Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The monastery’s refectory was to have an equal influence on Jeanneret’s work. It is an extraordinary salubrious space for human congregation; the overall impression is of rough plaster—painted with a marvelous bright whitewash—and then of the subtly colored frescoes that cover many of the walls and convey a biblical narrative cogently and gracefully. The tables in the refectory are semicircular, thick, coarse slabs of marble, quarried on islands in the Marmara Sea and, like Carrara marble, dominantly white with grayish-blue veins.

  These slabs and the benches that accompany them ennoble the act of eating and sitting. The wooden seats are long planks set into whitewashed plaster bases that echo the curves of the tables. Le Corbusier made similar custom-fitted furniture in the lakeside villa for his mother, in his own cabanon in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and in other residences. Like the anonymous architects of Lavras, he, too, unified functional, dignified furniture with luminous architecture and colorful art so that all the elements work in tandem.

  Jeanneret reveled in the ambient honesty and strength of these surroundings and the monks who inhabited them: “We sit down on the white wooden benches. The monks’ hands are rough and calloused, swollen from working the fields, and their robustness is at one with the plates and enameled earthenware common to the country and implying the soil. Beyond each guest are three earthen bowls containing raw tomatoes, boiled beans, and fish, nothing else. And in front of him is a wine pitcher and a tin goblet, together with round, heavy black rye bread, the daily treasure, the meritorious symbol. In front of the apse, the superiors break the bread, eat their food and drink their wine from the earthen dishes and the green jugs on the unvarnished wood boards, and nothing more. A joyous atmosphere.”7 This became his ideal: earthy materials, lack of pretension, the interplay of work and simple pleasure—all nourished by the southern sun.

  5

  On Athos, Jeanneret was also awakened to the relationship of a garden to the life it supports. The terrain cultivated for melons and peppers and other fruits and vegetables at the monasteries in time led to the well-planned courtyards and terraces in Le Corbusier’s villas and to the parks he designated for the outskirts of large cities. The necessity of a growing space in communion with a living space seized his consciousness forever.

  But while he retained the memory of the pink Judas-tree blossoms and the profusion of delicious sun-gorged vegetables of the Holy Republic, the reality of his time there was less than perfect. In a letter to Ritter, he blamed the monks of Iviron for the food poisoning from which he suffered shortly after arriving there: “Endless diarrhea due to those dear monks whose culinary preparations had wandered into forgotten cupboards.”8 Suffering from at least two intestinal attacks on Mount Athos, he was extremely sick for ten of his days there.

  Jeanneret treated the illness with retsina, of which he drank great quantities at night. He marveled at the curative effects and credited the rough wine with his ability to spend the days on muleback ascending and descending the island’s steep hills. This was how Jeanneret found a rather ordinary building that staggered him with the clarity and grace of its architecture. It was a simple, small Byzantine church in the monastery of Rossikon: “Two things: the straightness of the nave, like an immense forum, and then the hollow onion bulb of the dome proclaim the miracle—the masterpiece—of man.” This modest structure had none of the scale of Hagia Sophia or other famous buildings, but it was a kernel of truth. “This architecture, however diminished in volume, commands my admiration,” he wrote, “and I spend hours deciphering its firm and dogmatic language.”9

  Undeterred by his ill health, Jeanneret “felt quite strongly that the singular and noble task of the architect is to open the soul to poetic realms, by using materials with integrity so as to make them useful.”10 This church at Rossikon enabled him to recognize the inestimable value of building with a clear conception and a worthy purpose. Jeanneret’s travels convinced him that the standards and integrity essential to such a creation were practically extinct; he would revitalize them: “The hours spent in those silent sanctuaries inspired in me a youthful courage and the true desire to become an honourable builder.”11 He was, for the rest of his life, to strive for this same marvelous combination—logic and directness in tandem with the inexplicable—that he discovered on Mount Athos.

  6

  Leaving Mount Athos, Jeanneret remained “haunted by a dream, a yearning, a madness.”12 His goal was to see the Acropolis.

