Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  He focused more on Bippert’s risk taking than his death: “The law of equilibrium demands that some exaggerate and caper since the rest are clams and rotting lobsters.” Jeanneret disparaged the cliché that the accident was predestined: “The believers have already cited the Finger of God, turning Him into a kind of boulevard swindler.”23 It was the contrary; Bippert, rather than fall victim to death, had commited a heroic act. The end of life must be the way Orcagna represented it, as a triumphant moment. At age twenty-five, Jeanneret resolved that, whenever the time came for him to die, it would be according to his own will and in a blaze of glory.

  4

  Albert had taken to performing silent pantomimes of someone playing the piano. When he was in these disturbing trances, no one could get through to him. In the same period, Edouard began to have upsetting, complex dreams, which he described vividly to Ritter: “I dreamed once of a Biberstein autumn, deep puddles of blood as far as the eye could see from your windows. Then the snow fell, rising above your roof. We were guarding your books, which the snow was gradually burying. Wolves had passed; then two exhausted Moujiks appeared, whom you greeted. The potters’ workshops had vanished under the snow. The Romanian blouses were covered. There were no longer any windowpanes and I stepped inside through the open windows. Yet even tilting, the Plain of Biberstein was one great puddle of blood. Yes, but there was the sky, the sun setting over that anguish.”24

  A perpetual lack of sunlight and the premature turning of the leaves added to his gloom. He wrote Klipstein, “It rains incessantly, tearfully. Enough to drive you to suicide.”25 When five hundred copies of his Study of a Decorative Arts Movement in Germany were published at the end of 1912 and there was “no reaction, no response,” his depression worsened.26 Jeanneret was exaggerating—he had heard from readers in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels—but he had not started to change the world as he hoped.

  After the highs of early summer, he had now crashed completely: “No music for months and months, no shocks, no jolts, no excitement, no joy. Your footsteps track the rainy days over the squelching earth…and my soul is so profoundly unwell that whenever I attend a concert I realize I no longer hear the music. Overcome by the day’s fatigue and paralyzed by the circumstances, my ears listen, but my heart remains cold. Unbalanced, I intensify my illness by a constant nonsatisfaction. The past abides like a book I’ve already read. It has not yet assumed the position of a witness, and uncertainty prevents me from making any resolution for the future.”27

  Even a kitten disappointed him! “I’m infatuated with cats: this morning someone brought us a kitten, the future guardian of our residence: ugly and oddly marked, the creature fails to attract me. How many women, too, generous though they may be, wake no response because they are not lovely?”28

  The man who half a year earlier had been exulting “the rose of hope” and “ecstasies, enthusiasm…enormous desires” now lamented, “Alas, most of one’s dreams will never come true.”29 There remained, however, one sole, splendid prospect: the great white villa he was in the process of building on the slope over La Chaux-de-Fonds for his parents, brother, and himself.

  5

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret first conceived of a new house for his mother and father and Albert at the start of 1911. His parents owned a large lot on the hillside overlooking La Chaux-de-Fonds. Edouard designed a sprawling structure that was fit for gracious entertaining they never did and was luxurious beyond their wishes. It is astounding that Georges and Marie agreed to it, but by the end of April 1912 the foundations were laid, and by the start of 1913 his mother and father were in their sumptuous all-white bedroom, with an “ennobling” blue floor, and he and Albert were in their capacious semicircular aeries on the floor above. The place he created as if his family would spend many more years intact—the sons unmarried, the four of them under the same roof—was imbued with boldness and grace. There were vast living and dining rooms and a terrace overlooking the landscape of woods and Mont Racine.

  The proud son was bursting with excitement: “One feels one is very high up, dominating a landscape somewhat reminiscent of Mount Athos—minus the sea!”30 He wrote Ritter, “My dear Sir, within my white walls my mother has become a slender girl again, and sings Schubert at her piano as she did at thirty. Is peace created here at home? In any case, I have experienced great joy on account of my mother’s happiness and my father’s contentment.”31 With the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also called the Maison Blanche, he was, for the first time, the author of human joy.

