Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  10

  When he was not boasting, Le Corbusier approached his success with a sense of measure. The princess of Polignac and the Michael Steins had come to the office about major projects, his Almanac of Modern Architecture was about to be in the bookstores, and he was making a film on urbanism, but “at the heart of this tumultuous existence, I persist in my pictures with stubbornness and fatalism. A lot of clients come to us now from high society as well as from the aristocracy of industry. It’s like a sudden launching. Of course, after such hopes there is always the counterattack of adversity; the franc is collapsing and the rising cost of houses makes chaos of our budgetary forecasts.”37

  To demonstrate his rise to fame, the architect enclosed news clippings for his mother, but he singled out one that had appeared in the obscure Revue des Jeunes, claiming to Marie that it was the very first time he had been moved by something written about him. For the text in this magazine intended for young people acknowledged Le Corbusier’s work as “une affaire de Coeur. As always, everyone finds me the pitiless rationalist, the sectarian: here I am considered, above all, a man, and I am happy for that.”38

  He was also still a vulnerable little boy. Le Corbusier closed this letter, “There, Ma Petite Maman. My eyes are burning, the light hurts me and the white paper is blinding. So, beddy-bye. Beddy-bye and kisses from your son, Edouard.”39

  11

  At the end of May, Le Corbusier wrote his mother about the sixty houses that were nearly finished at Pessac: “As I told you, setting modesty aside, I am astonished myself. Astonished to witness an absolutely new, unheralded architectural phenomenon, not bizarre yet telling us that things have changed, that there is a new spirit—here is a manifestation of that new spirit.”40 He was anticipating the official opening with feverish excitement. Le Corbusier, Pierre, and Anatole de Monzie, the French minister of beaux arts, were to go from Paris in de Monzie’s personal train car. Henri Frugès was ecstatic that the minister would be visiting his home territory.

  Albert would be there as well—all that was needed was for his mother to make the trip, too. Le Corbusier urged her, “You don’t know the really beautiful countries. Switzerland is not a beautiful country.”41 Travel, he explained, was no longer a big deal; his one regret was that his father, who had studied geography so avidly and would have loved to see more places, had been denied the chance. Le Corbusier was determined to provide that opportunity to La Petite Maman.

  Marie Jeanneret did not make the trip, but he described to her the event on June 13: “The mood was gay, free, unembarrassed, and one might say that the heart was in everything. The minister, Frugès, we ourselves, all of us were disinterested, pursuing only a dream of life’s improvement.”42 The opening was packed with journalists and filmed for the news reports shown in the cinema. After the official speeches, Le Corbusier gave interviews.

  What he had created on the outskirts of Bordeaux had the joy of the event. “The color of the walls, a procedure never yet employed, was a kind of universal festivity, and the brilliant white set off the pinks—the greens, the browns, the blues; a unity of detail in everything, a tireless variety everywhere. The big cars are in the new streets. Leaning over the banisters, climbing up and down stairs, silhouetted against the sky, a crowd occupies the roof terraces over which spill geraniums, fuchsias, bushes and clumps of reeds.”43

  The crowd on the vegetation-covered terrace was 150 people standing on the deck of the model house of Pessac, where the pine and chestnut trees surrounding the structure made the perfect backdrop to the new architecture. Everything was in place: artistic and natural beauty, the poetry of life, human generosity. Henri Frugès gave “a splendid speech, eloquent, actually ardent, setting forth his program of altruism…. I explain how we set about working, a technical speech, actually…and finish up by claiming the right to a certain lyricism, instancing the poetry of our creation.”44

  The sun was shining brightly when the minister then told the audience that he had read Toward a New Architecture. Le Corbusier could not hide his pride from his mother. At dinner afterward, in Frugès’s house, Le Corbusier was seated next to de Monzie, and they spoke like close friends. He and Pierre went back to Paris with the minister in his “wagon salon” and slept like babies.

