Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Interior of Ozenfant’s studio

  2

  In 1922, Le Corbusier elevated the second cousin he had initially disparaged to the position of partner. The principals of the office were, officially, “Le Corbusier–Pierre Jeanneret.” But it was called l’Atelier Le Corbusier; there was no question as to which one had more authority. There was room for only a single genius in the partnership, and while Le Corbusier did most of the designing, the competent but less imaginative Pierre was better suited to be the loyal, skillful manager with his feet on the ground. Few people even knew that the two men in truth had the same last name.

  Toward the end of his life, Le Corbusier wrote, “Our work as a team permitted an important architectural and urbanist production. Supporting each other, we were able to produce significant mutual work. Between the two of us, there was always total confidence, despite the difficulties of a working life…. Our personal characters in all this advanced side by side, Pierre and I confronting all obstacles together.”1 In fact, there was to be one long-lasting feud over the issue of Vichy, but Pierre’s presence in Le Corbusier’s life made a great deal possible.

  THAT SAME YEAR, Le Corbusier began to live with Yvonne Gallis. They met because Yvonne was a salesgirl and model at the couture house of Jove when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret showed his paintings there in 1919.

  She had been born Jeanne Victorine Gallis in Monaco on January 4, 1892. Her father was a gardener, and her mother owned a small flower shop. Full figured, with large dark eyes, a delicate chiseled nose, and cupid-shaped lips, Yvonne was unabashedly sexy and coquettish. When Le Corbusier first met her, she parted her black hair in the middle, pulling it back straight and then letting it cascade in neat waves that draped around gold hoop earrings, so that she resembled an exotic gypsy. She laid on her mascara, eyebrow pencil, and rouge as if with a shovel, and she applied her dark crimson lipstick as boldly as he painted bottles of red wine in his Purist still lifes.

  To him, she was “Vonvon” to her, he was “Doudou.” From the start, she made him laugh and gave him a sense of well-being. She had none of his intellect and drive, but she believed in him totally, at least initially. The zealot who was slaving away for long days at the office revolutionizing world architecture and designing everything from private houses to entire cities, and who sanctimoniously told his parents that he had completely sacrificed the pleasures of friendship and private life, let down his guard with this girlfriend who embodied the Mediterranean spirit he craved. With her, he had fun and felt robust.

  Although they were to be together thirty-seven years, the first ten unmarried, Yvonne remained almost completely out of the public eye, even as Le Corbusier became world famous. She rarely attended official events and scarcely appears in the material published about him. The architect’s close friends and office staff knew her, but otherwise he kept her like a well-guarded, secret treasure.

  The one statement Le Corbusier put in print about this eccentric beauty makes clear the role she played in his mental construction of his life: “Yvonne is the best girl in the world. But she has her own ideas, her habits. She’s a willful little creature, and it’s no use trying to alter her nature. What would be the point? To make her a commonplace bourgeoise? Wasted effort! You would get nowhere. The game isn’t worth the candle. What I can say is that her tastes and mine fit together, harmonized by being different…. Yvonne, the empress’s daughter, used to giving despotic commands, a great sport of a girl, so kind, so pretty, so charming, so affectionate.”2

  Yvonne was famous for her practical jokes as well as for her sharp remarks. When the distinguished architectural patron Père Couturier, a Dominican father known for his support of modern art, came to call on Le Corbusier and his wife in the early 1950s, Yvonne, sounding like a well-brought-up Catholic schoolgirl, reverently told the prelate to have a seat on the living-room sofa. He lowered himself gently in his immaculate white robes, only to bring about the sounds of booming flatulence from a whoopee cushion. Yvonne began to giggle like a ten-year-old, as did the admiring Le Corbusier, who retailed the story. She was salty, generous, and famously difficult.

  THE FIRST EVIDENCE of Yvonne’s residence in the garret apartment on the rue Jacob is a letter dated September 27, 1922, which Le Corbusier sent to “Mademoiselle Yvonne Gallis, chez M. Ed. Jeanneret, 20 rue Jacob.”3 On his way back to Paris, he visited his parents and brother in Switzerland, where there was no possibility of his being joined by a girlfriend, let alone of revealing their cohabitation, but where he hastened to write her in secret.

