Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Village life in this powerful landscape sent him soaring: “The three great whitewashed walls, which are repainted each spring, make a screen as decorative as the background of Persian ceramics. The women are most beautiful; the men clean-looking. They dress themselves with art: flashing silks,…the thousand folds in the short dresses where the silk flowers ignite under a sun of golden fire.”6 He was finding the beauty that was to be his lifeblood.

  3

  When he got to Istanbul, Jeanneret learned that William Ritter had mentioned him in a newspaper article that would be read in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Jeanneret wrote Ritter, “Will my distinguished papa deign to smile if one day he sees his son’s name in cold print?”7 He allowed to Ritter that his father was convinced that his sons would never amount to anything.

  L’Eplattenier had recently asked him to teach for twelve hours a week at a new school; his father, whom one might have expected to be pleased, was indifferent about the offer. “You understand that my dear papa, who has no ambition for his sons beyond a stable position, could be quite happy. Yet it’s he himself who catalogs all these wonders while commenting on them with a lack of enthusiasm, of warmth, which neither surprises nor disturbs me.”8

  Suddenly, his world was falling apart again: “In any case, the watercolors are going nowhere. Besides, who knows if Constantinople is right for water-colors. Is Santa Sofia lovely? Internally speaking, of course. Perhaps Constantinople is a mirage? K and I are in a strange state of mind, and each evening we question each other: ‘Perhaps I’ve gone mad? Tell me, Klip, do I look like a donkey? I think this damn tobacco has played a trick on me, and now I’ve been mummified!’ Etc.”9

  The “tobacco” was probably hashish. It had him wavering between a self-nourishing negativism and an enthusiasm he voiced to Ritter in a language a young man from the provinces might have used to try to impress a duchess.10 This shift in mood within a two-page letter reveals the precipitous emotional leaps and descents to which Jeanneret was increasingly subject: “We came by way of Rodosto in order to proceed through those waters I’d always adored; by sea so classically, so majestically, in order to take it all in. We saw Andrinople, and how we loved it! Kazanlik at the foot of the Balkans was simply exquisite. Tirnovo gives you an attack of spleen, but I’ve had the revelation of the Chapel of Paradise.”11

  The experiences of color and smell were intertwined with sexual cravings, about which he also wrote Ritter in a pretentious literary style: “Strange how your incisive words about Bucharest express just what I felt there: that terrible itch of the flesh, that thirst for Theodoran debauchery (I’m creating adjectives), and then that disgusting odor of the lilies the handsome gypsy women were selling. And to think that painters here produce such filth instead of painting filth in a gypsy plastique and in chromatics where lemon yellows would excite dirty greens and corrupt violets, and where the blacks, absolute blacks, would blacken everything that’s rotten, cynical, bestial. And inside blooms that weird rose of sensuality which savage peoples adore because it’s the true color of flesh. And it all stinks of lilies until your brain cracks, your arteries burst.”12

  The bursting arteries were in his penis; he wrote Ritter, “And it was hot here, so hot we were kept awake all night! And believe me, one hard-on after the other!!!” The freedom to enjoy himself was still a problem, however. “It takes an act of will to let oneself go here, to fill one’s lungs and enjoy a real vacation of doing nothing. Yet even so, one conscientiously torments oneself every day: the devil’s always had a hard time turning white.”13

  JEANNERET was determined to be liberated from his shackles: “One expires from impoverishment and Christian torture. I’ve been so stifled that I’ve had to throw off the heavy cape. Now for action.” But although the local women were enticing, he considered them strictly off-limits: “The little ladies: white silk, cherry-red, black silk, too. But it’s all impossible, absolutely forbidden. So then one hugs one’s pillow, too bad!”14 This was one of many undisguised references Jeanneret made over the years to embracing his pillow in the absence of a woman; he frequently described his relationship with his pillow to Yvonne.

  The physical experience occurred in solitude, yet he felt compelled to tell someone else about it.

