Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The writing/dining table is the first example of the variation that reappeared in Le Corbusier’s own cabin at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. It is a straightforward rectangular wooden slab supported by iron stovepipe legs. But while this table was as modern as the house for which it was custom fitted, Georges and Marie used old country chairs that recalled the couple’s earlier years. Similarly, the elegant and old-fashioned desk Edouard had designed for Marie for the Maison Blanche, with its space for knitting needles, is in the bedroom. For all the simplicity of the architectural program, the house is not cold; it invites the charms of one’s life experience to be present.

  The tiny enclosure of the sole toilet in the house does not have an inch to spare. At the same time, because of a window high up in this vertical cubicle, it has the light of a chapel, ennobling the act of sitting on the toilet. In the separate bathroom, Le Corbusier put small vertical windows and skylights over the tub and sink, as he did in the closet: light, intangible and born to the sun, changes everything.

  IN 1930, Le Corbusier added a “fruitier” to La Petite Maison. This eagle’s nest for his own use allowed a view akin to what he had first experienced in the monasteries on Mount Athos. From this austere box on top of the villa, he could set his sights on the horizon.

  The desk and chair in the fruitier are on a platform. This desk is even simpler than the table in his parents’ living space; one end of its concrete top rests on a ledge, while the other is supported by a single stovepipe as delicate as a bird’s leg. Le Corbusier had an ability to take strong industrial materials and imbue them with feathery lightness. The stairs to reach this aerie have a banister of tubular steel, with a graceful turn below and a handsome mirror image of that turn at the top to provide a sense of balletic grace; its concrete steps are scaled to invite easy footwork. What is weighty becomes weightless.

  THE LARGE PLATE-GLASS sliding window overlooking the lake in the main space of La Petite Maison encourages the act of seeing. And what a feast that is, thanks to the play of colors within the interior. The north wall of the living/dining room is painted a light aquamarine; the east is cobalt. There is also a range of grays. The bedroom is salmon. Brown trim serves like a colored tinted mat surrounding a picture. Playful cutouts of geometric shapes, high and low, provide the satisfaction of abstract art.

  All of this occurs under a flat roof that is covered with grass—a superb play of the man-made and the natural. This dwelling is the perfect shelter in which to contemplate the universal. The views, and that deliberate melding of earthly growth with the calibration of human needs, inspire thoughtfulness and reverence.

  In this small, private house—his gift to the people he cared about the most—the architect who publicly swaggered across the worldwide stage, who issued pronouncements for humanity and tried to replan our cities, was charming, poetic, and divinely quiet. He sanctified everyday living while making it easy and practical. To the father who had shown him the sky and the earth, and to the mother who opened his soul to the rhythms and harmonies of music, he returned these qualities in a new form.

  SHORTLY AFTER La Petite Maison was completed, the community council of a nearby town got together to forbid the building of any modern structures within the territory it governed. It did so in the name of preservation of the scenery. That slap confirmed Le Corbusier’s views of Switzerland. In little time, the hostility of his native land became even more apparent; the struggle for beauty would not be easily won there. But his house for his parents was, however slight, a victory.

  4

  The end of February was almost invariably a time of winter lows for Jeanneret/Le Corbusier. Nineteen hundred and twenty-five was completely different.

  He had garnered the respect of the other pioneers of modern architecture. This was evident when Mies van der Rohe, vice president of the Deutscher Werkbund, became project director of a major exhibition in the Weissenh of section of Stuttgart to show the latest approaches to the modern home and gave Le Corbusier the single best location, overlooking the city. Le Corbusier did two houses that expanded on the Citrohan ideas, essentially boxes on pilotis with simplified, versatile plans. Their architecture was praised for its connection to the natural surroundings while criticized for its cost; these houses were more expensive per square foot than anything else at the exhibition.

  Ca. 1920

  The Weissenh of houses are examples of Le Corbusier’s work that must be considered in the context of their site rather than in photographic reproductions that render them as isolated objects. In that neighborhood of Stuttgart, one is on a hillside, near a bustling city center but facing a vast panorama of fertile mountains and vineyards. Especially in springtime, the shimmering white plaster of Le Corbusier’s shoe boxes of modernism is a perfect foil to the fields of buttercups and bluebells catching the sunlight all around them. The utterly simple, bold pavilions, one sprawling and the other compact, one facing south and the other east, are resting points on the earth that gracefully assume second place to their setting.

  Remarkably, the rolling countryside of southern Germany here resembles the surrounds of Delphi; this is more a fertile corner of the world than a particular place, with its timelessness and universality accentuated thanks to the way Le Corbusier’s architecture recedes and deliberately presents a view of the distant panorama rather than the modern city. He succeeded in making Germany, the country he disliked, distinctly un-German.

  The buildings serve the setting, yet they are anything but timid. These elegant rectangular blocks are both brave masses, standing strong and clear. Lighter than the villa he was simultaneously designing in the Paris suburb of Garches, they are more confident than the studio-house for Ozenfant, their bold forms exquisitely elegant without being in any way fussy.