  Le Corbusier described cutting wood with great strokes of an ax; now his hands were full of blisters. He wrote Yvonne in baby talk, instructing her to rest up and to sing, to be at her best when he got back: “And it would be nice if you made me some little drawings. You’d have fun doing it, the time would pass more quickly, and your Doudou would be so proud.”4

  He counted on her to understand him, continuing, “My parents are as nice as could be. But they’re terrified of their sons and their damn ideas. Fortunately I never talk about painting—that would stir up a storm.”5 To post this letter secretly, Le Corbusier needed to walk through the countryside for nearly an hour in the wind and rain. Sneaking out of the house for love, he felt a sense of true companionship and could fancy himself a Mediterranean at last.

  3

  The architect was having his bachelor digs remade to suit his girlfriend’s tastes, and wrote her from Vincenza about the details. Pierre had wallpaper installed. While Le Corbusier was traveling in northern Italy, Yvonne was hanging curtains and applying yet another coat of polish to the parquet. He wrote her that his consolation each evening when he returned to his hotel room was to look at her photo and think of her in their new domesticity. After a six-week separation, he was counting the days until he would be back “in my little nest in the rue Jacob with you my happy little song-sparrow.” Anticipating the hard work he faced in Paris, he wrote, “You’ll be there to soothe me with your caresses…. I know I’ve got a bad character, but I wouldn’t do any harm to a nice little friend like you.”6

  He instructed her not to come to the station when he got back. His train was to arrive early in the morning and might not be on time; this would fatigue her. He would head straight home; she should await him in bed.

  Le Corbusier now considered himself a connoisseur of women and wanted Yvonne to know of her high standing: “Venetian women are lovely—dark and distinguished, built rather like you; so I kept thinking of you, and I was quite pleased with you in comparison.”7 His way of being faithful to her, he explained to his mistress, was by embracing his pillow. He urged her to ask him, once he got back to Paris, what his ideas had been when he was doing so.

  4

  Within months of their beginning to live together, the relationship between Le Corbusier and Yvonne had advanced to a point of complete dependence for both. But even a year into the affair, he remained nervous about the need to keep her existence secret from his parents. In August 1923, when he went to Blonay, he instructed Yvonne that if she wrote him at his parents’ rented chalet, she had to be sure to address the envelope with a typewriter, to prevent his mother from having any ideas about the sender.

  Pierre, on the other hand, was in the inner circle. During that holiday, the quieter cousin was in charge of Yvonne’s entertainment and well-being in Paris. Following Pierre’s report that Yvonne was grimacing when she took her cough syrup, Le Corbusier, like a tough parent who had put a caretaker in charge, wrote that if she was still coughing when he got home, he would give her a “good thrashing.”8

  At first, she was nothing but worshipful and sweet to her lover. But by their second year together, she periodically burst out angrily. Le Corbusier appeared to handle her anger rather than rise to it. With his mother and colleagues, he feuded; he dealt with Yvonne as one might cope with an enchanting pet cat, accepting and enjoying the limitations of control.

  But how he admired his inamorata. He credited Yvon
ne with “a quality which makes for peace in the house,” while complaining to her about his mother’s chronic restlessness and twitching, her need always to be doing something, and her inability to sleep.9 The contrast between these two totally different women, which Le Corbusier often pointed out to both, obsessed him.

  When Le Corbusier returned to be with his mother and father in Switzerland for Christmas that year, Yvonne again remained in Paris. Back in his parents’ world, the thirty-six-year-old architect simply did whatever was expected of him. He again cut wood for the winter and helped slaughter pigs for the holiday meal. He slept on a board in a freezing room under the roof, and when his father took off on mountain outings in brutal weather, he joined in cheerfully. But in the letters no one saw him mail, Le Corbusier emphasized to Yvonne how much he missed her. He complained of his loneliness and the sexlessness of life there, conjuring up a picture of the bare planks on which he slept solo, in contrast to their warm bed at home with her in it.

