Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  There seemed a real chance that the commission might be completed and paid for. He was ebullient. The little apartment on the rue Jacob began to feel like paradise. The man who was soon to streamline interiors to bare white walls and stovepipe railings had covered his bedroom with a black wallpaper decorated with bowls of fruit that went well with the Louis XV wood carving in the alcove, where an enormous divan nearly filled the entire space. Rugs of black, white, and red stripes were underfoot; no bare floor whatsoever was visible. An abundance of cushions and pillows offered many possibilities for comfortable seating. Once wartime restrictions on fuel were lifted and Jeanneret was able to maintain the gas heat at his ideal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius, this overstuffed, small apartment was everything he wanted: “It’s a perfectly appointed living room, suggestive of the most complete intimacy. Surrounded by the absolute calm of this residence, all I need do is wait for Sleeping Beauty to awake.” As of yet, the mythic female was only a fantasy.

  As 1917 drew to a close, he learned that the slaughterhouse proposal was going ahead. Just before New Year’s, Jeanneret experienced his first charrette, the nonstop, round-the-clock campaign in which architects complete building plans. He was ecstatic.

  The making of the slaughterhouse was a “new baptism”: a purifying rebirth that was his own renewal. “The further the project advances, everything grows clearer, more orderly, better organized. Backup draftsmen arrive, my drawing workroom, so lamentably empty, is filling up: until midnight Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, just before Christmas, 44 hours without stopping, eating on a drawing board, the excitement, total reliance on nervous energy.” When he observed “we advance, but we shall not arrive,” it was not a lament; the quest was what thrilled him.3 Throughout his life, the urgent sense of necessity infused Le Corbusier with a happiness rarely matched by the end results.

  He was much too excited to react to the gore of the project with anything but amusement: “From ‘Industrial Cold’ this Christmas morning came the nicest secretary, diminutively blond and neat, out of a nice warm bed. And to M’selle Yvonne I dictate memoranda on dung heaps, liquid manure, slaughtering, emptying cow bellies, guts, etc. A thousand pardons!”4

  “Working myself to death,” he wrote without irony. The more the martyr suffered, the more he knew who he was. At three in the morning, when the draftsmen had all left the office, he remained. This was the moment to take the project to a new stage and to draw the ensemble of factories as a vision without precedent. At last he was an inventor, not just someone who rehashed old ideas of what buildings should be. In his hands, radically new forms were conceived: “Energy and flexibility are needed. I’m stiff with physical exhaustion.”5

  When Jeanneret finally put down his pencils that December evening and left his office at 29 bis rue d’Astorg, he found himself in a swirling snowstorm. Walking along the wide boulevards of the Right Bank, he lost his way. Then he circled the Madeleine, the enormous nineteenth-century structure built in antique style as a temple to the glory of Napoleon’s army, and the next thing he knew, as if he had no control over his own footsteps, he was back in his office. Aided by the eight people who had just arrived to start a new day, he finished the project. He was nearly as thrilled by his exhaustion as by his achievement: “The big plans, impeccably drawn in ink, describe the really good arrangement of this project, its boldness, its grandeur, its harmonious modernism. It fills me with joy. But how weak my legs are!” The feeling of having given his all was his intoxicant. When those neat drawings were, at last, ready to go, Jeanneret declared, “One is stupefied, like a woman who has just given birth.”6

  He believed that if the slaughterhouse project succeeded, it would be the beginning of his changing the world: “I’m getting excited just writing this. I see the happy days shining anew, and I wrest myself from the spleen of those days of terrible cold. The flowers freeze with the water in my vases. The river at Alfortville is magnificent, lashed by snow, a mordant green, cruel to the citizens, cruel to my plans. Everything has a color exceeding the beauty of what has ever been seen on this river, but to stop now would be death.”7

  XIV

  1

  The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

  —GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  Auguste Perret liked to introduce to one another members of the next generation who were on the right path. He had as a neighbor a promising young artist named Amédée Ozenfant, whose father owned a construction company that sought out the latest technological advances in building and had consulted Perret about reinforced concrete. He was determined that Ozenfant meet the creatively possessed if notably eccentric Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. “He’s an odd duck,” the elder statesman warned Ozenfant about the recent arrival from La Chaux-de-Fonds, “but he’ll interest you.”1

