Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

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  On November 12, the day the armistice became official, the Americans jumping and dancing in the streets of Paris again struck Jeanneret as different from other people.

  Riveted by these revelers from across the Atlantic, he decided that they had the boldness and directness of their silos and factories. Black and white, they kissed one another and threw dollars in the air. “The women want to spend their dollars and they want that sensation in that little vice of theirs—the transoceanic sensation,” Jeanneret raved to Ritter.4

  The armistice itself, however, was a nuisance. He and Ozenfant were supposed to have their exhibition open at THOMAS Tableaux at just the time when people were too busy celebrating, and Jeanneret resented the intrusion on his career. On November 20, he complained, “The show had to be postponed on account of the armistice. The armistice has disorganized a lot of things. People have been celebrating for the last eight days. Not me, of course.”5

  The only comfort was that the postponement gave him additional time to tear into his work and perfect his paintings. He continued as he had for three months, sleeping little and painting in every minute left over from his other work. On December 19, two days before the new opening date at THOMAS, he wrote Ritter, “I see more clearly these days. My place is set for me in Paris, more or less at the high table. I have been made the administrator of two huge deals. I feel I am an essential cog in the machine, and there is a decisive clarity in my ideas for which I am esteemed. I count. This is the beginning for our generation: it is our turn to take action. I have put my ideas of art in order, and some order in my life. I still flounder in my affairs because they are not yet sorted out, but 1919 will do the trick. Then I will be complete as a man and more extensive in my work. On the whole, I am making progress, not without difficulties, not without effort. I have the distinct sense of having become my own judge, a rather clearheaded and demanding judge at that. Other people’s opinions are a matter of indifference to me.”6

  In his apartment at 20 rue Jacob, just prior to his show at THOMAS Tableaux, December 1918

  On Saturday, December 21, at 4:00 p.m., the exact moment when the vernissage was beginning, he proudly finished his last painting for the exhibition.

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  THOMAS Tableaux—at 5 rue de Penthièvre, near the rue La Boétie, the fashionable street of galleries that was then the center of the art world—was normally Jove, the dressmaking shop where Ozenfant worked. It had been renamed for occasional exhibitions two years earlier by its owner. The gallery was open only from 2:30 to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays, but its connection with Matisse and other well-known painters made it a worthy showcase for a first exhibition, sure to attract the press.

  There were twenty works by Ozenfant and ten by Jeanneret. Jeanneret’s friends, who thought he only built slaughterhouses and made bricks, were amazed. The critics, however, disapproved. Louis Vauxcelles, the predominant art pundit of the day, wrote that Ozenfant and Jeanneret were “like clergymen putting on blinders when they walk down the grand boulevards, in order to keep from being tempted by the pretty girls.”7

  Vauxcelles had a point. Jeanneret’s carefully preconceived canvases revealed meticulous execution, but the freshness and spontaneity of his travel sketches were absent. Jeanneret told Ritter these were “painted according to the strictest rules, the paint as smooth and uniform as Ingres (if not so good)…. No longer a matter of vibration, of excitement, of noise.”8 He was using painting as a sedative.

  Jeanneret’s early forays into painting were also limited by a lack of originality. Ozenfant was not out of line to claim “our two drawings were as alike as twins, especially because at the time Jeanneret saw through my eyes and, in painting, I did his thinking for him.”9 It would take architecture for Jeanneret to realize his own brilliance.

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  For a while, though, Jeanneret remained unsure about where the ultimate focus of his life’s work should be. And the two years in Paris had made him no more certain about the issues of women and sex than he had been when he arrived.

  Photo Insert One

  1. Self-portrait, watercolor, summer 1917, Paris

  2. Paris, watercolor, 1917

  3. LC4 Lounge Chair, covered in panther skin

  4. Villa La Roche, mirror under ramp in gallery

  5. Villa Savoye, exterior room and ramp to top level

  6. Villa Savoye at Poissy

  7. Villa Savoye, built-in bath

  8. South America (self-portrait with Josephine Baker), pencil sketch, 1929

  9. Two Naked Women Lying Down, watercolor

  10. Sketch in letter to his mother, September 10, 1951

  11. Unité d’Habitation, Marseille

  12. Maisons Jaoul

  13. Cabanon, interior

  14. Le Corbusier and Yvonne’s bedroom at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli

  The first of January 1919 inspired one of his grand statements about carnal and artistic passions. Jeanneret again described to his two homosexual friends his ambivalence about prostitutes. His natural impulses were countered by his self-judgment. The inner combustion he revealed to Ritter and Czadra linked his approach to sex with his attitude toward everything else in life: “The women are leaving here, including Raymonde, opulent and magnificent; can I love them? Can I love Raymonde? So much heft and health, so much good nature; so nice. I still think so. I’m still a kid, and such women are for going to bed with, no other functions. So much confusion in my life, so much paradox, so much rationality to apply. Not to let all streams flow. Take responsibility in business, in art, and in the realm of the senses, where the love of plasticity impels toward the embrace, toward natural effusion. I tend to strike out in all directions, I want to embrace everything, I am wildly dilated. Everything enthralls me and pulls me up short. An artist without calculation: this year opens like a fan. I am ready to believe everything and to do anything. Reckless and what of it: the heights and depths of society, ecstasies and depressions, wild ambitions—it’s all wonderful. Yet responsibilities accumulate everywhere, and everywhere a maximum effort is required. Everywhere ardor. Love it all…. Why not? What a child I am! Tonight I’m completely overwhelmed! And yet I long to act—in every realm. Everywhere I sense tension, expectation, desire. What a symphony! From time to time my heart sings. But how to sacrifice and select? In art I see clearly. Elsewhere I lose my breath and believe in everything. I am terribly tired. 1919? Anything goes until a choice is made, the choice that will come later. Life is too beautiful now.”10