  4

  From Constantinople, Edouard wrote his parents that he hardly had money for postage stamps because he had been unable to resist buying a marvelous Persian miniature, brocades for his mother, ceramic pots, and some icons. Georges was outraged at the expenditure, but Edouard insisted that they were bargains and good investments and that he and Klipstein were living on three or four francs per day, including rent. Besides, he would soon be on his own financially.

  The tension mounted when Georges corrected a draft of Edouard’s essay on the design of cities. Georges—whose own published writings for the Adventurers’ Club newsletter have a succinct, no-frills style—gave valid counsel: “Your sentences are…too complicated, too long; we get lost.”15 He also informed his son that L’Eplattenier had telephoned the editor in La Chaux-de-Fonds asking him to delay publication of the article until Edouard had restructured it and made its views more acceptable to the local authorities. Georges meant to soften that blow when he wrote, “I’m giving you fatherly advice,” but Edouard showed no such grace in his response.16 In a long and relentless diatribe, he retorted, “It’s dangerous to interrupt someone else’s work; it’s an ungrateful role as well as a sacrificial one, and it pains me you’re taking it on.”17 After announcing that he would not communicate from Constantinople again, he sulked for a month, finally writing only to inform his parents that he had not died of cholera.

  He did not even bother to let them know that he had escaped the great fire that destroyed some nine thousand houses in Constantinople that summer, although his account of it to L’Eplattenier afterward would have served to reassure them that he had survived. Jeanneret fastened onto every detail of the tragedy. As flames shot out from the military headquarters, barefoot firemen ran around “like raving madmen.”18 Water blackened by soot rushed down the street, while “the inquisitive crowd” clambered toward the scene of the disaster.19 Having emptied their establishments of all merchandise, shop owners now sat smoking with their friends as the flames approached and fire burst out in three separate places at the same time. Jeanneret calculated that two million square meters were burning.

  He observed with a smug satisfaction the selfishness evident when the “unperturbed and curious” crowd blocked the streets and got in the way of people desperate to rescue their possessions.20 “Neither a gesture of compassion nor one of solidarity induces this multitude of idlers to offer assistance,” he wrote of the way that, during a downpour of burning embers, street vendors sold lemonade, ice cream, syrups, and fruit. In the face of this tragic devastation, he applied his cynicism to himself as harshly as to other impassive bystanders: “Since we do not see a convulsive face, we have no sense of horror. We hear no groans, no cries, no blasphemies…. We are captivated by a scene of formidable beauty and haunted by its magnificence.”21

  Thirty-four years later, at the end of World War II, Le Corbusier was similarly excited by the totally destroyed city of Saint-Dié. Making a reconstruction plan, he treated the eradication of the homes of hundreds of thousands of people as a clean start, a wonderful chance to build. At age twenty-three, observing the burning Constantinople, he wrestled with that same enthusiasm. “We can only seek to appease this passion that overwhelms us by its diabolical beauty,” he wrote of the “brocade of fire;…the colossal blazing mass as though it were a sculpture;…these fabulous columns of smoke, streaming with fiery embers. It is an exaltation of joy! What utter joy!”22 Color and form, explosion and destruction, intoxicated him so completely that he willingly shut his eyes to their horrors.

  VIII

  1

  Following Constantinople, Jeanneret and Klipstein headed to Mount Athos. Known also as “The Garden of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Mountain,” this self
-governing state inhabited exclusively by monks has been a religious retreat for more than ten centuries. Jeanneret had long been determined to be one of the rare laypeople to visit the sacred territory. Athos is dotted with twenty monasteries, extraordinary in both their architecture and their isolation, and he counted on expanding on the fantastic experience he had at Ema.

  Entry to Athos, however, was an arduous affair. The instinct and tenacity to make this pilgrimage to the Holy Republic distinguished Jeanneret and Klipstein from virtually everyone else they knew. Few of their contemporaries raised in the stronghold of Protestantism would have dreamed of hazarding the trip to the territory of total maleness, religious devotion, and physical isolation; even drinking the thick foreign coffee that coats the teeth with bittersweet muddy powder, a staple of this journey into the Turkish empire, would have been unthinkable.

