube on a large white paddleboat, Jeanneret reflected, “Were I a fisherman or merchant along its banks, I would religiously sculpt out of wood, somewhat in a Chinese manner, a god who would be this river and whom I would worship. I would set him on the bow of my boat, smiling and gazing out vaguely ahead of him, just as they did in Norman times. My religion, however, would not be one of terror: it would be serene but above all full of admiration.”2 Nearly half a century later, Le Corbusier’s main architectural collaborator in India, Balkrishna Doshi, observed, “I often noticed while interacting ho
w much he believed that there was somebody, somewhere, who was creating or sending messages so that they could be implemented by him as HIS instrument. He often referred to the river which internally connected the source and the destination of the water and where the creator told him to flow, but always detached from either of the banks.”3 It was on that boat deck at age twenty-three that Jeanneret began to worship such an undefined spiritual force.

  2

  Approaching Belgrade on the wide river, Jeanneret wrote Ritter, “The whole mystery of this journey seems so full of promises, occurring under a sky that already declares its splendor, so that quite understandably one feels happy. There is in us—perhaps only in me—a vestige of religious masochism that almost engenders a fear of such happiness. But I am gradually discarding it, soon the devil will relieve me of it, and have to find another poor leper to torment himself.”4 Jeanneret sketched a square shape divided in the middle horizontally by a wavy double line. The top half he marked “sky,” the lower one “water” “earth” was nothing but a narrow slit between the two roughly parallel lines in the middle. Le Corbusier always viewed earthly existence as such—a fragile platform that is a minuscule part of the larger scheme—but he was learning how to enjoy being there.

  BEFORE THE SHIP reached Belgrade, the captain arranged for the two young travelers to board a small raft at daybreak. Journeying via stream to one small village after another, Jeanneret thrilled to the throngs of pilgrims chanting psalms, the peasant women bearing small baskets of fruit and vegetables in crowded marketplaces, and the oxen, cows, and goats grazing peacefully. He also reveled in the straightforward building style that achieved protection and enclosure in their fundamental form: “Each house has its own courtyard, and the intimacy in them is as perfect as in the gardens of the Carthusian Monastery of Ema where, as you may recall, we had a fit of spleen. Beauty, joy, serenity gather here, and a wide, semicircular portal, closed by a door lacquered in either red or green that opens onto a spacious exterior! The trellis assembled from latticework casts a green shadow, its white arcades bring comfort.”5