The pavilion itself was the model for the standard residential unit that would have been reproduced ad infinitum in neat blocks at the outskirts of the new ideal city. If, to current eyes, the residential unit fits into a known canon of modernism, to its viewers in 1925 it offered as powerful a jolt as the urban plan. It was essentially an unadorned, unmodulated white concrete box with a facade sheathed in a taut, industrial-style window wall. The inside was punctuated by an enclosed garden with a tree popping through a circular hole in its roof. This last detail, a response to the exigencies of the wretched site, now became part of the general concept.
Walking near their office, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret had conceived of the scale after studying scaffolding in front of the three-story-high Le Bon Marché. They became convinced that human beings would profit if they followed that commercial model in residential architecture. Ceiling heights should be nearly doubled from the existing norm of nine to twelve feet to eighteen to twenty-two feet. Housing should be set back farther from the street and built higher than it had been.
Inside, the pavilion depended on commercial lighting fixtures made for shop windows. Some of the chairs and tables came from a catalog for hospital furniture; most of the cabinets and closets were built-in. The glassware to be used domestically had been made for laboratory experiments. Le Corbusier explained that the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau and its contents were “the fruit of a mind preoccupied with the problems of the future.”18
Less advanced minds did not see it this way. Controversy broke out. The jury of the exhibition, according at least to Le Corbusier’s subsequent account, wanted to give the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau and the Plan Voisin its highest design award. But its vice president, none other than Le Corbusier’s former employer Auguste Perret, declared, “It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t hold together, it lacks any logic. There’s no architecture here.”19
Exterior of the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau, Paris, 1925
The Building Committee for the exhibition erected an eighteen-foot-high wall in front of the new pavilion to keep the public from seeing it. Whether this was a construction wall, simply meant to keep the project under wraps while it was in process, or deliberate censorship, as Le Corbusier makes it sound in his accounts, is unclear. But Le Corbusier always presented that wall as a symbol of the wishes of the forces against him to conceal his work, even implying that it was re-erected after the inauguration of the pavilion. He falsified and dramatized the maneuvers of the opposition; the pavilion remained plainly visible after its delayed opening. Nonetheless, the disapproval was real.
9
The printed invitation that served as an admissions card for the inauguration ceremony invited its recipients to enter the Grand Palais on Friday, July 10, at four o’clock in the afternoon. In blocky, sans-serif type, as lean and right-angled as the pavilion itself, it declared, “This pavilion is better hidden than any other in the exposition.”20 Le Corbusier wanted no one to overlook the unforgivably obscure location. But once people made their way to this structure tucked into the garden between the two wings of the Grand Palais, they were in a new world.
The pavilion was elegant: light, graceful, imparting a feeling of cheer and optimism. Inside as well as out, it was clean, fit, and energetic. Those laboratory jars and hospital furniture now used for domestic purposes were so charming and effective that they were to infiltrate the culture, so that today there are carafes resembling chemists’ flasks for sale in housewares stores all over the world.
There were ingenious wardrobes and clothes cupboards built into walls or neatly suspended from them, as well as imaginative bookshelves and storage units, made out of metal by a manufacturer of office equipment, that allowed maximum space in the rooms. The new aesthetic was a revolutionary invitation to be practical, to live in a house that is easy to clean and maintain. At the same time, the clear and engaging forms were arranged at lively angles meant to lift human spirits. And bouquets of flowers burst joyously in the tidy assemblage. As always, Le Corbusier’s vision was a stage on which the splendor of nature could perform in plain view.
THE PAVILION was hung with work by the same pantheon of modernists as the Villa La Roche, among them Braque, Gris, Léger, Lipchitz, Ozenfant, and Picasso. Jeanneret/Le Corbusier’s own paintings were also displayed, in contradiction of his vow to keep that side of his creativity under wraps. Certain qualities of Jeanneret’s Purist canvases—the “‘marriage of objects in sharing an outline’ and his use of so-called regulating lines”—were echoed in the architectural organization. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s deployment “of color in his architectural interiors is closely related to the palette of his canvases.”21 For all the restraint and austerity of the ornament-free shell, the overall symphony was immensely rich.