  Amédée Ozenfant was born the year before Jeanneret. At age twenty-six, he had conceived and built an aluminum car on the chassis of a Hispano-Suiza, with large whitewall tires and a streamlined, elegant body. He also painted and was devoted to ancient art—like Jeanneret, he had formed his artistic sensibility in Italy and at the Louvre—and, having traveled to Russia, was so attracted to Slavic culture that he had married a feisty Russian, Zina Klingberg.

  Portrait of Amédée Ozenfant by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, ca. 1920

  Exempted from the military because of persistent bronchitis and pneumonia, at the start of the war, Ozenfant founded an avant-garde review called L’Elan, which featured André Derain and Pablo Picasso among the painters and Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire among the poets.2 The goal of the publication was to support the French war effort by serving as a propaganda tool for manifestations of the French spirit: the lightness, energy, and charm encapsulated in its title.

  Ozenfant’s father died suddenly in 1917, forcing Amédée to become the supervisor of a large building project for a munitions factory in Toulouse. He camped out in a small hut directly on the building site. In the evenings, burrowed inside this shelter intended for explosives, he wrote about “Purism”—a term he had developed to describe a new artistic approach. The workmen were stunned that this odd young man spent more time than was necessary in the midst of dangerous materials, but just as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret could gaze at flames and see art more than peril, Amédée Ozenfant was focused only on change and progress.3

  2

  In 1916, Auguste Perret had founded and became president of Art et Liberté, a group of pioneering practitioners of all the arts who opposed historicism.4 Ozenfant was a charter member. Perret brought Jeanneret to one of their luncheons so they could meet.5

  They took to each other instantly, and with their friendship Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was exposed to a whole new milieu. In addition to his work at the family business, his publishing, and his painting, Ozenfant was running the Jove couture salon, one of the most prominent dress shops in Paris. Frequented by wealthy courtesans and other stylish women, Jove was owned by the fashion designer Germaine Bongard, sister of the couturier Paul Poiret and said to be Ozenfant’s lover. Ozenfant occasionally organized art exhibitions in the salon; the first show included two paintings by Henri Matisse, for whose daughter Bongard had designed spectacular outfits in which she posed for her father.

  His new friend opened Jeanneret’s eyes as never before to the visual as a source of amusement in life. Ozenfant’s mother wore the sort of fine clothing he helped sell; Marie Jeanneret and Aunt Pauline, on the other hand, would never have imagined donning anything more extravagant than the plain offerings of the ladies’ establishments in La Chaux-de-Fonds, where sensible women paid reasonable prices for what went well with solid shoes. Nor did they approve of anyone who presented herself in an entertaining style: Jeanneret was furthering his education in the art of pleasure.

  More than two decades later, Le Corbusier would ask, “‘Was Jeanneret more valuable to Ozenfant than Ozenfant to Jeanneret?’ It would be
extremely difficult to decide the question.”6 And Ozenfant eventually made it one of his major pursuits to assume credit for having originated and invented almost everything they ever did together. But for a few seminal years, the two young modernists were devoted partners, each bolstered by having a colleague.

  INITIALLY, OZENFANT SERVED the vital function of being Jeanneret’s latest vehicle for self-improvement. He wrote his new companion, “In my confusion…it seems that an abyss separates us as to age. I feel on the threshold of my studies, while you are carrying out your plans,…I am a bricklayer, working without any plans, in the trench…. You are nevertheless, of those I know, he who seems to me most clearly to be carrying out what is stirring within me.”7

  Ozenfant’s idea of Purism became his and Jeanneret’s mutual rallying cry. It emphasized visual reduction, clear lines, and concentrated forms. Jeanneret had already been attracted to these values inside barns on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds. Most designers, however, still decorated every possible surface; the Beaux-Arts architectural style blanketed building fronts and room paneling with echoes of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Even Jeanneret’s own early architecture was laden with ornament; Purism presented an alternative.