  In Constantinople, Jeanneret had had to obtain a letter from the Greek patriarch, which necessitated a recommendation from an embassy. There was, however, no Swiss embassy there. He had had to turn to the French authorities, who were not inclined to help someone who wasn’t one of their citizens. Armed with letters from L’Eplattenier and Perret, he asserted himself until, finally, after several weeks, entry documents in hand, he was on his way.

  MOUNT ATHOS IS one of three peninsulas in Macedonia in northern Greece that stretch down into the brilliant blues of the Aegean Sea. The most easterly, it has the form of a splayed claw. Its jagged mountain peaks, treeless and rocky, are virtually inaccessible, although Lord Byron claimed to have scaled the bare summit, 2,030 meters high, and to have seen the plains of Troy from it.

  On the fertile cliff-top plateaus near the sea, large monasteries were built starting in the eleventh century. The pine forests around secluded coves lined by sandy beaches were scattered with dwellings for smaller groups of monks who preferred even greater isolation, as well as with huts for monks requiring solitude.

  The monastic republic is accessible only by sea. Jeanneret and Klipstein first had to travel on rugged roads for many hours from Thessaloniki southeast to the port of Ouranapolis to get their boat. To their surprise, rather than sail directly to Athos’s entry port of Daphni, they first were forced to take a small dinghy to a desert island just offshore from their departure point. There they spent four miserable days quarantined in a cell that Jeanneret compared to a cage for chickens and where his and Klipstein’s underwear was taken so it could be boiled. Finally, they were released and boarded a large boat for the three-day crossing.

  But the moment Jeanneret stepped off the boat at Daphni on August 24, he was transported. The town was inauspicious—a cluster of a few ramshackle wooden structures for customs officers—but Jeanneret was captivated by the landscape, which struck him as sacred. The grandeur and majesty of the mountain in front of him was more impressive than any man-made construction he had ever seen. And he exulted in the myth of this bold pyramid form shooting up from the sea—said to have been the rock that Athos, the leader of the Giants, had cast at his foe Poseidon, the leader of the Olympians, but that had missed him and fallen into the ocean.

  In early Christianity, a tradition developed that Athos was holy ground and had been visited by the Virgin Mary. The mountain was dedicated to the Mother of God and her glory, so other females were not permitted there. Edith Wharton had written in 1888 when she peered at the sights of Athos from a deck without being allowed to land, “The early established rule that no female human or animal, is to set foot on the promontory, is maintained as strictly as ever; and as hens fall under this ban, the eggs for the monastic tables have to be brought all the way from Lemnos.”1 The idea of this haven conscribed exclusively to the Holy Mother impressed itself on the traveler who four decades later designed his chapel at Ronchamp, dedicated to this same Marie.

  2

  For about two weeks, Jeanneret and Klipstein traveled by mule and stayed in various monasteries. The high-perched building complexes were unlike anything Jeanneret had ever seen. So was the endless horizon, devoid even of boats. Sleeping on cots in the spare rooms, savoring those vistas of sea and sky, dining with monks in the refectories, Jeanneret felt his life change.

  He wrote of the trip to Athos, “To go there requires physical courage not to doze off in the slow narcosis of so-called prayer but to embark, rather, upon the immense vocation of a Trappist—the silence, the almost superhuman struggle with oneself, to be able to embrace death with an ancient smile!” The sea journey itself provided a new sense of what mattered in life: “Lying motionless at night, I feigned sleep, so that I could gaze, with eyes wide open, at the stars and listen, with ears fully cocked, for every trace of life to subside, savoring silence in its glory. These were the happiest hours I have ever experienced.”2

  The obsession with the horizon that Jeanneret developed on Athos was to determine the way he positioned almost all of his subsequent architecture. The smooth and continuous line where sea and sky meet had a meaning well beyond its visual beauty. “I think that the flatness of the horizon, particularly at noon when it imposes its uniformity on everything about it, provides for each one of us a measure of the most humanly possible perception of the absolute,” he wrote.3 In his future, there were to be other forms of horizon: the bumpy juxtaposition of gentle fields and sky as seen from the terraces of the Villa Savoye; the wavy border of the earth appearing like a mirage in the blazing Indian sunlight at Chandigarh. But whatever the base, the boundary between earth or sea and the infinite cosmos of the sky became the focal points of the vistas that Le Corbusier made essential components of his buildings.