  It was all a dream, wonderful to experience and even more marvelous to recount to the person who had given him life and raised him: “It’s so you can have your own little celebration, Petite Maman; after all, you have the true soul of an architect, and weren’t you the first to know how to live in a Corbusier house?”45

  That the buildings had not received the necessary permits and that nothing could actually be inhabited was beside the point.

  12

  In early July, on one of the many trips he took to Vevey in the months following his father’s death, Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne during a free moment while walking the puppy, now named Bessie. “DD” told his “Petit Vonvon,” in a voice of unblemished contentment, “I’m walking this little mutt and waiting for her to do her pipi. She’s a handsome brute with a very becoming sky-blue leash. A boatman’s dog.”46

  With his mother in the Villa Le Lac, late 1920s

  The dog was easier than his human intimates. His mother was insistent that he stay on with her longer than he intended, while Yvonne was impatient for him to get back to Paris. He was also having problems with Albert, who had asked their mother for money. Edouard assured Marie that he had become directly involved in his brother’s latest professional endeavors, so she need not worry about his request. “I won’t forget about Albert, but I’ll deal with him discreetly—though actively,” he wrote pompously once he had returned to France. Then, to assure her of his own financial well-being, he boasted, “As for me, we have the king’s court around here. It’s becoming a client a day, all over the place.”47 If he could not hope to rival his brother as their mother’s preferred son and fellow musician, at least he could take the upper hand as a breadwinner.

  ALBERT WAS NEEDIER, but, unlike Edouard, did not instruct or challenge his mother. Le Corbusier might conquer the world of architecture, but he never achieved his goal of upstaging his brother as Marie’s favorite. The architect perpetually barraged her with news clippings about the giant he had become and emphasized his role as her protector, but the widow now had an issue she considered more pressing. The villa in Vevey had water leaking into the living room; if he was such a great architect, surely he could solve the problem.

  MARIE JEANNERET was, in addition, tormented by fears about her household expenses. She could not fathom the costs she was incurring for water and gas at La Petite Maison. Le Corbusier angrily reminded his mother that she had the same income as when his father had been alive and that she used to mock Georges for his worries about money. He blamed her for torturing herself. He felt punished—as if she still held him accountable for the disaster of the Maison Blanche.

  Again he informed Marie that he was working like someone possessed, pushing himself until midnight every day, including Sundays. And for all that he was doing in the world, he was occupying himself with her issues and taking care of Albert. He lectured his mother:

  Petite Maman, be careful, keep your wits about you. Don’t make mountains out of molehills. Try to find a purpose in your day, recognize what’s important and what’s secondary. And always remember that forty percent of what the mind undertakes or what one actually does must fall through. So don’t cry “wolf.”…

  You’re making me write this morning so that my letter will reach you without delay. But you’re not getting the best of it, for I’m tense and nervous—I know I have other things to do. But of course since you’re ma petite Maman I have written and I’m glad to do so; but it’s not much of a letter—more of a porcupine. Your Sonny gives you a big hug, Ed.48

  To please Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret remained his greatest challenge.

  13

  In August 1926, Le Corbusier learned to swim. He had allowed himself and Yvon
ne the luxury of a vacation in the holiday town of Le Piquey, near the large Bay of Arcachon. In this first summer after his father’s death, the warm weather and sunshine at the edge of the sea were a great comfort. He wrote his mother, “It takes an hour and a half to cross the pine forest to reach the ocean. Site of a simple majesty, a tremendous beach stretching in a straight line over a good deal of the coast from the Gulf of Gascony. The ocean is protected by a wide ribbon of dunes at the edge of the fields, the sand entirely sown with yellow immortelles, shifting like the sands of the desert. Then the pine groves begin, sometimes tall trunks, sometimes low bushes; a warm and intense smell of resin, of turpentine, and above it all, relentlessly, a burning sun, making the sand hot and the shade cool. A constant breeze keeps the temperature mild all day long. O deadly Paris! Here the pure sand everywhere, clean hands, clean feet, clean clothes. O filthy Paris!”49

  With Pierre Jeanneret at Le Piquey, late 1920s

  He had read a newspaper article that represented Switzerland as the equivalent of Siberia. Driving home the contrast from his seaside Eden, he continued, “Here we’ve had nothing but an implacable sun, but all very magnificent and welcome. I find a certain humor in thinking of you fussing in your twelve square yards of garden and knowing you’re quite happy doing so while we have these vast spaces of pine forests and the ocean.”50 He could have chosen to point out the oceanic nature of Lac Leman—that small garden faced what looked like a sea—but something in Le Corbusier was tortured.