  Ozenfant proposed “cleansing the plastic language of certain parasitical terms, as Mallarmé had done with the verbal language.”8 He wanted to continue the quest to understand and abet the process of perception that had been launched by Ingres, Seurat, and Cézanne. For Jeanneret and Ozenfant, the connection to the ancient past was also an essential component of their modernism. They intended to achieve freedom by emulating the balance and clarity of Classicism.

  3

  Jeanneret challenged all the usual ways of thinking.

  At the end of January 1918, he was on the Pont des Arts, a lovely bridge spanning the Seine between the Left Bank and the Louvre, when a bomb exploded. An air alert a few minutes earlier had sent most people to the Métro or to cellars, where they huddled together and enjoyed the protection of being underground. Jeanneret had opted to be among a smaller group out in the open air, facing the spectacle directly. Standing there brazenly, looking up and down the Seine, the young Swiss took in the bombing as a concert of sounds and a visual panoply. Transfixed by the explosions, he felt no fear and experienced no horror.

  The next day, he wrote Ritter, “Yesterday I watched the bombing from the Pont des Arts. I couldn’t make anything out of it. There were a good fifty of us on the bridge listening to the roar of the cannons, the enormous explosions close by, watching the glow of fires. Bombs were exploding a hundred meters from us; we didn’t realize they were bombs.”9 He was as interested in this lack of cognition as in the horrific event itself.

  It was the beginning of the heaviest action of the war in Paris. Yet, two weeks later, Jeanneret tried to be as circumspect as possible to his parents: “The spectacle was fascinating, the sound of it overwhelming…. But in the roar of the cannons and the violent explosion of the bombs, I couldn’t tell what was happening, and it was only next day that I realized that this time the Goths had reached Paris and were actually spitting their bullets. Now the moon is back; the Boches will return with it. Right this moment, during this freezing night, you can hear the hum of pursuit planes: the moral security offered to the Parisians.”10 The only thing that terrified Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was the prospect of missing the excitement.

  HAVING BEEN CALM during the bombing, within a month of that violent disruption Jeanneret believed, just as he had a few months previously when he had his grippe, that he was dying. He wrote Ritter, “And tonight, all of a sudden, alone in my office, I had the strangest feeling: an insuperable pang. I was distinctly convinced that I would die tonight. Now my mind is utterly calm. I want to write that if I were to die tonight, I protest against the life that tempts me so and that is so low and cynical.”11 Again, the verb he used for the process of dying was “claquer”—abrupt engineer’s lingo, with the sound of a machine.

  Contemplating his own death, he mapped out a plan: “You must forge your own weapons for the life you want to have. You must make yourself a superior being, to see only what is high. And detach yourself, turn away from everything not involved in the realization of something superior. It is, after all, only the abstract which will survive and which is worth the effort.”12

  4

  Jeanneret had made the short list of eight finalists for the slaughterhouse project, and he remained after the group was whittled to two. At the end of January, a commission presided over by a government minister did the final review: “The Fixari project is the board’s favorite—unrealizable! It costs twice as much as ours. Mine is a personal creation; it is alive—an organism.”13 The injustice stung, and the certainty and excitement he had felt at Christmastime collapsed.

  With German aircraft continually buzzing Paris, by mid-February he was confined to the very center of the city and could no longer wander even as far afield as Montmartre or Montparnasse. The bombing intensified; by mid-March, he did not dare to go to sleep at night in his apartment. While Woodrow Wilson was formulating fourteen points for a peace settlement that might end the war, there were so many Luftwaffe attacks that Jeanneret often stayed in the freezing cold cellars. “Paris is unrecognizable: impenetrable darkness: no way of knowing where you are, of finding your way. And during the bombing, it’s absolute night without a single light anywhere,” he wrote.14

