Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Letter to his parents, with the menu of his banquet for Ozenfant prepared during World War I

  Jeanneret was determined that his parents get the point that living with panache had the power to ward off sadness and obliterate evil: “The lecture for today: Harmony Above All. Some Greek terra-cottas on the table, and then the bottles, the fruit in wicker baskets, the sugar in Daum cups. The wine was good, the anemones superabundant, as were the pinks. A suitable lighting from candles in the polished bronze of a Dutch candlestick. The table offered a rich still life, attractive and unstudied. Everyone talked at once, a thousand questions were broached without sterile controversies but in a restful unison. The cigars were splendid, the weather fine. It makes you feel good. You forget the war and the bourgeois (which is the same thing). Proportion. That’s it, the Whole of life, the goal, the truth.”22

  IT WAS TO BE a long time before Jeanneret had as romantic an evening with a woman; after the Sunday-night dinner with Ozenfant, he was as high as someone in love. For a brief but shining moment, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was less alone than he had ever been.

  6

  In little time, as Le Corbusier, he would flaunt self-assuredness and appear confident to the core. But less than a week after his feast with Ozenfant, his faith was sullied by doubts. He wrote Ritter, “I’m living in a torment, a little tempest in my teapot: the heaviest cares, yet fine reasons to be confident, the crest of a wave, the gulf between two waves, enough to disjoint a man…. I’m a man flung into the whirlwind of affairs carrying in outstretched arms over his head, above the filth, his dream.”23

  The wailing air-raid sirens and his self-disgust at not being part of the war effort plagued him. “The moon is sparkling over Paris, and the sky is full of buzzing planes. The Boches have come with their Gothas. We’ve gone down into the cellars,” he wrote. There he noticed “a pretty girl of about twenty with a touching expression (many girls touch me, but I don’t touch them)…. Myself, I’m all for the conquest of money and fucking off afterward. I find money tragic, not just stupid. Luckily my instincts are the non-sensation of the value of money…. Some people have confidence. Not me—I’ve spent everything; will I come out on top? I think so, for I’m following my lucky star.”24

  The lucky star was art; at least he was now doing what he loved: “And art, ideas, but ten times more than at La Chaux. How I love them, as I practice them. I draw, I paint between eleven and midnight.” Yet he was troubled by his own emotional isolation: “I have moments of sunshine when I see the hour of my rehabilitation shining before me. The bastards will hear my fanfare! Yes, I’ve known that great bitterness…. But how sad I am that my heart’s rind still remains hard and intact…. Am I doomed to a melancholy solitude?”25

  7

  The tortured Calvinist dreamed of going to a whorehouse, “to bury myself effusively in the damp warmth of an armpit.” He went, but found the prostitute “Alas, indifferent!” The bought sex, he told Ritter, was “a nostalgic abandon of one’s energies, having struggled all day long and all week long, between the hands and the arms encircling you, which will close your eyes in order to make appear certain joys, alas quite false, alas contested in advance, alas inaccessible or sad, sad then.” He imagined something nobler. “I dream of Max Elskamp, with his nostalgic ‘Maisons de Mauvaise Vie’ where he never set foot…. How indifferent I am to all this. I’d like to be cut down on a splendid page of life, in full ardor, at the top of my bent.”26

  It was heroic to do battle and cowardly not to. He was in hot dispute with his father, who favored Swiss neutrality and declared that in war men become beasts. The younger Jeanneret insisted to his parents that “the man in the trenches is not an animal, he is of the most sublime nobility; and there are millions of them just like him in every country. The war, quite the contrary, has raised up humanity…the question is to know why and for whom one is fighting, by virtue of what ignoble false idol, false belief, criminal false-ideal.” The son lashed out: “I’ve already told you a hundred times: in your hateful business you had the best remedy: there is still time. You should write the Journal of a Bourgeois during the War.”27

  When, in the middle of the night, Jeanneret heard air-alert sirens and got dressed and escaped, like so many Parisians, into the nearest Métro station, he felt revulsion when it turned out to be a false alarm that had everyone running through the streets. He declared himself a useless observer of the world: watching from a distance, judging, masturbating. He should take action, and so should his father: “Now then, I’d like to know I have a papa who reacts with all his might against the invading depression.”28 His mother, too, was guilty of lapses—mainly by playing away at the piano without taking pen to paper to write to him.

