Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Yet for all his ardor, he remained more the observer than a participant. He wrote to Ritter, “There’s a lot of Woman around, as ever. How stupid all these men seem, who just because they’re sitting around a piece of meat think they’re becoming kindred spirits! But of course it’s for the sake of the nozzle this crowd gathers, each man wild to satisfy his brute need, his vital egoism. How stupid a man is in the last analysis! Yet what a piece of work is man.”10

  In a diary entry a few weeks later, he linked a town center he loved with its beautiful women. “Pisa is surely one of the towns I love most. Life there seemed to flow slowly enough to let me enjoy the centuries as they pass. And Orcagna drew unforgettable women there.”11 From there he jumped to comments on Paul Poiret’s coiffures for music halls. Almost as much as he liked the Pisa cathedral, Jeanneret was fascinated by the ostrich feathers arranged like a peacock tail on Gaby Deslys’s head, which nearly doubled the height of her body. For months, he painted these women. But that was the extent of it: “What I need is to caress someone: my life is murderous,” Jeanneret reported in the diary he eventually sent to Ritter.12

  Jeanneret was vaguer to his parents about the simultaneous attraction and repulsion he felt to prostitutes, but he wrote them as well about his struggles: “Yet this expression which I understand but which I fail to estimate properly, alas, for lack of having enjoyed that bittersweet fruit: the wild distress when there is passion in carnality, the thirst of one’s entire being, the indispensable presence, copenetration, reabsorption of every molecule.”13 The allure of “that bittersweet fruit” haunted him.

  THE ACT OF LOVE and the making of buildings were inextricably linked in Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s mind. Going to brothels and realizing architecture required similar determination; the challenge was to get from the fantasy stage to efficacy. In his diary to Ritter, Jeanneret wrote, “I’m an architect, a builder. I like my drawing tables on their trestles, my telephone, my typewriter. I like the hiss of automobile tires and the clamor of the street. I’m not a castrato. I’ll pay my visits to that seething Montmartre sloping up toward Saint-Augustin. I won’t withdraw from life, I’ll do what everyone else does. And I’ll rent a big room, a workroom in which my furniture will shrink to nothing, and then the big walls will impose a grand design on me, in which my chaos will espouse the kinds of violence oriented toward a geometry as deliberately inscribed as the wheels and pulleys of a machine, and with the same lucidity, the same fantasy, the same concision.”14

  Determined as he was to show his virility—to go to “that seething Montmartre” meant frequenting brothels—he couldn’t bring it off: “I complain: this is ridiculous. I had gone to the restaurant to pick up a girl. There are no girls left. My celibacy weighs on me.” On the Easter Monday when he recorded this, he was drinking cheap Chianti: “My life flows past, stupid, monotonous, tense, alone, unfortunately…. Now I’m at home drinking some kind of nasty alcoholic brew; I’ve turned on all my lamps. It’s cheerful here, this nest of mine—the former residence of a maid of Adrienne Lecouvreur. I’m alone, except for the mice doing their minuet on my ceiling.”

  He envied an acquaintance who had “a mistress who is a real woman; he’s beyond me, I’m isolated, wounded, I suffer. I see the irony, the grotesquerie of life; I’d like to experience its beauty, its energy, along with this springtime, this joy, this living in spite of everything, this song of the sparrows, these skies of hope. My mind abandons itself to melancholy and assigned projects. How I long for the release of a natural, beneficent flowering.”

  Jeanneret prized sexual potency as a mark of greatness. “To have or not to have…an erection. He who gets hard and stays with it is a man capable of strength, still a beast deserving to live in the sun.” Swiss men, he claimed, were eunuchs, but now he had left their neutered land behind: “I’m telling you this because it’s true. Since I get my erections normally, I believe in life, desire it, and this spring I even have the impression that the desired act is fulfilled and that I’m entering the CITY. I’m through with what’s back there…. I was a child of La Chaux-de-Fonds, brought up far from life and in fear (in the fear of God, they have effrontery to say)…. I’m entering the age of realization…. Now I’m a man nearly six feet tall named Jeanneret who’s an architect, who has no diploma, who’s capable of solving a problem and achieving his goal.”15

  It was not to be as easy as he hoped.

