Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Narrow streets with a checkerboard of windows in the facades. No ornamentation. The whole city one color, one substance. Cars surge past, planes pass overhead with no one paying much attention. There would be avenues across the rooftops amid flowers and trees; huge staircases to climb and long bridges to cross and then the descent down a superb staircase, which confers the gait of an emperor and fills one’s heart with generosity.

  Here and there a temple: a cylinder, a half sphere, a cube, a polyhedron. And empty spaces, for breathing.

  Up on such rooftops, what else would we be but gentle madmen, leaving the crowd, with all its bright rags and celluloid collars, on the piano nobile below?

  What is to be done with women? Steal your best friend’s wife for a night, abandon your own for another, make love when the impulse seizes you, a debauch at essential hours. A splendid resurrection of hetaerae murmuring endearments and performing acceptable coitus. From great white halls you would pass into red ones. And then proceed on your way forgetting the episode, recovering your habitual companion. I desire such things, perfect fool that I am, for what exists today is intolerable. I have lost all religion, and upon seeing two young newlyweds crossing the square in front of the cathedral tonight, entwined just closely enough for the sake of hygiene, I wondered what the devil we were doing here on earth. Surely the stupidest question to ask, for the answer is: do your work, burn your candle, the one you manufacture and sell for the sake of light, and above all, do not concern yourself with whoever furnishes the tallow and with what those you illuminate are doing.

  Since the blade has already fallen, I shall not die tomorrow. I am in the next world already. My muscles are prepared, capable of hard work. I shall perform at the top of my powers for several years. And I shall see the two young newlyweds entwined for the sake of hygiene—perhaps she will be the one, the unknown woman who awaits me, and I—I shall be cast into the void wondering Warum?

  Starting tomorrow L’Eplattenier will hire a good mason and we shall make Art! A ridiculous notion! Never again must we make Art but only enter tangentially into the body of our epoch and dissolve there in order to become invisible. And when all of us have disappeared in this way, the stone will have become one great block. What will survive us then will be Coliseums, Thermae, an Acropolis and certain mosques, and the Jura, our mountains, will provide a frame as fine as any sea. Long afterward young people will pass by, their passions aroused.

  Let me propound my new dogmas: we are remarkable men—great and worthy of past epochs. We shall do better—that is my credo. The primitives are in fashion. Their day is past. They were savages, and we are civilized men. I must raise two altars—to Michelangelo and to Rembrandt. All the others in the history of Art are so much dung. Piero della Francesca is a poet. Cimabue is a painter. And Giotto a decadent. I shall betake myself to Egypt. Asia is our crucial resource. All art critics must be destroyed, excepting only those who reveal contemporary art. Those must sit in judgment. The world must be made white. The fruits of the earth must be eaten and drunk. To make love with the body and thereafter to be stoned to death, having put up a splendid resistance—what a beautiful fate!

  Must, must…. There is no escaping it. Must: the dogma of thenew. A hard look and a whip for those who refuse. That sounds like me. Who else?

  Yes, I long for imperatives. Such is my destiny, as you well know. Yet wrought up as I am, I aspire to being so for its own sake.

  This was just a small part of the fifteen-page missive he wrote as he anticipated losing the gains of his time away. “I shall turn back, mow down my friends, be called a crazy fool, and once there is a void around me, I shall remember that you shouted: ‘Sir, sir, whoa there, breakneck!’ but there is nothing for it. Go your ways.”

  This was the occasion when Jeanneret put, on the back side of the envelope, as the return address, “La Chaux-de-Fonds de m…”—La Chaux-de-Fonds of shit.2

  2

  Georges and Marie Jeanneret did not have room for Charles-Edouard in their apartment. For four weeks, he stayed with L’Eplattenier. Then he visited Octave Matthey. The friend who had advised him on sex was living in an ancient granary, similar to the primitive barn he had rented on Mount Cornu two winters earlier. The moment he saw this rough structure, constructed in 1670 in open countryside, he decided to move in. If he had to be back at La Chaux-de-Fonds, he would do so in wilderness rather than bourgeois oppressiveness.