  One of the issues was Pessac, where he attributed the failure to hook up water to be a result of politics: “All this time the ministers administered, doing so in their very bourgeois way in order to keep up the spirits of the money-lenders who quite patriotically had invested, most of it abroad. Poincaré [Raymond Poincaré, the French prime minister at the time] is not my hero, far from it; a man of the conservatives, of the bourgeois, against whom we struggle every day. But of course, the money is with the bourgeois, therefore the bourgeois must be saved.”51

  Le Corbusier was determined to release himself from anything he considered bourgeois, too focused on money, or Swiss. He wrote his Calvinist parent, “In the last ten days…nobody has done anything at all. I haven’t read a line nor done a stitch of work. But I’ve learned to swim very well, and yesterday across the dunes and the woods I made an excursion quite flattering for my age: I went to the ocean with Pierre, running all the way without stopping once: 24 minutes going, 28 coming back, a distance considerably greater than from La Chaux-de-F. to Le Locle (roundtrip) (9km).”52

  One detail of the holiday he left out was the presence of Yvonne. Marie certainly knew she was there, but Edouard still wanted his widowed mother picturing him alone.

  14

  Le Corbusier wrote his mother about a book he had been reading by René Allendy, a pioneer of psychoanalysis in France. Born in Paris in 1889, Allendy specialized in dream interpretation and issues of sexuality. Le Corbusier reflected, “Everywhere a generalized movement appears in favor of the mind and exclusive of a narrow materialism. The former does not operate without the latter. I often experience this and often I am accused by some of a terrible rationalism, by others of being a dreamer and an aesthete. Yet architecture lives on relations which are a quivering lyre exclusive of practical conditions and techniques of the problem: ‘touch me, touch me not,’ everything is there. That’s all there is to it, art is here or is not. I am moved, I am not moved. And to concern oneself with things that provoke emotion is one of the rare felicities of living, and it’s because we concern ourselves with such things as these that we are happier than the rest, exclusive of material conditions.”

  In this confused exegesis on the balance between the emotional and the practical, Le Corbusier went on to say that his father was “permanently and constantly present: he is here, you know he is.” He allowed, “My regrets, my sadnesses are constantly happy. I think: if Papa were here.” He contemplated the joy Georges, “a man who passionately imagined the earthly paradises he divined elsewhere than in that severe and wretched Jurassic trench,” would have known if only he had seen the places where his younger son now traveled and worked.53

  The seacoast and the precinct of art both belonged to the sacred realm of feeling that his father had recognized as one of life’s goals, however elusive and difficult it might be to achieve.

  15

  Returning from his halcyon holiday, Le Corbusier remained overwhelmed by thoughts of the man who had died eight months earlier. The architect wrote his mother, “Yesterday morning between Nevers and Paris his last image haunted me continuously. Moreover I kept looking at my hands shrunken by the physical activity of this vacation, and they were a little like Papa’s hands. Of Papa I keep the throbbing image of those last days, of the day when I realized, precisely a year ago, that he would be leaving us…. That magnificent image at his death which is engraved all the deeper because I could see it so clearly in my drawing of him and then keep it in mind. That image which gives me courage for the future because I have felt the nature of the blood that flows through me so that in this dray-horse life we lead—and this jackals’ life, this life of hyenas and wolves, I realize very clearly that I belong to one side and not the other, and referring myself to the testimony of our origins—our father, our mother—I move ahead, tranquil and calm, seeking one thing and not the other. You write so nicely, your letters are so true, you are so young, so frank, that I am entirely happy reading you, feeling how strong you are, how healthy in mind and body. When you write you are yourself. Your identity is complete, externals vanish. Then it is extremely comforting for a son to feel his Maman leaning over his desk in your little family dream and to know that his Papa is lying in peace, hands crossed over his chest, under the cypresses of the hill at Saint Martin. My dearest Maman, an affectionate kiss from your Ed. And to Bessie—show her my photograph so she can absorb it, you know how much I love the little creature.”54