  Then, even before the great family house on the hill was totally finished, reality hit. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had destroyed his parents financially. “Where is duty?” he asked Ritter rhetorically. He answered for himself. “Duty: I have a papa and a mama.”32 He was shattered by what he had done.

  It is unclear if anyone had ever discussed a budget for the Jeannerets’ mansion. But what is certain is that the final cost was about fifty thousand Swiss francs. The sum would have been substantial no matter what the clients’ circumstances; it was exorbitant for people of the modest means of an enameler of watchcases and a part-time piano teacher. The entire savings that Georges and Marie had acquired through years of hard work had been depleted by the construction of their new home.

  Jeanneret heaped blame on the people he had hurt. If they had led their lives differently, his parents would not have been in this predicament. Edouard considered his father’s work “a stomach-turning and degrading métier.” Nearly forty years of doing the same thing had turned Georges into a passive person who had few personal pleasures beyond some limited time for reading and hiking. He admired his father’s intelligence but deplored his isolation: “My father has nothing to do with anyone, neither relatives nor friends.” His mother, at least, was, at the age of nearly fifty, still “ardent and youthful” and adored by her piano students.33 But in his frenzy, he resented everyone. Even if one of the main reasons he was back home was because of L’Eplattenier’s asking him to form the art school he would later equate with the Bauhaus, he acted as if he had been obliged to return from Greece to assume an immense burden of responsibility for both of his parents because Albert was away. Now, in his devotion, he had gotten them all into deeper water with the new house, an enormous blunder. Not only had he encumbered his parents financially, but he had foolishly established them away from the city and their neighbors.

  The Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also called the Maison Blanche, in the snow, ca. 1912

  The irony is that when the house that broke the bank was completed, in June 1913, it was the first architectural achievement in which the future Le Corbusier assumed his own voice. Unwieldy to run and made of materials too fine, it was, nonetheless, a superb and original design. Its gentle, sweeping forms and lively details lent harmony and charm to everyday life. This house had infused Jeanneret with an energy and originality that enabled him to go beyond the static formality or overly local style of his previous work.

  The rear facade was bold and playful. For the first time, he made a wall by building a straightforward slab and perforating it so that the long, continuous form was a syncopation of thick and thin, glass and stone, mass and opening. Delicate steel mullions balance thick stucco; feathery lightness jibes with dense weight. The dominating whiteness is punctuated by a band of vibrant blue. The octagonal rectangles of the white shingles that cover the house—a pioneering concoction of compressed concrete with visible fibers, each small panel nailed to the support beneath—further the impression of energy and candor.

  When he had been designing the Maison Blanche, Jeanneret had had Klipstein send him photographs of religious buildings that had impressed him in the Balkans.34 The boldness and simple massing of these anonymous Romanian buildings, and the confidence with which those majestic structures were planted on the ground, have their echoes in the villa. The influence of the Parthenon is also apparent in the way Jeanneret’s cubic structure is enlivened by the sequence of evenly spaced vertical elements.r />
  With his father in the garden of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, ca. 1916

  With his parents and brother in the garden of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, ca. 1916

  Previously, Georges and Marie Jeanneret had surrounded themselves with comfortable clutter in small rooms with flowered wallpaper. Their younger child moved them into a small palace, aesthetically more austere than anything they had ever before known but also far more luxurious. Now the closet for their clothing was the size of their former living room, and their lives were graced by noble forms and a plethora of inventive details. Edouard had realized his goal of making his parents different from the other townspeople; these modest-living, hardworking people had not been able to turn him down when he had proposed it. The problem is that, from the moment they started to live there, they knew they could not afford to stay for long.