  It was, Jeanneret wrote Ritter, “exactly two minutes from the top of the town, an outbuilding of the old convent which has lately been inhabited by tramps. I was jealous of the place; I had them cut out a huge room from the barn, forty or fifty feet on a side, low ceilings, but with enormous and very beautiful brown rafters and very white walls, I insisted on that. I tell you, my big barn is adorable. You get in up a steep, narrow staircase, and out the window I see a mountain ash, and beyond it the melancholy Mont Sagne bristling with stubby firs. O these horizons under your nose! My friend Octave lives in the apartment underneath, a friend from Coulon days. We share an enormous kitchen, with a fireplace between the arches worthy of a Hindu cult. It is pitch-black, dark as a cave inside, really too dark…. And to get my barn in working order took these cheating workmen a whole month.”3

  At “Le Couvent” in La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1912. Jeanneret cut the wide window through the wall on the second floor.

  Matthey had an “Egyptian”’s triangular torso and square shoulders, yellow skin, hair that was practically blue, and Dante-like nose. One day, when a former girlfriend of Matthey’s was in his room, Matthey knocked on Jeanneret’s door. The woman, who lived in Zurich, was visiting for two days. Matthey remarked that since Jeanneret had shown him his Maillol—as they called the little terra-cotta from the island of St. Giorgio—Jeanneret might now want to come see his “statue.”4 Matthey added that Jeanneret could stay as long as he wanted, but he should come on tiptoe, since she appeared to be sleeping.

  To Ritter, Jeanneret described the encounter with his unique mix of specificity and incoherence: “One shawl spread across the six-paned window, another at right angles hung from the ceiling, both forming—with the partition opposite the second shawl, the ceiling, and the floor—a tiny hollow cube in which the triangle of the two splendid armchairs and the wicker chair produce a design of their own; a pedestal-table covered with what appears to be a service of black and white china, on the far sideboard an enormous pot of dried chrysanthemums, the various stems protruding under their weeping tresses. She was stretched out in one of the big armchairs covered with a big scarlet rug, naked and asleep, her feet thrust toward us, her head in a cloud of red curls hiding the face tilted toward her armpit; the almost complete darkness made her body look colossal.”5

  After creeping in, Jeanneret sat down in the second armchair. Matthey offered him a cup of tea, but Jeanneret was too mesmerized to do anything as ordinary as sip a beverage.

  His mind went through complex gyrations as he faced the sleeping, naked woman. He wrote his mentor, “We were talking softly about the Beauty Sanctuary constituted then by the huge spherical lantern of orange and white paper with a big blue eye in the center which Octave lit and hung above us. We decided it had to be painted. Octave took his brushes; the shawl spread in front of the six little panes of the window made a green fluid immobilized above the dishes which looked, in the warm light of this sanctuary—pink flesh in a vermilion matrix—as if they were made of some black and white substance. That was when I left. And here on my desk upstairs there was the blue cover of a book of Mallarmé’s poems—I read the ‘Soupir’ and his translation of ‘Ulalume.’”6

  Matthey’s girlfriend returned to her family. Two days later, Jeanneret did a watercolor of the sleeping woman from memory. It released a new energy in him, and he began to paint with zeal. Drawing on recent memories for his subject matter, he believed that by making art he could create the vibrancy absent in his everyday experience. He painted the Parthenon in emerald green and vermilion, and the temple of
Jupiter in green and “rose-caleçon”—a pink Jeanneret inexplicably identified with boxer shorts.7

  Yet nothing was good enough for Jeanneret. On a postcard he had bought in Florence in happier times, he wrote Ritter, “I don’t know what I’m doing. What appears disgusts me; I spoil everything in ten minutes and yet I don’t give up. I’m telling you I no longer have any control over the thing. I look into myself with a deep expression of exasperation. But isn’t it true to make a sky exploding with light you have to leave the paper blank from top to bottom, not daubing it at all? Yet this strange persistence of black and of dirty grays produce a kind of tragic harshness. You can imagine how sick I am of the whole, can’t you? I walk like a drunkard with huge gaps, light and darkness.”8

  Then, for six weeks, he stopped writing even to Ritter. When, at the start of February, he broke the silence with a postcard, he again utilized the term “depression.” He felt outside of himself; it was as if his mind as well as his body were freezing in the barn. Matthey had left their shared home without warning—giving the incident of the sleeping woman in the armchair as the reason but specifying nothing more. Without a roommate, Jeanneret’s financial affairs were in chaos, and the city government had failed to give him an office.