  Edouard also lectured his parents about Ritter and Czadra. He told Georges and Marie that while they had everything, they must not forget these kings in exile, so misfortunate and in need of affection. He verbally wagged his finger at his father and mother by writing, “I really don’t want to believe your silence is indifference.”29

  Unlike the rest of them, the youngest member of the family knew how to conduct his life. “There are two ways of regarding life: FORWARD and BACKWARD. There’s the wisdom that ends in indifference. But there’s the strength that produces passion. And there’s the conscience which produces hate. All three are necessary.” Jeanneret was grandiose and humble in the same breath—and desperate to conquer his own demons sufficiently and become steady. “So then there’s the conflict within oneself from morning to night—but what a turmoil! The years fly past in pursuit of realization. In this torrent it’s good to come up against others, it tempers you. All of which may be empty words; Ritter, that observer buried in his den, would demolish my system in three strokes of a pen; never mind. The turmoil is the fact of an imbalance. The important thing is not to fall.”30

  AT THE END of March, he wrote his brother that the cellars of his building had become a shelter, but he now considered that scurrying down to the basement was like the mindless pursuit of money: something most people did like a swarm of insects. He would never again bow to fear.

  8

  On May 6, Jeanneret got his first substantial order for the brick factory. His spirits soared; his business was sure to succeed.

  Music again moved him to rapture; he attended the first Debussy concert following the composer’s death, making Debussy’s vast accomplishment seem of a piece, with Le Clair de Lune leaving him elated.

  He was also euphoric that the days were getting longer: “How lovable this country is, how loving, how the sob of life gently follows the obtaining of frivolous loves. How this country accounts for itself, how it soothes my mountain man’s heart. How gladly I surrender to the sweet light…. This city is lovely, and life here promises well.”31

  Then, just as he was flying high, a contrary force took hold of him. Determined never to let love weaken his control of his destiny, he would not waste the time and energy required to maintain a serious relationship, yet his solitude was unbearable. Mostly celibate, and still skeptical about his sexual performance, he was crazed by vivid erotic fantasies and his craving for voluptuous women.

  He tried to create and possess his ideal female in his watercolors: “My artistic thoughts rise toward plasticity, a form and a line ever more esoteric. My attempts are shapeless, disappointing…and I paint trash. My women are of a bestial, gross lasciviousness. And I hesitate to touch a naked woman, for her back, her breasts, her mouth are of an adorable substance, are a kind of dream my crude fingers would spoil. My sensual excesses remain almost entirely outside the bed, and I have a more intimate and painful joy in thrusting my tongue into a big, fresh rose.”32

  Art counted more than flesh: “If I yield to the lure of the boulevards where the women are, it’s to find an expression of the ideal mathematics for that dream my brushes are busily seeking to create.” Attracted as he was to those prostitutes, it was his job as a martyr to resist the lure of sex in deference to his higher c
alling. He focused on the dream women of Italian art, not the streetwalkers of Paris: “Sudden encounters: yesterday a word of a conversation about the Medici tombs, and it’s that entire Sunday when Michelangelo and Leonardo obsess me. The women of Titian and Giorgione. Italy forever!”33

  His increased alienation from his parents was exacerbating his feeling of isolation. His mother’s concern with the effects of the power structure in La Chaux-de-Fonds, which he was determined to put behind him, made him write Ritter, “All alone a man is in the world. I’ve just received from Maman a long letter entirely beside the point. First of all, those cannons, those Goths, which no longer exist and which have never bothered me more than a bramble that pricks you as you’re walking through the fields. Then an inconceivable excursus on my pathetic present and my agonizing future!” What upset him the most was his mother’s and father’s failure to grasp the progress he had made: “Enterprising as I am, I’m happy. My whole being is happy. I may suffer in my private heart, sufferings of the bird peeping in the spring in a flowering tree. Ah, poor parents, once again how little you understand your children, how you persist in not seeing what they really are!”34