  4

  At the end of April 1917, Jeanneret sent a postcard to Ritter from Chartres. It was of a single thirteenth-century figure from the North Portal, a solemn woman, looking downward, carved with great dignity, who represented “la Vie Contemplative.”16

  On this card showing another tormented observer frozen into inaction, Jeanneret wrote, “Yes. Alas, one must look ahead and fulfill one’s destiny. This cathedral is as much the house of the Devil as of God. The tragic heroism of these stones deserves a portico of hell; here, in a titanic effort, man expresses his own damnation. No one could imagine Chartres from looking at other cathedrals: the foundations are like the successive movements of a symphony and of fatally incomplete thunders: there is moonlight in these stones, and an unheard uproar.”17

  World events were making his incertitude worse. In February, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the monarchy in Russia. On April 6, the United States had entered the war in Europe. No place seemed stable, even if the epidemic of mutiny in France had been ended when Henri Pétain, the new commander in chief and future Maréchal, and Georges Clemenceau, the new premier, restored order.

  Yet three days after sending that postcard from Chartres, Jeanneret was so enthusiastic about the richness of human history and the bounty of nature that he was displaying symptoms of what today is called “rapid cycling.” He wrote Ritter and Czadra a single, rambling, manic sentence:

  Dear friends. It’s the fault of too many buds bursting into bloom outside the open windows, of too many branches shaken by a warm wind—old branches, as old as Maurice de Saxe, above the flowerbeds entirely covered with ivy; of too many irresistible appeals from the old bridges of Androuet du Cerceau, with their cornices of flags and banners, their opulence of royal pomp; of too many quais between which flows a river as joyous as silk—quais where once again the great trees spread their limbs wide in a touching blue sky; of that overpowering murmur I hear from my desk, coming from far away—I hear it coming from the other side of my wall, coming from distant walls to strange crenellations against a sky that is pink at this time of day—that murmur in which I can make out an occasional raucous call of the bargemen on the river, under the bridges; of too many sweet, sad impressions which drown me quite “dolorously” because it is really too beautiful and because a man cannot be happy with a tangible and present happiness, and because there pass through the air shudders of unknown and troubling future things, inevitably sad since I feel I cannot measure my happiness, that I lack an inner vitality strong enough to silence those far-off enthusiastic branches: all too often the calm of my walls yields to the raucous call of the passing Unknown, and as I follow the flood of a destiny to which I attribute so many surprises, I proceed beyond my crenellations one after the next, toward the boundaries of nations, and toward places where there are people I think of and whom I can beguile with such spleens as these. That is why I have waited so long to write.

  Man is very much alone.18

  The frenzy of enthusiasm required an outlet if he was to overcome that solitude. He continued: “I feel that I cannot discern my happiness, that I lack a soul generous enough to deck my heart with flags.” Sooner than he imagined, however, he was to channel his ecstasy into architecture.

  5

  On the evening of May 17, 1917, Jeanneret went to a performance of the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet that, in retrospect, stood out as a milestone of modern cultural history. When the dancers from Moscow, impeccably trained in the imperial tradition, soared above the Parisian stage to the strains of music as advanced as the latest progress in ai
r travel, the possibilities of human motion took a new dimension.

  That night, an art form that had been the precinct of the elite embraced mass culture. This revolution, a triumph of modernism, thrilled the onlooker from La Chaux-de-Fonds. That it was loudly booed and brought on the rage and opprobrium of the sleepy, reactionary bourgeoisie enhanced rather than diminished his pleasure.

  The ballet, called Parade, reflected a radical preference for settings like fairgrounds and the circus tent. It moved as far afield from the refinement of the Bolshoi and its ballerinas enacting fairy tales in tutus as Jeanneret had when he shifted his sights from the splendors of Versailles to humble dwellings in Balkan villages. The new ballet had been the idea of Jean Cocteau. In 1915, Cocteau and the composer Erik Satie created Parade for the dynamic Russian choreographer Sergey Diaghilev. Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes.