  SUDDENLY, HE BEGAN to soar again. A sentence Jeanneret had read in Ritter’s “Musical Life” was so beautiful “that it may help me to disperse the mists which imprison me.”9 He was designing two villas, one of which was to be a new house for his parents; in his new role as a teacher, he was gaining a wider audience. Elation replaced gloom.

  Le Corbusier later compared L’Eplattenier’s new division of l’Ecole d’Art to the Weimar Bauhaus. It taught everything that pertained to the art of building. Teaching twelve classroom hours per week, Jeanneret enlarged students’ understanding of basic geometric elements and enabled them to apply that knowledge to architecture, furniture design, and interior decoration, with the emphasis on abstraction more than structure.

  He began to relish his role of embattled martyr: “People hate us a priori because we were trying to do something fine. The minnows and the piglets have protested—they hate us because we were trying to clear the muck out of their stable. In the same way that the socialists hate L’Eplattenier because the monument has made him radical, the bourgeoisie hate us, the young ones because we don’t have anything to do with them since most of my friends are boors, wild men with red beards and clumsy gestures whose elocution offends them more than spelling mistakes.”10

  If only he could reconcile the world of watchmakers and the love burning inside him. “What I’d like is to be able to do whatever I do with a great deal of passion,” he wrote. “Anything deserves to be well done. It’s true—to adapt yourself to the milieu, to love and express it: the roots of the trunk of the tree of art. So that we no longer rebel against the Convent. That would be too easy. We smile at the Gray City which does not smile back. The Gray City would like to spit on us, a business of carefully ejaculating a gob of saliva; pleasures of smokers and drunks.” Even his mother was against him: “Bare-faced lying, if there’s any hope for success. They’ve just covered my head with ashes and called me a chimney sweep; that’s my mother for you: chimney sweep because it’s not yet practical.”11

  But this time, rather than sink into incapacitating depression, Jeanneret resolved to work fiendishly hard. “All action is an act of optimism. In all inaction is a fall into the gray void.” Yet he was completely confused about what direction to take: “To make ‘beauty’ for others—is this a necessity or an impertinence? It is either civility or altruism. It is? Damned if I know. I’d like to be a milestone of positive contribution, not of combat. And to make a contribution is to be a tiny thing in a great mass. To be avant-garde is to set yourself up alone on a pedestal, very high in spite of yourself, with principles of movements. To be a poet and describe a flower! It seems to me that it’s permissible and necessary even for certain individuals to be the pope. Sometimes the poet and his flower seem selfish to me, and sometimes so wise. Every problem is a question for me, and I am not sufficiently indifferent to life not to ask it.”12

  3

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret managed to harness his energy and to set his course in spite of that burning tendency to turn belief into doubts. By the middle of the year, he had determined that making beauty for others was all that mattered in his life. It was insignificant that he was not certified in his profession; in fact, he never attained the official qualifications to practice architecture. Having decided who he was, he opened an office at 54 rue Numa Droz in La Chaux-de-Fonds, with the mathematically satisfying telephone number 939. The letterhead declared, “CH.-E. JEANNERET * ARCHITECTE.” The description beneath the name was “Architecte des Ateliers d’Art Réunis.” A list of services followed: “CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAS, COUNTRY HOUSES, APARTMENT BUILDINGS—INDUSTRIAL CONSTRUCTION—SPECIALIZING IN REINFORCED CONCRETE—REMODELING AND REPAIRS—INSTALLATIONS OF SHOPS—INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE—GARDEN ARCHITECTURE.”