  The smaller house has a balcony that floats off of it. Its pilotis are thin and graceful, bringing to the forefront Le Corbusier’s idea of the resemblance of architecture to music, with the massing of the house the kettledrum and the balcony and these supporting elements the flutes. One goes from seeing and hearing the full orchestra to a meandering solo.

  The larger house combines inside and out as a totality. Nature penetrates its balcony; the sky and the surroundings are present throughout. Le Corbusier was an architect of air; space, more than bricks and mortar, was his medium. He used the sturdiest, most durable of new materials, as befit this exhibition of current construction practices, yet rendered them weightless. A refinement and touch are apparent in every lean staircase, the tautness of the window trim, the grace with which each space opens to the next. How delicate was this bold vision that allows one to join the birds!

  5

  On February 24, Le Corbusier wrote Ritter his latest assessment of his life: “I realized that after ten years of really tumultuous, painful (oh very!), and exhausting life that I had rounded the cape of storms and was in fact a very happy fellow, leading an ideal life.” With no time wasted socializing, he was doing what he loved: practicing architecture, painting, and writing. It made him “gay as a sparrow, more optimistic than ever, stubborn as a mule, and always focused on the same goal.”8 Now realizing more than ever what a quagmire his hometown had been, he credited Ritter, the only person he felt had had confidence in him, for his escape.

  “For me architecture is a game,” he wrote confidently. His struggle was with painting, “which torments me endlessly, plunging me into tremendous anxieties.” But now, at least, everything was coming into perspective. His romance with business and the goal of making his fortune were behind him: “I want you to understand that for me money has lost any luster it may have had. Having earned it, but having always invested it in risky ventures, I have never had it in my hands for long; having lost it, I felt nothing. But the only good result is being able to reach that focus where, in the work itself, you feel yourself on your way.”9

  Le Corbusier was determined to live simply and avoid distraction from his work: “A harsh, precipitous life furiously filled to the brim; and
the modest situation of a monk (whose little heart has his little friend), in a white room, overlooking a garden. Le Corbusier is not Peter Behrens, who had a lackey to watch him eat.”10 His “little friend”—presumably Ritter knew who she was—was all he needed.

  THE CLIENTS were at the door; he was preparing for exhibitions; new texts were going into print. At the same time, Le Corbusier was devising the urban scheme that, for many people, was to cast him permanently as the devil. This bombshell that the architect was about to let drop became the reason that, on first hearing Le Corbusier’s name, many people still speak of him as the man who wanted to destroy Paris and as the demon who damaged cities all over the world.

  This was also a time of major personal change for Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. It was the beginning of the end for his father. Freud has said that a man’s father’s death is the beginning of his maturity. As Le Corbusier began to assume his new role in the oldest surviving generation of men in the family, he gained a confidence of terrifying proportion.

  6

  With the City for Three Million, Le Corbusier had come up with an abstract urban scheme that could go anywhere. Anticipating the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts that was to open in April 1925, he devised a new plan for Paris itself—or, rather, for a city that would be dropped down into the middle of an erased Paris. He had reconstructed his parents’ lives by excising them from one existence and transplanting them into another; now he imagined doing so for most of the population of the French capital. He also conceived the ideal single-family dwelling that could be produced, as if with a cookie cutter, on an infinite scale and that would be the cell of this new metropolis. That his urban proposal meant bulldozing almost all that was already there did not trouble him.

  The central notion behind his scheme was his belief that the automobile had changed everything. Having observed Paris empty out during the summer months, Le Corbusier had been anguished by what happened when people returned from their August holidays: “Then there came the autumn season. In the early evening twilight on the Champs-Elysées it was as though the world had suddenly gone mad. After the emptiness of the summer, the traffic was more furious than ever. Day by day the fury of traffic grew. To leave your house meant that once you had crossed the threshold you were a possible sacrifice to death in the shape of innumerable motors. I think back twenty years, when I was a student; the road belonged to us then; we sang in it and argued in it, while the horse-bus swept calmly along.”11

  In Le Corbusier’s mind, the presence of all these cars became hallucinatory: “On that 1st day of October, on the Champs-Elysées, I was assisting at the titanic reawakening of a completely new phenomenon, which three months of summer had calmed down a little—traffic. Motors in all directions, going at all speeds. I was overwhelmed, an enthusiastic rapture filled me. Not the rapture of the shining coachwork under the gleaming lights, but the rapture of power.”12

  He assumed for himself a force equal to that intoxicating energy of the automobile.

  The simple and ingenuous pleasure of being in the centre of so much power, so much speed. We are a part of it. We are part of that race whose dawn is just awakening….

  Its power is like a torrent swollen by storms; a destructive fury. The city is crumbling, it cannot last much longer; its time is past. It is too old. The torrent can no longer keep to its bed. It is a kind of cataclysm. It is something utterly abnormal, and the disequilibrium grows day by day….

  Surgery must be applied at the city’s centre.