  Then an art collector he knew, Barthélémy Rey, was killed by the Germans directly in front of the Ministry of War, at the moment of presenting himself to enlist. The event was a turning point in Jeanneret’s life. He realized he had to summon incredible toughness and self-mastery just to endure. He wrote his parents, “So now we have bombs all the time, which means that the women are hysterical. How they go on! Myself, I pay no mind. Though I’ve decided to zigzag nightly to where the cellars are, after the events of these last days, which were more demonstrative than others. I repeat: I’m quite unconscious of the danger in every respect—in business as well; I’d make a good campaigner.”15

  Max Du Bois, on the other hand, was crumbling. Jeanneret could not stand it. “Du Bois’s nerves are very bad. It’s impossible to be around him; he’s setting up a kind of satrapy, a despotism, a czarism. I feel a complete indifference for so much fuss, given the facts. A bomb will have to come and find me, I’m not looking for it. At times like this, when I’m calmly puffing on a dreadful cigarette butt as I calligraph this epistle (for I do calligraph), I know several little women who are completely overwhelmed, crouching on a corner of the couch, a candle nearby, blankets, shawls, provisions, letters from their lovers, everything ready for the descent into the realm of the rats…. Now in my neighborhood, my slimy rue Jacob, as Colette Willy[later known as the writer Colette] calls it, the bathrobes of the young heiresses are more ordinary than ermine, so that when you have to spend an eternal 4 hours in some cellar corridor waiting—what else is there to do but flirt, since you can’t smoke or drink?”16

  Barthélémy Rey’s death, unlike Du Bois’s weakness, was noble: a heroic act like his friend Bippert’s fatal flight. Even though Rey was a rich dilettante with impulsive taste, morally he was a superior being, for he had given up his life of ease, closed the doors of his bank, and torn himself from his wife to present himself at the ministry that fatal day. “But this time, our friend Barthélémy Rey, the father of our friend Marcel, was killed, his chest ripped open by an explosion. That chest which a minister has come to close by pinning on it the Cross of the Legion of Honor.” Charles-Edouard Jeanneret focused on Rey’s courageous control of his own destiny. “He had real panache. His life had no purpose. He died splendidly, illustriously. That’s something in a man’s life.”17

  Again he addressed the issue of his own mortality: “Death doesn’t scare me, mine or other people’s. It’s so natural…I believe I won’t experience any of those distresses which are so many weaknesses: a tree against its stake, a stake against its tree…. Separate them;
is there suffering? No, there’s a nuisance. Look: we’re separated. And our thoughts? No. Even when space stretches to infinity, thought remains.”18

  Fear or weakness was worse than the end of life: “There’s only one painful and dangerous sentiment, dangerous because it’s exclusive of will: panic! The collective effect is huge. Yet up till now, I’ve escaped it, and this is why: my spirit of contradiction.”19 By always challenging the status quo, he avoided the nightmarish impotence that destroyed the lives of people who complied. His brave contentiousness defined him.

  5

  Jeanneret loved telling his parents about his wonderful new friendship: “Ozenfant is a boy endowed with a wealth of remarkable gifts without at all belonging to that genial hermaphrodite race that is to be encountered among musicians and that is utterly exasperating. Ozenfant is a heroic worker. And he navigates the business labyrinth even as he accomplishes his own work. He writes well; he paints very well. And he’s all for freedom of the seas! We often take dinner together in a little dive down the street and spend the rest of the evening in my office.”20

  The routine was convenient, since Ozenfant’s flat was near Jeanneret’s office. On one Sunday evening in mid-March, however, Jeanneret served the friend whom he described as having a “sharp Mohican’s face” a dinner on the other side of the Seine, in his own apartment on the rue Jacob.21 For someone brought up on the heavy fare of landlocked La Chaux-de-Fonds and never taught to cook, the repast was remarkable—especially during wartime. He started with Portuguese oysters accompanied by a white Graves. Then came hearty dried sausage. The main course was pork chops with poached eggs on top and buttered baby sweet peas on the side. By then, the two comrades were drinking a St. Emilion, although Jeanneret had planned a red Burgundy. The cheese course was brie with an apple marmalade. Then came dates and figs. “Coffee without sugar,” “old Calvados,” and “Bad Cigars” followed. He illustrated a menu in the style of Raoul Dufy and said that everything, especially the beverages, was to be served “in abundance.”