ROBERT BRASILLACH—a journalist who, twenty years later, was executed as a collaborator with the Vichy regime—wrote that the furniture, and the ideas on furnishing, would last for a very long time. But the manufacturers who the architects hoped would take up his ideas showed no interest. Having imagined the pavilion and its fittings being repeated all over the world, Le Corbusier felt mocked and lambasted.
In his new book, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, he defended himself. “This is a sentiment born of the most arduous labor, the most rational investigation; it is ‘a spirit of constructions and of synthesis guided by a clear conception,’” Le Corbusier writes of the Pavilion and the Plan Voisin, without attributing the quotation.22
His 1925 The Decorative Art of Today intensified the propaganda campaign. It shocked the public in part because it virulently attacks Art Deco, which had become immensely popular. The book criticizes majority taste past and present. Blasting museums for “their tendentious incoherence,” it decries concepts of decoration and style in general, and laments, in particular, the contemporary plagiarism of folk art—which Le Corbusier wanted only in its genuine form.23
Le Corbusier cites, as objects worthy of display in a museum, “a plain jacket, a bowler hat, a well-made shoe, an electric light bulb with bayonet fixing,…and bottles of various shapes (Champagne, Bordeaux) in which we keep our Mercurey, our Graves, or simply our ordinaire… a bathroom with its enameled bath, its china bidet, its wash basin, and its glittering taps of copper or nickel…a Ronéo filing cabinet with its printed index cards, tabulated, numbered, perforated, and indented.”24 What many of us today consider the courage and imagination of that declaration of beauty struck contemporary readers as heresy.
Le Corbusier reproduces photographs of various types of fuselages and extols their merits, case by case. In this highly personal version of the history of ornament and design, he denigrates any number of classics with one of his dicta of the type that set the public on its ear: “I notice that a whole mass of objects which once bore the sense of truth have lost their content and are now no more than carcasses: I throw them out.”25
Those who were not stunned or enraged by the narrative admired its bravery. The poet Paul Valéry wrote Le Corbusier, “Monsieur, I have only one word to tell you about your book (The Decorative Art of Today), and that is a word I use rarely: admirable. I am embarrassed, moreover, to write it to you. I think alike with you on most of the subjects you deal with. It is all too easy for me to approve of my own sentiments…. Please be assured, Monsieur, that I hold your work in singular esteem, that I shall make it known to others to the best of my ability, and accept the expression of my gratitude and of all my sympathy.”26
But no praise was sufficient for Le Corbusier to abandon his role as a long-suffering martyr. He made himself the victim of “the generation of our fathers who protest, resist, refuse, mock, laugh, insult, deny. We are poor and we run round the race-track, exhausted and emotional. Our fathers sit in the stands…. Our fathers are smoking fat cigars and wearing top hats. They are fine, our fathers, and we are what we are—thin as street cats.”27 For the dapper and urbane son who sported fine Paris hats to portray the older generation in tha
t way was more than ironic. His own father was lean and worn out by a lifetime of hard work. He was also on some level the man whose approval Le Corbusier still most craved.
XXIII
1
On November 8, 1925, Marie Charlotte Emilie Jeanneret-Perret wrote both her sons. “Our dear papa is lost,” she informed them.
Georges had stomach cancer that had spread and formed a tumor in his liver. He had no idea how sick he was; nor could she let him find out. The doctor, who had told her this in private, said that one should hope only that Georges’s suffering would not be prolonged. If he had a hemorrhage, he would be spared extended pain. Marie was now following the doctor’s counsel and preparing the house so that he could be cared for there. Nurses would be required, she informed Albert and Edouard. But in fact their rugged mother was constitutionally incapable of hiring outside help and intended to do everything herself.