  Physic must be used elsewhere…. We must use the knife.13

  7

  The International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts had been in the planning stages since 1909. This show, which subsequently gave birth to the term “Art Deco,” was to reveal “modern tendencies,” reflecting the era of automobiles and airplanes, in temporary structures especially erected between Les Invalides and the Grand Palais, on both sides of the Seine. Le Corbusier liked the idea but not the organizers. In March 1925, he wrote, “Countless pavilions, all decorated and decorative, are being built, truly a spectacle which astonishes me and produces the impression of pure madness. I didn’t dream the level was so low.”14 The architect was particularly outraged by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s salon, which he said was just an updated version of an elegant sitting room of an earlier era that violated the concepts of the exhibition.

  Le Corbusier, however, honored those guidelines. His intended Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau was to demonstrate how standardization could be applied to domestic building in a housing type made entirely through industrial means. But the organizers quibbled with this notion. “When I submitted my scheme in January 1924 to the architects-in-chief of the Exhibition,” he later wrote, “it was categorically rejected. They wished me to illustrate the theme ‘An Architect’s House.’ I answered, ‘No, I will do a house for everybody, or, if you prefer it, the apartment of any gentleman who would like to be comfortable in beautiful surroundings.’”15

  The initial dismissal of his proposal delighted rather than discouraged the man who was convinced that he was the savior of humanity—and who expected the concomitant opposition. The dream that he could give visual beauty to the masses was too great to go unchecked. Naturally, the notion of building housing as practical and efficient as modes of transportation was too revolutionary for the mediocre minds in charge.

  The official disapproval continued. In April, when Le Corbusier presented a new design for a structure at the exposition, he got no response. When a site for it was finally granted in September, the location was remote and contained trees that could not be moved.

  Le Corbusier let it be known that he was injured and disgusted. But his enthusiasm did not wane. He now sought financial backing for this pavilion by approaching various automobile companies. The car, having destroyed the city in one form, could be the source of its salvation in another.

  Le Corbusier offered Jean-Pierre Peugeot and André Citroën what we would today call a “naming opportunity” in exchange for funding. Peugeot was honored but refused; Citroën didn’t understand. André Michelin was in Morocco. But Monservon, who worked for Gabriel Voisin, went to the office on the rue de Sèvres. Voisin, a manufacturer of aircraft with an automobile division, agreed to be the patron and gave twenty-five thousand francs. Henri Frugès, heir to a sugar cube factory in Bordeaux and a Le Corbusier supporter, matched the amount, and the three-hundred-square-meter reinforced-concrete structure was erected. The new plan for Paris, which Le Corbusier named for Voisin, was revealed inside it.

  THE CONCEPT was megalomaniacal. Declaring large sections of Paris “antiquated…unhealthy…[and] overcrowded,” Le Corbusier called for destroying hundreds of acres of the Right Bank, including much of the charming ancient quarter called the Marais. To ease the excessive traffic on the Champs-Elysées, he proposed building a highway that would cut through the partially leveled city. Le Corbusier retained some remnants of the past—“certain historical monuments, arcades, doorways, carefully preserved because they are pages out of history or works of art”—but the rest would go.16

  One of the most consistent misunderstandings of the Le Corbusier legacy, however, is the notion that he intended everything to be destroyed as if by a bomb. The error is often reiterated that he wanted to obliterate the place des Vosges—that, if he had had his way, virtually every trace of Paris’s architectural history would have disappeared. The Plan Voisin was radical—in most people’s judgment outrageous—but, although it called for a total rebuilding of much of the area between the Seine and Montmartre, the intention was always for the place des Vosges, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Palais Royal, and various other buildings to remain. Le Corbusier aimed to make them all the more visible. The goal was not the eradication of the past but a selective pruning that would leave the best behind to be savored in a new way. The great open spaces, such as the Tuileries and the Invalides, that had been essential to the urban idea
of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon would be returned to their former glory.

  In front of the diagram of the Plan Voisin, 1925

  Driving a Fiat on the roof track of the Lingotto factory in Turin, mid-1920s

  But Paris would now consist mostly of variations of the building type seen in the City for Three Million. Le Corbusier envisioned carefully spaced, cruciform skyscrapers, 245 meters high. He explained that these would attract investment from America, England, Japan, and Germany. There would, in addition, be blocks of new residential units.

  THE LITTLE-KNOWN TRUTH is that although Le Corbusier invented and presented the Plan Voisin, he did not intend for it to be followed. He neither imagined it really would be done nor thought it should be. “The ‘Voisin’ scheme does not claim to have found a final solution to the problem of the center of Paris; but it may serve to raise the discussion to a level in keeping with the spirit of our new age,” he wrote at the time.17 No utterance of Le Corbusier’s is more important to a correct understanding of his legacy. He had not wanted to ravage a world he loved. He had been deliberately provocative; he had done his utmost to stimulate new thinking; but what he put forward as a hypothetical proposal was just that.

  8

  The Plan Voisin and the City for Three Million were displayed in two large dioramas, each about one hundred square meters, in a rotunda within the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau. Detailed plans for the cruciform skyscrapers and for entire colonies of these new dwellings hung on the walls inside this imposing silo.