  9

  Then Paris was bombed some more—and Jeanneret was revived from what he called his “pathetic languor.” The cacophony of sounds and the fluid violent forms mattered far more to him than the destruction they accompanied: “Inevitably, here are these she-camels of sirens. A magic and opulent sound over the city. A new note of the coming symphonies. A roaring which catches like fire over all Paris. Cannons. Trumpets. Nightfall. An admirable clamor that, through so much moonlight, and over such handsome blossoming chestnut trees, is no longer of distress but only music. It fades in the distance. The sound of our Notre-Dame first of all, then that of Saint-Sulpice. Those over all the churches and the town halls, all the sirens of the earth. The other sirens have come down the rue Jacob to mark the crescendo. There is silence, and there will be cannonading in the distance, and then roaring over the city, and then the great thumps of the autocannons in the streets, and here and there violent explosions. The Boche is approaching and in five minutes will be here with his filthy idiotic bombs.”35

  He was similarly intoxicated by the brute power of industry at Alfortville: “The two daunting chimneys of the Thompson-Houston spitting blackness. The four daunting chimneys of Est-Lumière…. The barges swollen with coal, the cranes sweating with black efforts, the tugs valiantly struggling.” Then a bomb fell directly opposite 20 rue Jacob: “Six-thirty a.m. of May 27th, the cannons have spoken! One Monday morning when the factories are opening, the signal, the Boche has the coquetry of order…. It was a blast of all the devils at once: it collapsed, O Zbinden Fritz, three floors of the house across the street.”36 As he addressed imaginary Germans, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was still determined to appear excited rather than panicked.

  10

  In the spring of 1918, Georges and Marie Jeanneret realized they absolutely had to sell the Maison Blanche. The fantasy was over; there was no longer a chance that they could afford it. With the war, the watch industry had bottomed out, and Georges went from earning a mere five francs per week to having no work whatsoever. He had developed such severe arthritis that he could not imagine starting up again, and the construction and upkeep of the new house had completely depleted his pension fund. Marie’s meager income from piano lessons, also reduced during wartime, was insufficient to keep them afloat. The only option was to divest themselves of their son’s folly.

  The consequences lasted for the rest of the lives of all the major players. Edouard had charged his parents a 6 percent architect’s fee; this was less than his usual 10 percent, but it was still the type of arrangement that destroys family relations. Worse yet, when Georges and Marie finally sold the house in 1919 for sixty thousand francs—which, given the high rate of inflation during the war years, represented a horrendous loss—the purchaser then defaulted on his payments. The house was repossessed, and the Jeannerets lost an additional twenty-five thousand francs. Any hope they had of preserving even part of their lives’ savings was obliterated.37

  Letter to his brother, with a sketch for a small house in Hyères for their parents, June 1918

  When Le Corbusier’s mother was in her nineties, in letter after letter he offered her financial support and begged her to allow herself more luxuries, like having a maid do the occasional load of wash. As the most prominent architect in the world, he made bank drafts and transferred funds simply to cover the cost of a small Christmas turkey. The financial past was never discussed with any of these gestures, but neither in his eyes nor hers did he ever make up for the havoc caused by the extravagance of the Maison Blanche.

  Edouard insisted at the time that the reason for putting the Maison Blanche on the market was that it was too big for two people, that his parents would stagnate in old age if forced to ramble around such a place. He announced optimistically they could get as much as 130,000 francs for it. That estimate was as unrealistic as the grandiose villa itself had been.