  On the voyage, for the first time ever, he immersed himself nude in the ocean. He could not yet swim. But, surrounded by water, entirely alone, he felt himself gloriously connected to the larger world. He wrote Ritter, “I look up and it’s splendid. I was plunging naked just now in these classical waters. I have a notion that there was fighting here once. Eleusis is across the away—a few thousand yards. And now, cobalt has filled the folds of the mountains and the beach rising out of the sea. Eleusis? The site of mysteries so long ago! I’ve seen Olympus, first the Asian one, and then two days ago the real one where Jupiter and company were enthroned. A fine mountain with a lovely profile I neglected to mention. Lord! I’ve seen Lemnos and Pharos days on end without flinching, all very beautiful.”13

  The man who was so intoxicated by the ancient world and had just bathed naked was thinking more and more about sex. He revealed to Ritter that he was acquiring a very specific taste for large, full-bodied females with enormous breasts—the same creatures who were to dominate his paintings toward the end of his life. He saw the prototypes of these voluptuous earth goddesses on the island of St. Giorgio, near the port of Antiparos, when his boat stopped there on the way from Mount Athos to Athens. The twenty-three-year-old wrote his mentor in Munich, “Back to my old crones, or rather forward to two enormous Greek women who came down to the beach one evening, surrounded by a thick cloud of patchouli, which I greedily inhaled. Lord what women! Splendid animals. I told everyone the identical creatures were to be seen in the two caryatids at the treasury of Delphi. They sat down at a table and proceeded to stuff themselves like the peasants they were, working their jaws to great effect. What arms, what heavy round chins, and what adorable breasts!”14

  Sketch showing a view of the Acropolis, September 1911

  In the bazaar, he purchased, for one hundred sous, an archaic earthenware figure with a full-bodied form that he likened to Aristide Maillol’s work. On top of the Persian miniatures and the bronzes he had already bought and shipped home, the purchase left him penniless but overjoyed. Clutching it, he wrapped himself in a brightly colored Romanian rug he had acquired on the trip and slept on the deck as the ship made its way toward the Greek mainland. He ate octopus from Mycenae and drank Sicilian wine, which was stored in a cask. In a language he scarcely spoke, he raved about both to the cook.

  Then, from the sea, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had his first glimpse of the Acropolis. As light conditions changed before his eyes, he marveled at the overall order evident in the assemblage of temples: “For all the majesty of the natural surroundings, the focal point was an amalgam of buildings perfectly placed on their sites by human beings.”

  Toward the end of his life, Le Corbusier acknowledged the indelible effect of both the ocean and the ancient temple ruins at that moment: “Over the years I have become a man of the world, crossing continents as if they were fields. I have only one deep attachment: the Mediterranean. I am Mediterranean Man, in the strongest sense of the term. O Inland Sea! queen of forms and of light. Light and space. The essential moment came for me at Athens in 1910 [sic]. Decisive light. Decisive volume: the Acropolis. My first picture, painted in 1918, was of the Acropolis. My Unité d’Habitation in Marseille? Merely the extension. In all things I feel myself to be Mediterranean: My sources, my diversions, they too must be found in the sea I have never ceased loving. Mountains I was doubtless repelled by in my youth—my father was too fond of them. They were always present. Heavy, stifling. And how monotonous! The sea is movement, endless horizon.”15

 
Resting on a column of the Parthenon, September 1911

  ONCE HE AND KLIPSTEIN got to Athens, Jeanneret postponed the experience of actually walking up to the Acropolis. Even after he resolved to do so, he put it off again to forestall what he knew would be overwhelming. He told Klipstein that he must make this journey alone; he was in too excited a state to be accompanied or let anyone else determine his pace.16

  On the designated day, after being on edge all morning, he decided at midday to wait until the sun had gone down. He wanted the effects of moonlight and the solitude of night to be present before going closer to the ancient temple. He calculated that afterward, once he had walked back down to the city, he would have only to go to sleep.