  Realizing that she would be alone for Christmas, Le Corbusier wrote on December 24, seemingly unaware that, even if in his mind he thought he was comforting her on Christmas Eve, she could not possibly receive the letter until a day or two after the actual holiday: “Yet your Doudou will be thinking of you and sending you a nice kiss during the night. In my chilly room under the eaves, I’ll be thinking of my brave little girl far away in her soft beddy-bye while I’m sleeping on a plank. I’m scouring the countryside, which is covered with snow, and it’s cold and wet and dreary, and I’m out looking for sites. No fun, but my parents are so happy about the future house that I’m glad to take on this task.”10

  The separation and hardship and foul weather were all worth enduring for that chance yet again to create a place where his parents would live. He had a new idea in his mind, and this time, with a different name, advanced skills, and a sense of reality, he would not let them down.

  XXI

  1

  Raoul La Roche, a Basel-born director of the Crédit Commercial de France to whom Max Du Bois had introduced Le Corbusier, had become keen about the architect’s work. La Roche, who spoke with a thick singsong accent like Le Corbusier’s, was a man of strong opinions. La Roche had been supporting L’Esprit Nouveau ever since 1920, and he valued Le Corbusier, four years his junior, as an aesthetic guide.

  In November 1921, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier bought for La Roche six Picassos—“the most beautiful,” said Le Corbusier—and a major Braque at a foreclosure auction of work coming from the collection of the dealer Kahnweiler.1 They acquired for themselves two Picassos that Le Corbusier kept at the rue Jacob and a Braque that Ozenfant had in his studio. The prices, Le Corbusier proudly noted, were a fifth of what they would have been in galleries. Le Corbusier and Ozenfant continued to coach La Roche on his collection, which, while deliberately excluding Matisse, whose pictures they considered lacking in gravity, also had work by Léger and Lipchitz. La Roche was so grateful to Le Corbusier for steering him toward foreclosure sales where art could be bought at low prices that he eventually gave the architect the Braque.

  The prosperous banker also bought up work by Ozenfant and Jeanneret—as he continued to be known as a painter. In 1923 alone, Jeanneret sold him six major paintings. That same year, his devotee commissioned what was to be Le Corbusier’s most significant building to date. This was a house in Autheuil, on the outskirts of the sixteenth arrondissement, intended primarily as a showcase for La Roche’s collection and as a place for the banker to give parties.

  The project became doubly important because, while Le Corbusier was enjoying new prosperity thanks to La Roche, Albert Jeanneret had befriended Lotti Walden-Raaf, a widow who had come to Paris as a member of the Swedish Ballet Company when it was performing at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Albert and Walden-Raaf were wed in June 1923. Walden-Raaf, who had a private income, commissioned a house adjacent to La Roche’s, where she and Albert and her two young daughters could live.

  Pastor Huguenin, Lotti and Albert Jeanneret, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier at Lotti and Albert’s wedding ceremony, June 26, 1923. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s painting in the background, now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, was his wedding present to them.

  The adjoining villas changed forever the way that human beings might choose to feel at home. Notions of what required concealment and what was permissible to see were radically altered; concepts of separation and openness, physical and emotional, were never again the same. The inventive forms and pioneering materials inaugurated a revolution in domestic design that echoed almost everywhere in the world where people construct houses.

  THE VILLA LA ROCHE is a marvel of playful rhythms and luminescence. The interior details—the sloping, shiplike interior ramp connecting the second and third floors through the capacious gallery (possibly a prototype for Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramps at the 1959 Guggenheim Museum); the gallery table that is a bold plane supported by an upended triangle at one end and a slab at the other; the recessed shelves here and there; the soaring interior atrium/hall with its lively balconies and ramp ways—have the weightlessness and the upbeat spirit Le Corbusier felt in the music he loved (see color plate 4). The original container was equally daring. As absolute in form as Jeanneret’s most pared-down paintings and more massive than the studio for Ozenfant, it was like an enlarged version of the shoe-box Citrohan houses.