  To compensate for his mistake, he developed a new dream house for his parents, which he sketched in a letter. He had found the precise spot for it—on the Mediterranean coast of France, facing the islands off of Hyères. He told Georges and Marie they must leave La Chaux-de-Fonds completely, spend a few weeks in Paris and the rest in this idyllic, simple retreat. After their years of toil, they deserved no less “for the final days of a fine life,” he explained to Albert.38 All that was needed, urgently, was a down payment of thirty-five thousand francs for the land.

  He sought his brother’s complicity: “So, instead of the parents seeing before them a sinister dead end, we can open the door to the happiest old age they could ever have. I have no reason not to achieve this, and there will be no more winter for them.”39

  This time, however, there was no cash to throw into Edouard’s fantasy. Nothing came of the son’s idea that his taciturn parents should move to the south of France.

  11

  In mid-June 1918, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret decided that all of his problems were over. He wrote his father, “I have, it is true, ten painful years behind me, and my joy which I do not disguise marks the definitive recovery of my optimism, curbed hitherto by so many struggles and pains.”40 He begged that the Maison Blanche be seen as a cup half full. After all, the family had had six good years there, and they all loved one another.

  Edouard rationalized the financial catastrophe. The new house had served well as a workplace for Georges and Marie alike, but now they had worked enough, and it was a good thing that they would be forced to move from “a hard, dry, brutal country none of us has ever loved.”41 Moreover, it was the war that had put in motion the inflation that was the cause of their problems.

  The youngest member of the family acted as if he were the one in charge: “I confess to having had, in 1914, a certain doubt about the entire destiny of our family. Today I find myself happy, and I believe I have the solution. Everything is oriented for each of us toward its just solution. And I believe that the labor and honesty which have been all our actions will bear their useful fruits.” Now Edouard preached unembarrassedly: “Love your last watch dials. You owe them that much. And cultivate your garden, your flowers, and your potatoes. Whistle as you listen to the birds. And forget about the price of coal.” Chagrin had given way to pomp. But he also had a heartfelt wish. His goal for his father and mother was that “the last rays of your life might be from a beautiful, limpid, favoring sun.”42

  12

  On a Sunday in that June of his rebirth, Jeanneret made a diary entry on the subject of flowers. His sensual response to the miracle of nature discombobulated him.

  The bouquets in my vases are select flowers from hothouses and flowerbeds and the fields of the south. My bouquets have a simple arrangement. One, two or three flowers, and the blossom alone triumphs. Corolla, perfume, weight, scallops, calyx, with the altar raised in the center and the pollen hanging for mute com
munions. The calyx have a vase, offers the oriole of its blossom. And the vases are arranged so that they help the rhythm of the bedroom as the nipple of a breast glows in the warmth of flesh and establishes the peaks. My ostensible witnesses, my living friends, my companions of voluptuous hopes, my stimuli of wicked thoughts: the roses! Always the flower that I kiss; the tulips, which I question and insult, the red tulips with regular and heraldic yellow streaks like the old playing cards, which speak to me of gambling houses, lupanars, protruding breasts, and kohl around the eyes, on the hard lips, on the cheeks of shrill vermilion below the bistre of the eyelashes. That blue, cold leaf of serpentine bronze encircles with a twin embrace the flower without calyx possessed of a geometric brutality, its empty odor, its pistils offered like bloodless lips in the depths of a womb. For me it remains the ideal rose. Mama used to make admirable bouquets…. They were all candor, ingenuousness, ingenuity, caprice, freedom, impromptu, talent. Mama’s bouquets used to delight me, their renewal amazed me. All her artist’s soul was in them, more than anywhere else, no repetitions, nothing learned or copied. It was all inspiration.43

  The mature Le Corbusier craved order and efficiency because it provided a framework for this sort of feeling of abundance. Overcome by his own mind, with its cascade of associations from flowers to sexuality to prostitutes to his mother, he needed mechanisms for stability. Moreover, the machines he loved paralleled nature. Rather than being merely dry or mechanical, they resembled flowers in the harmonious workings of their parts.