  Jeanneret felt overcome by “the deliberate skepticism of someone who inevitably expects the most bitter disillusion.”17 But when he finally reached the Parthenon, the building’s scale stupefied him, and he was exhilarated beyond all expectations. After climbing the steps he considered too large, he walked into the temple on its axis. He looked back between the fluted columns to see the vast sea and the mountains of the Peloponnesus spread before him in the changing light of dusk. Conscious of standing in a place once reserved for gods or priests, feeling himself thrust into an era two thousand years previous, Jeanneret was “stunned and shaken” by the “harsh poetry.”18 In that delirious state, he began to walk around.

  ANYONE WHO HAS looked over one of the perfectly scaled parapets on the terraces at the Villa Savoye, who has stood on the roof of l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and taken in the mountains to the north and the sea to the south, who has felt the merging of garden and house at the Villa Sarabhai in Ahmedabad, will recognize that these ever-changing compositions are rich echoes of the marriage of nature and building that Jeanneret perceived when he first took in all that was contained and exposed on the hill overlooking Athens. What affected him above all at the Acropolis was the integration of the temples into their site. The relation of buildings to their natural setting; the universal vistas; the equal importance of air, water, and light to stones and mortar—what was evident in the Greek monuments was to be palpable in all that Le Corbusier built.

  So were the roles of color and light. “Never in my life have I experienced the subtleties of such monochromy. The body, the mind, the heart gasp, suddenly overpowered.”19 Now more than ever, he wished to create such thrills for others.

  7

  Jeanneret both worshipped and detested the godlike power of the Parthenon. He summed up the experience as “admiration, adoration, and then annihilation.” After twelve days of daily visits, he suddenly disliked going up there: “When I see it from afar it is like a corpse. The feeling of compassion is over.” Jeanneret began to sense the presence of death everywhere around him. The nights seemed “green,” with “bitter vapors” under the black sky. In the streets of Athens he saw—or thought he saw—corpses being carried by black-robed Orthodox priests; the skin of the exposed faces of the dead bodies was also green, with black flies swarming around them. “The torpor of the land” merged in his mind with the weighed-down clouds.20 Yet for nine more days, he kept going back to the Acropolis. He was in love, then out of love; ravenous, then satiated; ecstatic, and then despondent.

  Finally, Jeanneret had had enough. He later wrote L’Eplattenier, “I’ve seen Eleusis and Delphi. All well and good. But for three weeks I’ve seen the Acropolis. God Almighty! I had too much of it by the end—it crushes you until you’re ground to dust.”21

  At the Acropolis, September 1911

  8

  In Athens, Jeanneret received a letter from Charles L’Eplattenier, asking him to come back to art school and form a new division there.

  Having taken this long voyage to cure himself of his previous misery and, he wrote Ritter, having succeeded in enlarging his vision of life and acquiring a new serenity, he was tormented by the offer. The need to reconsider his future was a “catastrophe.” He feared that if he decided to go back, he would become like L’Eplattenier, a prospect he equated with spiritual death. But he had to contend with reality and the obligation he felt to return to his hometown.

  Jeanneret told Ritter that he blamed himself for his suffering; his own tyrant, he tortured himself. Since the age of fourteen, he had pushed himself mercilessly, so that now he was more anxious by the day and made women afraid. His brother, Albert, by contrast, was generous, full of sunshine and love.

  Miserably, he was resigned to accept L’Eplattenier’s proposal but still would not give his parents the satisfaction of knowing he was coming home. He told them only that he was leaving Athens and going to Calabria rather than Cyprus because of his digestive issues: “I’m dragging my guts around Athens…it’s the cooking here that’s doing me in.” He believed he would stop his diarrhea with Italian macaroni. “I think that’ll put the cork in it.”22

  In Pompeii, the cure worked. But in Rome he became upset about a misunderstanding. He learned that a postcard he sent home from Constantinople showing himself and Klipstein disguised as women had flopped. His parents “failed to recognize their own son with towels for breasts and purebred elbows” and were not amused by the “bazaar finery.”23 Then, on October 4, Jeanneret learned that his father’s workplace and his aunt’s apartment had been destroyed by fire.