  X

  1

  When war broke out in August 1914, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was exempted from military duty in the Swiss army because of his bad eyesight. He had worn thick glasses and suffered from vision difficulties at least since 1904, when the local oculist had requested that l’Ecole d’Art excuse him from engraving. Within a few years, he almost completely lost sight in one eye. He credited that problem alternately to a gradual deterioration accelerated by an intense period of painting at night in 1917 and 1918 or to an accident with a sharp pencil point. All that is certain is that Le Corbusier had monocular vision and was known to argue with optometrists that his eyeglasses, frame included, should be half price.

  Albert, too, was exempted from the army. In his case the reason was a slight heart condition, genuine enough but exacerbated by hypochondria.

  Years later, Le Corbusier claimed publicly that he had done his military service by directing the construction of roads. Considering French soldiers “a marvel, nothing could be finer, more robust,” he implied that he had been among their ranks, but it was a fantasy.1

  THE CRUEL REALITY of war did, however, lead him to develop a brilliant concept of housing for the victims of bombs.

  In September 1914, Jeanneret received news of the partial destruction of the cathedral at Reims. He wrote Ritter, “I’m profoundly disturbed by the spectacle of these fallen stones. Reims destroyed. All I had to do was to consult images of this unique, ineffable vessel of glory in the fantastic structure of its stones in order to feel a decisive hatred, somewhat equivalent to the sadness you must be feeling. Oh, I promise you my architect’s soul is suffering.” That catastrophic damage to a masterpiece horrified him: “these stones arched over a tabernacle and the eloquent relics within—now hurled to the ground by a pig named Wilhelm or Kronprinz.” He called it “a cruel nightmare. Everything crumbles before these criminals, and so many men will die who were beacons in the darkness.”2

  The bombing of Reims made Jeanneret wish he could “take a pickaxe, and if possible prowl around the cathedral, piously gathering up the ruins,” as he said to Ritter. He was plagued by his own inability to take action: “This is a terrible screed I’m sending you, harsh and fidgety, without the slightest note of calm. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of that. Despite all my efforts, I’m unable to control myself; I feel a constant, morbid compulsion to talk instead of shutting up. And at the same time, an imperative sense that I owe it to myself to do so.”3

  As was often the case, when his world was falling apart, Jeanneret came to life. The citizenry of La Chaux-de-Fonds, against L’Eplattenier’s new section for having violated the traditional approach to art education, forced its dissolution. Plans for a building by Jeanneret to house that innovative institution would never see the light of day. His parents were becoming upset over problems with their house. And now Flanders had erupted in a military conflagration that threatened the fiber of everyday life. This was when the future Le Corbusier’s first major innovation, the Dom-ino system, rose from the ashes.

  2

  Dom-ino was a form of housing conceived for the victims of war. Based on standard elements that could be combined quickly at low cost, it could exist anywhere.

  The plight of people ravaged by the forces of destruction and suddenly left homeless offered Jeanneret the fresh start he craved, and he came up with a snappy, elegant idea that was totally original. The Dom-ino system is a structure of three parallel slabs, stacked at intervals like toasts in a club sandwich. The uppermost two slabs are supported by lithe columns of reinforced concrete; inside, the levels are joined by concrete stairs. These straightforward units have an airy, ethereal appearance. With their tensile lightness, they use the latest technology in materials and engineering. Their aesthetics are fresh and contemporary; every form is simplified and pure, virtually a Platonic ideal of its type.

  The flat-roofed structures could theoretically be joined in infinite combinations; the columns were within the space and not in the walls.4 Jeanneret planned entire Dom-ino complexes to replace areas that had been destroyed by the war. This early idea of mass production—dedicated to the well-being of all inhabitants, respectful of human scale—was to have echoes in the city planning with which he altered the face of civilization.