  The office at 29 bis rue d’Astorg was busy. He was undertaking a number of architectural projects for new industrial clients, and he had begun work on Toward a New Architecture—a text that in time became one of the most important treatises in twentieth-century design. But then, as in his soliloquy, came the “pulling up short.” Having thought the sale of his parents’ house in La Chaux-de-Fonds might realize 130,000 francs, he now saw it go for 60,000. Edouard was probably intensely guilty over the financial loss he had imposed on his father and mother, but his way of dealing with it was to insist that they know how important he had become in Paris.

  Like a rooster strutting across a stage, he wrote them about attending a breakfast where he was seated between Le Marquis Boniface de Castellane and Le Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, at de Castellane’s house. He had been sent as a delegate from the Technical Commission for the Renaissance des Cités. “I was royally entertained in ‘cet hostel’ where I proclaimed the beauties of modern life,” he wrote. He also proudly described his Christmas Eve: “an extremely select ‘soirée’ at the house of Poiret’s sister, a setting of the last refinement and exquisite art, with Ozenfant, Auguste Perret, et cetera.”11

  It was essential that Georges and Marie recognize that the child who had cost them their lives’ savings had now worked things out: “I’m going to buy a first-rate gramophone so I can hear the fine Italian masses, the Beethoven quartets, Rameau, Ravel, Granados, Moussorgsky, etc. with a perfection which is a real revelation
to me. I never go to concerts now, they bore me. To have perfect execution by Capel, by Risler, by Chaliapin, and by don Perosi, at my worktable and in the most flagrant intimacy is a windfall I owe to the wonders of science.” With this ability to listen to the great musicians of the day, his place on the rue Jacob was “a marvel of tranquility and of exquisite proportion,” but he was looking for something else as well, nearer to work, that would allow room for the entire family; and he intended to buy a car, a further sign of success.12 “There are two architects in Paris: Perret and Jeanneret,” he boasted. He had been asked to advise on the restoration of the cathedral at Reims. And again he let his mother and father learn about all the important people he knew, while assuring them that he was above it all: “Senator Risles, next to whom I was seated, showed great friendliness toward me. I accept it all without batting an eye.”13

  Yet something was deeply wrong. “Your letters continue to be very incoherent,” he snapped at his parents, after first chiding them for not having written enough.14 The boastfulness and anger were a transparent mask for his remorse and embarrassment over the crisis of the Maison Blanche.

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  One afternoon, Jeanneret ran into an old friend, Alfred Vallette, the director of the Mercure de France, where Jeanneret hoped to publish a new version of After Cubism. They met on the rue Condé. Standing on that narrow street of old buildings with high-pitched roofs and ornate facades, Vallette accosted him with the remark, “Oh, it’s you, the flat-roof-man.” The publisher was referring to Jeanneret’s latest architectural proposals for flat-roofed, cast-concrete structures in Picardie, the Somme, and Champagne, which were the subject of an article he was writing and which he predicted would be frightful.

  “Not in the least,” Jeanneret replied. “This village will be as lovely as a machine.” The young architect described the incident and dialogue in graphic detail to Ritter: “He gave a start. ‘You don’t mean it!’ ‘Of course I mean it, it’s not a slip of the tongue: a village as lovely as a machine.’ He backed off, groaned, acknowledged that ‘I had a point,’ but that it was frightful. ‘I won’t forget your remark, a village lovely as a machine, a village lovely as…!’ I authorized him to make a grenade out of it. ‘You could put it as an epigraph to your article.’ We left on very good terms. He’s always quite cheerful, chubby, and in slippers. He regards the enterprise of modern life with terror; he understands my optimism but rejoices at the imminence of his death. Life extinguishes them, these good librarians, these extractors of quintessence.”15

  Thus was born the much misunderstood rubric for Le Corbusier’s work: his intention that a house be “a machine to live in.” This line that gets quoted more than any other of his—often to suggest the sterility of mechanization—has come to have a significance that distorts its true meaning. The architect did use that expression and did want efficiency, but its purpose was to facilitate, not stifle, rich and complex living. His idea was a beautiful and well-run vessel for the diversity of nature and human existence. And the language he had chosen had been a deliberate sally in the sort of verbal fencing match he loved.

  YEARS LATER, when a world still unable to fathom Le Corbusier’s industrial windows and stovepipe railings continued to hammer “machine for living” to death, he defended it via his biographer Gauthier.