  Parade threw off the shackles of elegance and embraced the tawdry atmosphere of the music hall. Three characters, ten feet tall, became moving skyscrapers; one turned into a tree alongside a boulevard while another was a horse. Two acrobats flew into the air, and a Chinese conjuror removed an egg from his pigtail, ate it, and then discovered it on the toe of his shoe. An American girl rode a bicycle, danced a ragtime, imitated Charlie Chaplin, snapped photos, boxed, and went after an imaginary thief with a revolver.

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was fired up. But most of the audience was incensed. When the performance ended, several threatened the producer physically. Many shouted “Filthy Boches”—a swipe at Germans uttered often during the war. As tempers flared, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire took the stage. Recently wounded in battle, he had a bandage wrapped around his forehead. He was dressed in his military uniform and wore his Croix de Guerre. The irate crowd had no choice but to accord him the respect warranted by a hero and calmed down. Apollinaire urged them to be more tolerant.

  For the program that evening, this proponent of modernism had written an essay entitled “Parade ou l’esprit nouveau.” Apollinaire animatedly defined that “esprit nouveau” as the means by which art was successfully combined with the most recent progress made by science and industry. In its brazen simplicity, “l’esprit nouveau” became Jeanneret’s gospel. He enthusiastically scribbled notes in the program and sketched some of the sets. The élan of Parade and the boldness of Apollinaire’s text signified the future.

  6

  At the beginning of July, Jeanneret told Ritter, in scintillating detail, “the epilogue to ‘the night at Aristide Maillol’s’: Today Aristide Maillol told me: ‘I kicked Gastonibus out, because the worst of it, after living four years in my house, was that Gastonibus, instead of vanishing somewhere into the crowds of Paris, came to rest in my own niece’s house, a house that belongs to me.” Jeanneret reiterated the horror of the lovers using Maillol’s own bed, instructing, “Reread for memory’s sake in what bed this all took place that night, already two years ago! Keep the gossip between ourselves, Gastonibus being the present and future glory of the chamberpot city under the mountains.”19

  The place like a toilet was La Chaux-de-Fonds, and Gastonibus Beguinus was merely the first new persona Charles-Edouard Jeanneret would assume in order to have the virility he craved.

  7

  In May, Jeanneret founded the Société d’Entreprises Industrielles et d’Etudes, leasing a new office at 29 bis rue d’Astorg—a location near the Madeleine that put him at the center of bustling, commercial Paris. In his free time, he dedicated himself to watercolors (see color plate 2).

  Beyond that, on October 16, ten days after his thirtieth birthday, he opened an enterprise to manufacture reinforced-concrete bricks. Max Du Bois had provided the financial backing for him to rent space in the St. Lumière power station in Alfortville, on the Seine on the outskirts of Paris. The blocks were made of by-products from the station and could easily be shipped from the location on the river. Jeanneret designed himself a coat of arms bearing the statement “The world is without pity,” but he was ebullient as he launched the commercial venture with which he planned to earn his fortune while also practicing architecture and painting.

  Jeanneret entered one of his periods of ecstasy. Moneymaking and the betterment of the world could go hand in hand. With his start as a businessman, he resumed the diary he sent to Ritter: “Alfortville is begun! We’re going to make bricks. The factory, the site actually, is attractive, the machines powerful, the situation magnificent. Enormous gasometers, the four overwhelming Est-Lumière chimneys right next to our property.” The fast pulse of industry was pure poetry: “Coming home at nightfall, I saw the water shimmering and the great factories smoking, their luminous bays reflected in the river.”20

  Still, Jeanneret deprecated the old-fashioned style and suburban ambience of the Napoleon the First building where his business was housed. And he disdained himself for his new alliance with the lowest of all human forms: the bourgeoisie: “I breathed deeply over my property: the bureaucrat, the trustee, the businessman, the eunuch architect will vanish someday—eventually! I’ll make fine engravings of my factory, and I’ll be able to speak of ‘my stocks’ and of ‘my sales’ like any wine merchant.”21