On November 29, anticipating Georges’s birthday two days later, Edouard sent his father a letter that focused on the heating system—he hoped it was working well—and on the beauty of the winter landscape. From Paris, he conjured the eternal setting of Vevey: “In winter this site is quite stately, vaster than in summer and of an impressive, polar sweetness. One no longer sees the mountains in the background, and the lake seems a sea.”1
Having latched onto other father figures as intellectual and professional mentors—L’Eplattenier, Ritter, and Auguste Perret among them—Le Corbusier had come to cherish his actual father as the model of beatific kindness. He wrote the dying man: “You have had many evidences of affection during your sickness. You see that you are surrounded by esteem and respect. By living without the fierce egoism which makes everything ugly, one creates around oneself a beneficent atmosphere. One would not realize this if, with the sudden arrival of the anguish of disease, those who breathe that atmosphere did not feel that their lungs would now lack it. It’s quite human, such testimonies come only at acute times, moments of crisis. You will have had not pride, for that is no longer suited to your age, but a certain emotion at feeling the sincere sentiment that surrounded you.” The younger son was overcome with admiration for his father’s “spirit…so calm, so detached from all pettiness.”2 He also told his ailing parent that he and Albert feared that their mother was not up to the task of taking care of an invalid. They had begged their Aunt Marguerite to hire someone at least to run errands for her.
At the end of November, Edouard provided his father with a thorough update on his work. He was upset that the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau was to be “cut into pieces by pneumatic concrete drills and transported by trucks to the suburban banks of the Seine,” but the first two houses of a new project at Pessac, near Bordeaux, were complete. “So much for my little gazette of accomplishments,” he summarized, going on to cheer up the invalid with the news that Albert was becoming more stable thanks to Lotti’s “great serenity of spirit.”3
As for his own female companion, Edouard made no mention of her to the dying Calvinist. But when Georges’s condition worsened a couple of weeks later and Edouard rushed to Switzerland, it was Yvonne to whom he poured out his woes. He had gone to see his father in the hospital. They had opened Georges’s chest and determined that the end was near. “If you knew how sad it is, how distressing, really lamentable to see my poor papa,” he wrote. “His body is awful to look at: a skeleton, and he has no blood left in him; he’s no more than a transparent man, and his voice is already quite remote. He thinks only of others and never complains, although he is in pain.”4
His mother, he told Yvonne, was “heroic.” She smiled in front of her dying husband, comforting him and making him believe that all was going well. Then she would go into the small kitchen of La Petite Maison and cry. That self-control in tandem with her tenderness was Le Corbusier’s ideal.
It was Christmas Eve. As Charles-Edouard Jeanneret sat in the small and exquisite villa he had built for his parents to savor the rewards of life as they looked out at the vastness of Lac Leman, he knew this was to be the last Christmas with all four of them alive.
2
Le Corbusier returned to Paris to be with Yvonne at New Year’s, although he told his parents it was for work. On December 31, he wrote his parents about the extent to which he felt
family ties. I am aware of the great friendship which unites us. And the gratitude I feel toward you who raised me allows me to tell you that you can count on me.
My dear good emaciated Papa, happy new year, good luck, bon courage, and take care of our Maman who is not so good at taking care of herself.
My dear good Maman, bon courage, and count on the support of your sons.
Swift recovery for dear Papa.
Affections from your ED.5
EDOUARD was plagued that he had left in the middle of their last holiday time as a family—in part because Albert had remained on the scene. But if he could not win in the role of more devoted son, he could certainly out-achieve his brother. At the start of January, he informed their parents that the magazine Architecture vivante was about to publish an article on La Petite Maison. Even as he mocked himself by adding, “I am incorrigible,” how proud he was to tell his dying father that the house was being honored in the most beautiful review in France.6
3
Within a few days, Edouard was called back to Vevey. He arrived on the morning of Sunday, January 10. Georges was to remain conscious for only twelve more hours. In those last moments with his mind still functioning, the elder Jeanneret discussed only what his son termed “the essentials” of life. He did not waste his breath on anything else.