  Machine for living! This is one of the expressions for which Le Corbusier has been most frequently and most violently reproached. But what is a machine? An instrument for communicating a certain freedom of movement, according to Littré in other words a motor, but also a house, according to Diderot’s Recherches philosophiques sur le Beau: Every machine involves combination, arrangement of parts tending to the same end. And is not the goal of a house to make life easy and agreeable? And is it not consequently important that the arrangement of all its parts tends to this same end?

  What! You’re saying that our family roof, the sacred shelter of our household gods, the hereditary asylum and love-nest, the villa of our relaxation and the castle of our dreams—all just machines?

  Le Corbusier says machine for house the way Mme. de Sévigné, writing to her son-in-law, says machine to indicate her daughter Madame de Grignan: If out of tenderness and pity, you fail to give a rest to this lovely machine, you will inevitably destroy it…. Le Corbusier says machine for house, but Voltaire: Man is so much a machine…. Le Corbusier says machine for house, but La Fontaine: Is there a poorer man in the whole round machine? But Boileau: But to think that God turns the world / and regulates the springs of the round machine. But Béranger: Observing the machine of the universe….

  And then we have the expression: the machine of State; Chateaubriand went so far as to invoke the grand machines of Christianity; The Dictionary of the Académie-Française allows us to exclaim that Veronese’s “Last Supper” or St. Peter’s in Rome are Grand machines; and Victor Hugo has observed that: The marvelous is the epic’s essential machine….

  A machine for living, Corbusier says, and he is right. For by expressing himself in this fashion he puts the problem where it belongs. He incites us to a healthy conception of the residence; not to forget, for instance, that a house must be above all a shelter sealed against the elements, thieves and prowlers, and at the same time a receptacle as open as possible to pure air, to light, to sunshine; to consider that order, in the rooms we live in, is one of the chief conditions of our peace of mind and that, consequently, we must achieve it conveniently and comfortably. In short, we ask architects, who are or should be artists, to prove themselves to be at least as endowed as the industrialists, creators of airplanes, automobiles, steamships, typewriters, office furniture, trunks, a thousand manufactured objects, in order to perform precisely the services we are entitled to expect of them.

  Such objects, such furniture, such maximally productive machines, all of which are obtained by a minimum of means and matter, Le Corbusier designates standards. Hence a standard is a necessary product because it corresponds exactly to one or more needs of our life; it is also, from the technological point of view, a model composed of simple elements, easily assembled. The standard is not perfection. It is merely the path, the basis, the springboard, the preparatory phase…. Before ultimately creating the Parthenon, which is architecture, a work of the highest spirituality, the Greeks made countless temples, always of similar construction but each time further refined. The standard expresses ineluctable realities, belonging to the economic and social realm. The architect, on the solid basis of the standard, has the possibility of attaining perfect beauty, but only the possibility.16

  This was the battle he had begun as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, trying to explain his goals to one of the many skeptics who did not understand the humility with which he tried to enrich other people’s lives.

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  While Jeanneret was reformulating his own life in Paris, he was also trying to take control of his parents’ future at a time when his mother was both wage earner and housekeeper. He wrote Georges and Marie: “I understand your silence and have been stirred by the awareness of the enormous difficulties you have faced, all the more unendurable since they were continuous and tormenting. And the cold, as I know by my own experience, can be depressing, especially for you who no longer have the resources of youth. But now better times have come, and I hope that your morale is better too. For you know, don’t you, how to give things their real importance. You must envisage a future solution; there is where the search must be made, and I hope to search with you. I realize the crushing task Maman has imposed on herself; I can hardly congratulate her for having done so, but I know her courage and her strong will, and Albert must surely understand the reasons for my reticence. For you see, one must know how to choose happiness. And I can just hear dear Papa disparaging morale for irrefutable reasons, going at it in good conscience. But we must allow ourselves to be upset only in proportion to things as they are.”17

  The issue, as always, was how to wrestle happiness out of life, given the obstacles within one�
��s own mind and the impositions of a flawed world. “I am often, believe me, forced to confront very melancholy realities,” he wrote. “So long as they concern only myself, my feelings, my suffering, my harsh and violent struggles, I pay no mind. I have a remarkable power of endurance, I resist to the end, and always manage to survive. But there are so many kinds of suffering which other people do not survive, which are dreadful fatalities, and which actually make me realize to what degree I am a happy man.” He recognized the effects of his own personality: “I’m an odd duck, and I know I disconcert those who don’t know me well; those who do, make no secret of their esteem. It is all or nothing.”18

  Jeanneret intended to use this period of life to make money so that within two years he could have the financial independence to paint and do nothing else. He also declared to Georges and Marie that he intended to support them and Albert in perpetuity. All was perfect; he would be a whiz at business, a creative genius, and the bastion of the family.

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  “The ideal is one of purity, as old as the Greeks. And to achieve this ideal, it is the machine which affords us the means to exceed the greatness of Rome,” he wrote Ritter and Czadra in April. Emboldened by his sense of purpose in fostering that credo, Jeanneret himself was “a motor which has been switched on.”19