  WITH VILLAS UNDER CONSTRUCTION and spring sunshine, he wrote Ritter, “The irises and the lilies of the heart bloom and open and spread their perfumes of the heart out the furthest fiber of the corollas, the same generous gift has risen and has traced, violet and blood-red on a field of mourning, a line of life. The rose of Hope is reborn each spring, which must afford us great comfort.”13

  Hope brought dreams: “Of Venice and of Ravenna, of huge, opulent women, smiling giantesses of Ferrara. Sickly Paris, Paris of the Folies Bergère, military service. Colombia: oaths, ecstasies, enthusiasms—youthful impulses. Enormous desire. Kindness in virtually everyone…. Paris glistening like a paradise and our thoughts transport us to the land of dreams, sometimes.”14 It was, however, time for a clean break: “It’s all over between L’Eplattenier and me…There is nothing left between us but masks. Masks that must be torn away.”15

  It was to be a pattern of Le Corbusier’s life: worshipful attachment followed by total rupture. The end with L’Eplattenier left him “a soul still sad at the agonizing spectacle,” but severance was the only possibility: “I’ve had to put down others. Oh, yes, eliminate and destroy many things, hopes, people I loved and who I believed loved me, who themselves believed they loved me.”16

  Like the fire in his father’s workroom, catastrophes opened doors: “It’s a great deliverance. The grim, huge, melancholy, the swamp of stagnation, gives way to the rush of light. Yes! This is a cruel landmark.”17 Throughout Le Corbusier’s life, conflict was a sublime stimulus; there was nothing like annihilation to clear the air.

  IT NOW WAS, Jeanneret decided one August morning at his parents’ kitchen table, “the modern moment!” “To raise a tower, first you must dig,” he declared. He blasted himself for the work he had done locally. “As for the houses I built this year, I have committed certain anachronisms in their regard. I have been old, old-fashioned. With a fool’s ear, I listened to dubious gossip, citations, unlikely aphorisms. I have been scandalously unsuitable. The absence of suitability, which has flung me this year into an abyss, has shown me the darkness of this condition. And now I see white!”18

  He was in a manic upswing. “The hour of battle sounds in music…. Music is the great promoter of joy. I listen, and I hear so much! Music, by its rhythms, is of all forces the one which is combat,” Jeanneret wrote Ritter. He was determined to understand and harness his euphoria. “What are they physically, then psychically, these explosions, these discharges, these outbursts, these ecstasies experienced, suffered?—once at the age of twelve in the presence of flowers, another time in front of that Alp, then inside that charterhouse near Florence (ineffable, agonizing vibrations), here in Palestrina’s mass, there in Paris, along the Seine.” The list of stimuli went on: the minarets he had seen in the east, the Parthenon viewed in conjunction with the sea and the sky: “Each thing offers itself to the eye.”19

  Now determined to celebrate rather than deny pleasure, he compared his responses to art and music to his
sexual emissions when he was sleeping. His aesthetic reactions resembled “the effervescence of carnal dreams.” Ritter was the one person who would understand. “I ask you—you who have inhaled life with such generous lungs—what becomes of and what use are the fugitive hours when we no longer belong to ourselves and where tears, cries, prayers, and blasphemies emerge pell-mell in our seething nonconsciousness? I’d like an answer from a man who has inhaled life with generous lungs.”20

  That zest for existence in all its magnitude brought with it a keen awareness of death: “Can it be possible that Life withdraws from those who love it? I am agonized by this question. Is all we have experienced…lost? Does it vanish, devoured by the grim indifference of external things? How to emerge from this abyss? Do you believe that with a sincere effort and a love of reality (and I know how readily the REAL can be masked!)—do you think that such things may keep us from dying?”21 The questions were not rhetorical; they burned inside him.

  DEATH BECAME MORE than theoretical when the thirty-seven-year-old journalist Auguste Bippert died demonstrating a small plane with a professional aviator on October 15, just after Jeanneret’s twenty-fifth birthday. Bippert was “one of the only men hereabouts (perhaps the only one) who was interested in art, who understood something about it, who was really alive.” At least to perish in an airplane was better than to be one of the living dead around him: “How much enthusiasm it takes, how much faith, and how many inner demons!”22