At seven in the evening, the former mountain climber summoned his wife and sons. He wanted all three together at his bedside at the same time. “It’s over. I’m about to die. Love each other, help each other, be faithful to each other”—these were Georges Edouard Jeanneret’s departing words.7 Age sixty-nine, he then fell asleep, never to waken.
Once his father was unconscious, Edouard lay down next to him. At four in the morning, he was aware that the older man was no longer breathing. He turned on the light. His father was dead, with one hand lying across his chest, the other positioned underneath his right ear. In Edouard’s eyes, his father was “tranquil, mild, without agony.” The son immediately picked up pencil and paper and drew the portrait of his dead parent. A week later, reflecting on his time with the corpse, Le Corbusier wrote Ritter, “If you knew what gentle joy I felt at being close to him this way.”8
SHORTLY AFTER Georges Jeanneret died, Le Corbusier wrote to Yvonne. He was aware now more than ever that the human values he prized most of all were exemplified by the man who had taken his last breaths at his side. “My Papa died beside me tonight, tranquilly, without a word,” he wrote. “All day Sunday he was with us, saying the essential things. I have a feeling of tremendous loss. My father is beautiful. He was the kind of man you recognized by his handwriting: limpid, pure, lofty, disinterested.”9
4
Le Corbusier was just then working on an unprecedented number of private houses. A week after Georges died, he revealed to Ritter and Czadra the drift of his mind at this peak of professional success. The architect skimmed his fountain pen at rapid speed across the surface of three large pieces of paper, in perfect lines that appeared to rest on invisible scoring and could only have been written by a skillful draftsman: “Yes, my father is dead. You knew how tenderly all four of us were united; the two sons and their parents loved and esteemed each other; there was never any shadow.”10
Le Corbusier pushed aside any trace of the tempests caused by the Maison Blanche and acted as if the disputes and differences concerning his early travels and career had never occurred. Rather, he celebrated the way that La Petite Maison, sitting only four meters from the lake, with its simple train-car form and magnificent vistas, had become “a place of well-being and a therapeutic of the heart.”11
Le Corbusier assured Ritter and Czadra that the house had provided his father with a marve
lous tranquility in his final days: “So, my dear father has died in perfect peace. During the last two months that his end was certain, he had established himself in the little house on the lake like a solemn music between the noble landscape and the drama that was irrevocably fulfilling itself. At this season the site unfolds its vicissitudes, and a polar majesty impregnates the soul with mildness and repose.”12
Forty years later, near his own small house with its view of the water and horizon, Le Corbusier was, after an entirely different sort of lifetime, to try to replicate some of those same feelings.
THE EMOTIONS that consumed Le Corbusier in January 1926 belong to the sort of son who, having deliberately and ferociously gone miles beyond his own father, then idealizes the man he had been determined to outdo. “Did you know my father well enough to know how much, day after day, he identified himself with the serenity of this site?” he wrote. “On his mortal remains, one phrase: this was a man of peace. From his silence, from his meditation always concealed in his depths, emanated nonetheless a radiant force that acted upon everyone (and powerfully upon the humble). Dead, his hands crossed on his chest, in his white shroud, he was no longer Mr. Jeanneret; he was a reformer, a man of those great centuries of bold thought. My timid father was an audacious man. Before his gently but firmly formulated judgment everyone, his countless friends, were brought up short: this was the truth; there was no thought of interest underneath it; my father was clear, felt clearly, thought clearly. He always dreamed of palm trees and sunshine and smooth, simple houses; when his features became so distinct, the silhouette of his face revealed a sharp profile; one might have said: an Arab; at least, that shape of the skull and that nose where everything is outline and pure script.”13
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