  JEANNERET’S FRIEND Max du Bois worked with him on Dom-ino. Du Bois, from Le Locle, near La Chaux-de-Fonds, had known him since he was a toddler and was a key figure in the younger man’s rise to success. An engineer in Paris, Du Bois attended to the technical details and development of Dom-ino, while Jeanneret masterminded its design; Du Bois also applied for its patent. Then Jeanneret developed grandiose ideas that the Dom-ino patent might be worth a lot of money and became suspicious that Du Bois would put everything in his own name. In fact, Du Bois, who had done the work mainly out of friendship, did not even have his name on the patent when it was received, but Jeanneret had by then damaged the friendship by accusing his helpful, more established colleague of selfish motives and insisting that no part of the authorship of Dom-ino be attributed to him. Dom-ino is one of many designs today associated with the name of Le Corbusier where credit should be shared; Du Bois was only the first of many people to feel that Le Corbusier erased his significance from history.

  3

  Jeanneret loathed what he considered the Swiss obsession with money: “Liveliness, originality, even wit are not Helvetian qualities to anything like the same degree as seriousness, conscientiousness, strength, clarity, and initiative—the sense of practice and of exploitation—altogether remarkable.”5 He considered himself as culpable as his fellow countrymen in having viewed war for its potential financial gain by joining the speculators who, as early as 1914, were imagining how they would heap profits during the inevitable period of reconstruction. He railed against this “civic consciousness built on the ruin of others. I yield to such consciousness. We spend hours in the speculators’ offices, and we talk figures and realities.”6

  Following the demise of the new division, the local officials who, exceptionally, admired his work, tried to commission different projects, but he was too angry toward his former foes as well as toward himself to accept the offers. On November 28, 1914, he wrote Ritter, “My history of being-in-opposition has turned against me and disgusts me now. I have had valiant defenders and, the conspiracy having failed, I triumph, but with such a feeling of bitterness that I’ll probably decide to send in my resignation.”7

  In Jeanneret’s mind, everything became associated with the relationship to one’s parents and home territory. He wrote: “A touching story: our little cat, the son of the one you saw, was given a month ago to some poor people on the west side of town who had asked for him; and after dinner today he turned up here, apparently guided by instinct, amazingly enough. He’s taken up residence in his mother’s bedroom, napping beside her. The minute his mother shows any sign of attention is followed by a session of tentative licking: the prodigal wants to nurse, and so the old woman’s bourgeois peace is troubled; whereupon quarrels, unpleasantness, abandonment. Appearing so miraculously from so far away, the sad little cat recognizes the premises, jumps into h
is old basket (in which he was born), feels reassured, starts to play. He is terribly skinny, his fur matted; the tiny creature is quite melancholy, though at the age of wild frolics…. The old woman was annoyed and upset, and the little cat is gone again. Fascinating story! It moves me nonetheless, this cat business!”8

  Not only did Le Corbusier always respond deeply to cats, dogs, birds, and donkeys—to their honesty and chicanery as much as their innocence—but he identified with these creatures of instinct, often wounded, always pure of heart. The affectionate, needy kitten, morose just at the stage of life when he should have been playing carefree, spurned by his own mother but desperate for her love, was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s image of himself.

  4

  In June, Jeanneret handwrote and sent Ritter a three-page text called “First Step in a Residence.” For this evocation of a salubrious dwelling, he delved into memories from Ema to Balkan villages to Athos. The goal—which was to permeate all of Le Corbusier’s domestic architecture—was to sanctify the myriad acts of everyday existence. His idea derived from “the nostalgic architecture of the red rocks of Dalmatia; a distorted antiquity whose every theme is atrophied, accumulating symbolic motifs to excess. And this becomes an evocation, chalk-white and terra-cotta. Roman, Etruscan, Byzantine. Everything strong, rich in values suggested by great heights, and the violence of the volumes. A vestibule whose door opens onto a courtyard. Further suggestions of enormous volumes. The peristyle was of square columns, bristling out of the earth.” There would be relief sculptures “suggesting good meals and high life. A tiled structure drowned in a big cement pool…. The ceiling simulates low, white beams separated by black intervals, and over each of the narrow doorways, an exaggeratedly prominent pediment, white with a black tympanum—which will be the leitmotif in the courtyard, though made of red terra-cotta in a whitewashed wall. This is what gives strength, freshness, height, and generous lodgings for people who love action and dreams.”9