  He responded by writing that, although the fire was a serious matter, it neither troubled nor saddened him. While he offered to rush home if his help was needed, the event was an opportunity for a fresh start: “Now comes a resplendent purity,” he assured his parents.24 Jeanneret told his mother and father that he had, however, cried because of the probable loss of two books that he wanted to use for his own research: the Encyclopedia and La Patrie Suisse. He also grieved the loss of “Papa’s suspenders, his smoking-jacket, his slippers, his checked celluloid cuffs.”25 But the idea of giving everything up and starting all over again was consolation.

  He longed to be in the same situation. From Rome, Jeanneret sent L’Eplattenier a postcard declaring, “I hear the death-knell of my youth.

  Within a month or less it will be over. Ended. Another man, another life, clear horizons, and a road between walls…. Of course I’m often sad about it: gray fits of melancholy mingle with the joys of my return. I leap from dark to light and back again, and there’s no doubt something harsh and tragic remains.”26

  Auguste Klipstein and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret performing the dance of Salomé in Pera (Istanbul), July 1911

  But Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had now made a resolution. If he had to be back in Switzerland, at least he could use it as a stepping-stone toward becoming an architect. His lack of the requisite diploma was no obstacle.

  IX

  One can never forgive the city where one has learned to know one’s fellow men.

  —STENDHAL, AS QUOTED BY LE CORBUSIER

  1

  The return to his hometown felt like a form of death. The train from Milan took the traveler back through the mountain passes through which he had first fled La Chaux-de-Fonds four years earlier. He wrote Ritter that he was heading toward “an ugliness sadder for being pretentious…that’s what my future will be: hard, hurried, arid, dangerous.” As he left “the tragic tunnel” on the train that was to deposit him in his birthplace later that afternoon, it was “the last day of a condemned man.”1

  AT AGE TWENTY-FOUR, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret teetered in borderline territory between genius and insanity. His consuming love of female beauty and craving for sex, his determination to make a new architectural dogma with universal application, and his passion for the visual overwhelmed him. For he had no idea how to realize his goals.

  He revealed the rich confusion of his unusual mind in a letter he wrote Ritter on November 1, the day of his return home:

  I’ve had my fill of death. In Italy everything has crumbled or collapsed. For me Italy is a cemetery where the dogmas that were once my religion are rotting where they stand. Who could believe such a hecatomb? In four years, I’ve suffered
and survived a terrible evolution. I’ve gobbled up an East of unity and power. My gaze is horizontal and cannot see the insects at my feet. I feel my own brutality. Italy has made me a blasphemer. I sneer at everything, and my feet are ready to kick things out of the way. I was obeying my destiny when I left everything behind in order to travel at any cost. All that bric-a-brac I treasured disgusts me now. I stumble through elementary geometry in my hunger for knowledge and eventual power. In this mad dash, red, blue, and yellow have become white. I’m besotted with white, with the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder, with the pyramid of great empty spaces. The prisms rise, balance, and advance according to various rhythms, having a huge black dragon writhing on the horizon in order to hold them together down below. Above them is nothing but a white sky: they stand on the marble paving where they compose monoliths unpolluted by color. But at noon the light spreads the cubes in one immense surface; by evening a rainbow rises out of the forms. In the morning they are real again, with lights and shadows, bright as a diagram. One senses their tops, their bottoms, their sides. More than ever, the night is black and white, the white whiter than ever, the black blacker. There are scarlet rooms with luxuriant bacchic evocations, stifling rooms filled with shadows, a sort of paradise aglow with local golden Buddhas. These would be refuges for hours of great anguish and madness. But we would be living between huge walls as smooth as they were white. It would be so ennobling that our progress would be regular, our gestures graceful, and everything would assume color. The world would take on grand and lovely proportions. Painters and sculptors would gradually become masons. Listen to the music of it! Can you see the developing architecture of a tragedy? Can you see the joyous inferno of a commedia dell’arte: Captain Fracasse, Pulcinella, Pierrot, Harlequin, and a black-swathed Don Salluste passing by.