  The pure and honest architecture on Mount Athos conquered Jeanneret as much as the cosmic setting did. The monasteries built there nearly a millennium earlier as self-sufficient villages eventually spawned his all-inclusive apartment complexes; the stone and plaster constructions where religious contemplation was the goal were reborn in concrete and steel in his monastery of La Tourette.

  Immediately recognizing the impact of those monasteries, he wrote in his journal of his “yearning for a language limited to only a few words.”4 In this anonymous architecture, built modestly and purposefully, he saw both the salient honesty and the celebration of life’s wonders that were to be the goals of his own architecture.

  Jeanneret found the heat oppressive, yet the sun’s warmth, which served to remind him of its actual fire, also excited him. This landscape with olives and lemons and almonds growing in profusion, with the sea nearby for long swims, became his ideal setting to live in, especially when it offered a view to the infinite.

  3

  In Journey to the East, an account of this trip published many years later, Le Corbusier mused erotically about his time on Mount Athos: “The night was conducive to any emotional contemplation made languid by the warm, moist air, saturated with sea salt, honey, and fruit; it was also conducive, beneath the suspended, protective pergola, to the fulfillment of kisses, to wine-filled and amorous raptures.”5 What did he mean by these ambiguous remarks about the all-male domain? Was this a memory or a fantasy? Was he revealing a homosexual encounter on the spot where Lord Byron had trod a century earlier? Or was he insisting that abstinence, psychologically, was impossible, that the territory set aside for men to be celibate had the opposite effect and filled the mind with the longing for a woman?

  Le Corbusier was deliberately obfuscatory. At that time, he lacked a clear direction and lived mainly in his head. But he observed richly and imagined mightily, especially when describing his thoughts in Karies, a village in the hills in the middle of the peninsula. Full of hazelnut trees, Karies had been established as the capital of Mount Athos in the tenth century. Jeanneret wrote: “With the overwhelming heat of the evening and our sudden transplantation into the sensuous night of such a place, a more than Pompeii-like feeling resonates with a heavy languor, and the loneliness of my heart conjures, in this glowing warmth, the black outfit and dismal figure of a marquis standing away from the group, far from the tables
beneath the lattices and vine leaves, and leaning against the railing, back turned, lost in the contemplation of the sea. No, for more than a thousand years, this very simple and unique inn in Karies had lodged neither a marquise nor a courtesan, not even a simple woman traveler. For this land with the most Dionysian of suns and the most elegiac of nights is dedicated only to the dejected, the poor, or the distressed, only to the noble souls of Trappists, only to criminals fleeing the laws of men or sluggards fleeing work, only to dreamers and seekers of ecstasy and solitude.”6 That his reverie was simultaneously so vivid and so ambiguous was both a gift and a burden to the young man trying to forge his identity.

  4

  Jeanneret and Klipstein decided to approach some hermits living in sketes— the dry stone huts that provided maximum isolation. The recluses responded to their greetings by offering large bunches of grapes, which the visitor from Switzerland considered symbolic of both human generosity and the earth’s bounty.

  Of the monasteries, Lavras, which had been founded in 963, impressed Jeanneret especially. Its design has an abiding simplicity and derives from the purpose of providing proximity to nature in a tranquil setting. As one approaches the rambling structure from the sea, its rows of bedrooms look like white linen hanging on a laundry line in the wind. The top stories are perched on skeletal structures that project them in the direction of the horizon. Inside, the plain white walls are clean and silent. All of these elements reappear in Le Corbusier’s luxurious villas and large apartment buildings, while other details—the large bell next to the chapel, the minimal Christian crosses, and the outdoor places of worship—all show up at Ronchamp.