  Facade of the Villa La Roche, ca. 1925

  With this showcase for an art collector, Le Corbusier opened new possibilities for the concept of luxury. Flat surfaces, machined materials, right angles, sharp edges—all were taken from the realm of industrial fabrication and made the essence of domestic graciousness. A solid block might be as suitable for a rich person as rococo panels; concrete could serve where once there would have been gilding.

  THE PROCESS, however, had none of the grace of the results. La Roche had put his total budget at 250,000 francs. By the time construction began, the estimate for building was 200,000, on top of 207,000 for the land and various fees and an additional 80,000 for furnishings and other expenses. Construction began in July 1923, yet the interior elevation drawings were still not complete more than a year later. The interior walls, constructed of brick covered in plaster, were not strong enough to support the doors Le Corbusier specified, which were made of “Ronéo,” an exceptionally heavy metal; some walls had to be rebuilt out of concrete, and the doors’ size had to be altered. The windows had flaws, and the technical systems were a disaster.

  Raoul La Roche with his collection, ca. 1925

  The strip lighting Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designated for the library and gallery gave insufficient light for reading. In October 1925, La Roche wrote Le Corbusier that the dining room ceiling was still “full of holes…. It’s six months since I moved in and I am still obliged to use illumination which…relies on ad hoc arrangements. What must the many visitors think, and what do you want me to tell them? I come back to the point that a perfectly banal system would be the best solution.”2 It was only in further revisions, undertaken in January 1926 and then in 1928, that the lighting was satisfactorily resolved.

  Such disagreements—and on many occasions a schism between architect and client—became the norm for a commission by Le Corbusier. Yet the airy court of the Villa La Roche, with its ramps and parapets and sequence of visual vignettes, remains a triumph.

  2

  The Villa La Roche led to a dispute that sundered Le Corbusier and Ozenfant. Le Corbusier credited himself and Pierre with installing La Roche’s paintings according to the collector’s “precise instruction.”3 Initially, the cousins had hung the Picassos in the gallery, but when the collector insisted that it be used solely for Purist works, they reinstalled La Roche’s collection. When Le Corbusier subsequently arrived at the villa to discuss an unrelated issue, he found that Ozenfant had made major changes in that hanging.

  Le Corbusier’s subsequent letter to Ozenfant about the problem exemplifies the insidiou
s form of diplomacy that became his speciality. The architect presents himself as the paradigm of balance and even temper. Touting his own virtue but seeming amenable to compromise, he is initially solicitous; then, subtly, he begins the attack. He writes, “Nothing could please me more than that you should carry out the hanging, but I would like it done by agreement with me—not with the aim of protecting my own interests (since you will have seen that I kept a good place for you)—but simply with the intention of insuring that the La Roche house should not take on the look of a house of a (postage-stamp) collector.” Following that deceptively gentle language, he shows his will of iron: “I insist absolutely that certain parts of the architecture should be entirely free of paintings…. Since this intention appears to have been modified by the new arrangements which you have made, I appeal to you as a good friend, first to take note of it and secondly to come to an agreement with me over it.”4

  Then, in 1926, Le Corbusier wrote an article in Cahiers d’Art criticizing La Roche for undermining the impact of his architecture through the dense installation of the pictures. This prompted La Roche to write the architect a charming riposte: “Do you recall the origin of my undertaking? ‘La Roche, when you have a fine collection like yours, you should have a house built worthy of it.’ And my response: ‘Fine, Jeanneret, make this house for me.’ Now, what happened? The house, once built, was so beautiful that on seeing it I cried: ‘It’s almost a crime to put paintings in it.’ Nevertheless I did so. How could I have done otherwise? Do I not have certain obligations with regard to my painters, of whom you yourself are one? I commissioned from you a ‘frame for my collection.’ You provided me with a ‘poem of walls.’ Which of us two is most to blame?”5 Not all of Le Corbusier’s disputes with his clients were handled in such gracious tones.