  Now more than ever, he yearned for his mother to be happy and was desperate that she not feel constrained by the architecture of La Petite Maison or by her own mania for neatness: “It’s you who makes that house alive. Knowing how to arrange each thing so that it becomes animated by a certain grace.”55 He had designed La Petite Maison to give her joy, not to impose a way of life, and to make household maintenance and daily chores as easy as possible. Le Corbusier’s goals for his mother became his dream for all domestic design.

  It therefore stung hard when Marie Jeanneret and Albert forgot Le Corbusier’s thirty-ninth birthday. Three days after the fact, once he was sure there was no greeting that had been delayed by the post, he wrote his mother, “It hasn’t happened to me since I was 16, when Papa told me: ‘Now you’re too big a boy.’ Tender kisses from your Ed.”56 Without specifically mentioning Marie’s oversight, he let her know that his Aunt Marguerite, a distant relative, had sent a card, and he had received flowers and a new pipe from unnamed sources.

  This was the first October 6 since his father’s death, and now his mother was happily ensconced in the small family house with her preferred child. It was more than Le Corbusier could bear.

  MARIE’S DISTRACTION was understandable; Albert was having a form of psychological breakdown. In treatment with the same Dr. Allendy whose theories Le Corbusier had been reading, he had left his wife and her children in Paris and retreated to the family house, where he was mainly making music by clanking rods against bizarre arrangements of drinking glasses he had suspended upside down from strings.

  Le Corbusier was forced to assume responsibility for the music school Albert had started in Paris. As he made clear to his mother several weeks after the birthday episode, he was now busier than ever before as an architect and painter of international importance. He framed his recitations of his own successes as if they were intended primarily to reassure her that at least one of her children was functioning well, but he relished his exalted position while Albert was floundering.

  In spite of the birthday
slight, Edouard now also sent his mother two samples of cloth and a fur collar for a coat—and he constantly inquired about the dog he had given her. Surely she must see that he had become the good child.

  16

  At the end of October, a new German edition of Toward a New Architecture sold out instantly. The success made Le Corbusier even more manic. As the hours of daylight decreased with the onset of autumn, he wrote his mother, “The day is wretchedly short of hours. And the hours themselves are even shorter. Ideas attack from all sides. I must achieve, I must act; so it’s a kind of frenzy of work and an avaricious use of each minute. Now that the galley seems launched, everything begins to open up and multiply.” He was, he told her, engaged in “a crushing labor.”57

  Nonetheless, he would bring the design for his father’s tomb when he visited in a few weeks. He wrote, “I think of you in your tiny house, busily doing everything for everyone and often think of our Papa on this anniversary of his last sickness when it finished him off. What anguish we had last year at this time. And how a capital event intervenes in life, suddenly changing everything! And how, too, a man can straighten up and pursue his destiny all the same, a destiny quite unknown and ineffable. Tomorrow? What will happen tomorrow? There is the tomorrow we prepare for quite logically. And the other one, unknown, otherwise determined, which may suddenly intervene.”58

  Le Corbusier was desperate for his mother to attend a lecture he was giving in Zurich. He spelled out the details: “Take a ticket for Zurich, straight to Vevey. My lectures are at Zurich on the 24th and 25th, so get one combined ticket for La Chaux–Zurich–Vevey. I’ll pay the difference for La Chaux–return. So it’s all arranged.”59

  For once, she managed a trip. Afterward, he wrote, “You may not imagine how happy I was to be with you in Zurich and of course I was so happy that my second lecture went off well and you had nothing to blush for. I was very touched by the testimonials of respect and sympathy which you provoked. Your attitude and your lovely expression of Corbusier’s old mother made respect flourish all around you.”60