  His mental swings were rapid and extreme. Suddenly, the self-loathing entrepreneur, after thinking of great architecture rather than business, was riding high again: “Tonight I leafed through my files from the Bibliothèque Nationale (more than five hundred sketches of cities). The whole world in extracts from old engravings. What flavor! Amplitude and imagination above all; overflowing. I am jubilant. And delicious inscriptions, ‘sweet smelling roses’ of Jacques Callot. And the big cartouches of the Roman engravers. Those letters! If William Ritter were here, he’d rejoice for days. And I’d be hearing him. Rome inundates me, hypnotizes me. Good lord, what laughter! The scale and the poetry. And their consuls, and their old men. L’Eplattenier dared tell us they were corrupt; the wretch!”22

  Then, as if a narcotic had worn off, he plummeted again. Only hours after committing his jubilance to paper, he lost confidence: “Sick all day. Solitude, entirely impregnated with Michelangelo. Still Rome! Tragic life, forced labor, implacable destiny. Tenderness, affection, the heart of that good, dolorous man. Fog outside. Silence here. My painting is still ten times less than what I wanted. I still don’t know how to set down a flat tone, nor how to shade a cube without 10 reflections, which do away with strength.”23

  8

  This time, Jeanneret remained glum until he immersed himself in architecture with such fervor that nothing could burst the bubble. When All Saints’ Day came six days later, he made his way through the rain to attend a morose mass at Notre-Dame and then chose to copy Rogier van der Weyden’s Déposition. It was a perfect recipe for gloom.

  The copy was his fifth oil painting. Trying to master the medium, he transformed the Flemish master’s gripping scene of death and mourning, its dramatic gestures and anguished faces, into a freer rendition with his own modern coloring. The painting then fed a fantasy of his own death.

  Jeanneret’s cold had evolved into a dreadful grippe—the sort of flu and sinus symptoms that would plague him regularly throughout his life. In the middle of the night after All Saints’ Day, he was hardly able to breathe. The problem intensified; suffering from the barklike gasping of croup, he had the agonizing sensation that he was suffocating.

  Semiconscious, he thought he was having a nightmare but then realized that the torture was real. At 3:00 a.m., he became completely miserable in “absolute silence. Abandonment, oblivion of mankind.” For the third time in as many days—first when the illness initially hit him, and again the following day—he thought his life was over: “I had the feeling I was giving up the ghost, and I resigned myself to it with complete simplicity.”24

  Then, he did one of his typical about-faces. “But the hell with dying; since this is hardly the time for it, let’s try something better.”25 Again he was resolved to reconfigure the settings of everyday human existence.

  XII
I

  The big break occurred when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was asked, at last, to submit a design for an architectural project of substantial scale. It was to be in Challuy—near Nevers, in the center of France. “Right now I’m studying a big slaughterhouse,” he wrote. “I could never have guessed how magnificent this problem is—and leads to true architecture. An architecture from America and Chicago, and its canned goods are letting me create a château on the Loire.”1 Not only would he bring the boldness and candor of American industrial architecture to the French countryside and build a monument to rival Blois and Chambord, but his factory for killing animals would be an unprecedented declaration of truth.

  After the initial charge, he descended into worrying: “Dubious and less than likely attribution, this work leaves me reticent and melancholy. Ah, life is hard, and a torment for those who are young and believe in ideals!”2 Nonetheless, in November and December, he plunged in. First, he ruminated about the project’s requirements. Then—and this is how inspirations always hit Le Corbusier—the design idea came to him in a flash. On the train to Nevers to study the site, he hastily sketched his concept while sitting in the restaurant car.

  It adhered to the tenets of Taylorism, the theory of assembly-line efficiency that called for increased productivity through standardized tools, more attention to workers’ abilities and training, and improved working conditions. These ideas had been put forth in the American Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, recently translated into French. Taylorism was then sweeping the industrialized world: it put in place conveyor belts to facilitate man-made production and organize factories for maximum efficiency. Jeanneret envisioned three separate buildings—housing animal stalls, refrigeration units, and the actual slaughterhouse—linked by bridges and Taylor’s mechanical bands.