Another fight troubled him more. The architect was furious at the builder of La Petite Maison, Colombo. He put the blame entirely on the builder for the dampness problem and leaking roof that had his mother increasingly upset. He insisted that Colombo, negligent as well as miserly, had played a dirty trick and not made an adequate foundation. He had never before had an equivalent problem in anything he had built: “Only that damn foundation is betraying us. Besides I had ordered hollow cinder blocks with a hole; Colombo made them of cement with three holes. Such walls have no consistency and no insulation. He neglected this when I was not around. I had ordered Pitcholine for the roof; he used Toitex and he made neither gutters nor connecting outlets against the parapet. It is all very clear, unfortunately. I have written Colombo to put his nose in his own doo-doo and to keep him from blaming our construction methods.”16
To have built a second disaster for his mother was more than he could bear. He assured Marie that, busy as his schedule was with the office reopening after the August holiday, he would stay with her until he got the situation completely rectified. Le Corbusier reminded Marie that the fifty-six houses at Pessac had survived torrid temperatures and the heaviest winter storms and that there was not a single ceiling stain—even in empty, unheated houses. His Stuttgart project was being praised to the hilt. He would solve the problems at Vevey!
5
Once the house in Vevey sprang its leak, everything began to spiral downward. By the end of September 1927, Le Corbusier was convinced that his League of Nations foes would defeat him.
His cousin Pierre became his latest scapegoat. Le Corbusier could not stand being at Pierre’s mercy whenever he went to Vevey to be with his mother. “That damn Pierre hasn’t written to tell me what he’s doing.” Le Corbusier complained to Yvonne on one occasion, “If Pierre deigned to specify his intentions I’d feel better about it…. It annoys me, since it’s the same story every year. He doesn’t even realize what a lack of consideration it is. He mustn’t get it into his head that I’m enjoying myself.”17
Swimming remained Le Corbusier’s emotional salvation. Trying to resolve the problems of his mother’s house, which he now called the Villa Le Lac, he could raise his spirits by taking off in the freshwater just a few steps from its doors. “If I didn’t have the opportunity to swim (and I swim remarkably well) I’d be completely disgusted,” he wrote Yvonne.18 Gliding through water, he encountered no obstacles and could control his own path. For the rest of his life, up to his last breath, this was how he could feel that he controlled his own destiny.
On the milestone of his fortieth birthday, Le Corbusier wrote his mother from Paris. She was, he reminded her, “the creator of my life on earth.” Le Corbusier vividly reconstructed his own birth.
Forty years ago this must have been a very painful day: that is what is called a deliverance. Maman was delivered, and a big baby filled the house with his cries. He had a cloud of hair on his skull, a mouth from ear to ear, and ears you could fold over his mouth.
Forty years later, a handsome boy, of course. And the best thing about it all is that he has no notion of blaming his mother for having brought him into the world. No! All’s well—why wouldn’t it be? The road is stony, the chariot must be pulled; one pulls.19
The bizarre monologue continued. His father had had worries and doubts about him; now Georges would have had reason for optimism. Le Corbusier charted his evolution for his mother.
In any case these forty years represent ten years of painful and unrewarded efforts. Then ten years of drifting, of hopes, and of a certain pride on the part of the parents. Then ten years of ineffable pride mixed with fear. And then at last ten years when it would have been better that the parents knew nothing of what battles were involved, what emotional situations, intense troubles, resolutions, rage, and desperate efforts which failed, ever-present hopes, etc., etc.
These forty years having passed, there intervenes a salient point along the curve which I hope will continue its spiral ascent. After these groups of four decades, three of which in any case are marked by what one might call human sufferings—dreams ever and again defeated by inexorable realities—the struggle seems to be achieving, in its most effective areas, gains worth the trouble they cost…. Whereas during at least the first two decades, for twenty years (!!!) that struggle was so often impotent and futile.
You were not sufficiently included in our joys—as was also true of the opposite—we were under great strain and it was better to keep it to ourselves.
And so much for the forty years and my thanks to my chief collaborator and my deep gratitude as well to the worthy and loyal father who along with her raised us.20
Le Corbusier had recently been in Zurich for a “council of war” regarding the increasingly precarious League of Nations situation. He launched into a related comparison of Germany to France. Having gone to Stuttgart to work on his houses there, he was appalled by Germany in general. Its cities were atrocious; they made one physically ill. Even the most allegedly sophisticated citizens were barbarians at heart. Paris, on the other hand, was “a dazzling crystal, straight, transparent, concentrated, conditioned, human”—adjectives that constitute the Corbusean ideal. The roads in Germany were disastrous, while the minute one crossed the border at Strasbourg one was in the land of “Colbert and Napoleon: clear and distinct ideas! Straight and magnificent roads, with cathedrals of trees planted along them, already two centuries old! The whole country has proportion, measure, style.”21
Le Corbusier always categorized nationalities, inextricably linking a country’s art and architecture with the citizenry that had made it. Were the largest buildings in Geneva to bear his imprimatur, they would signify the strength and independence of Switzerland; if not, if the League of Nations were to wear the tired vestiges of timid academicism, he would have to separate himself even further from the homeland he so disparaged.
6
In mid-October, Le Corbusier received a letter from William Ritter saying that Janko Czadra, Ritter’s longtime partner, had died. Le Corbusier wrote his mentor, “Since my father’s death, a death before my eyes, a new aspect of life has become apparent to me: that of death. And a whole cycle of ideas inevitably leading to it. Death is everywhere. I had no idea.”22
Ritter was the exemplar of human tenderness. “I have no idea what’s become of you. Dare I hope that you’ve grown terribly strong? You must know that your image and your presence are as distinct for me as ever—but you who are so violent of heart, what’s become of you? You were all heart. That’s what remains to me of you. And Janko was the object of your heart’s impulses.”23
There was a price to pay for such sensitivity. Denial was essential for vulnerable people to survive life’s unbearable sadness. “My mother, I believe, is sustained by an almost alarming stoicism. It is the triumph of life. Tell me how you really are? Deliberate blindness and, luckily, daily exhaustion overwhelm us, which is how human resistance is formed.”24
This had become Le Corbusier’s own formula for survival. He believed that to manage in the face of setbacks and the inevitable tragedies of human existence one has to wear blinders and fatigue oneself in everyday struggles.
Offering condolences to the grief-stricken Ritter, Le Corbusier brought the subject back to himself:
Remember: I owe you a lot. You are the first to have awakened me. I wanted to confide in you, in spite of everything. I say in spite of everything, for it is in spite of everything that life goes on and supplants disillusion and decline.
I have been singularly affected the last two years by natural phenomena, cosmic events that torment me with their grim fatality, their indifference. A dramatic obsession whenever I travel and am released from the specific and intimate problems that absorb me: painting and thinking about architecture.
Life opens its fan, and there is drama everywhere. At which point laughter becomes the buoy.
But at certain moments you cannot laugh; laughter is only a mask.25
He coun
seled fortitude to the bereaved Ritter: “How ardently I wish you the potential of strength you need in order to go on, for there can be no stopping.” Le Corbusier acknowledged his own struggles. “I’m afraid you might think me insincere, a parvenu. I am, as always, a student at the foot of the mountain. Praise terrifies me and knowledge renders me ever more timid, for there are holes that open everywhere. I have survived the worst miseries, but I have always had joy. I am still just a little bird on the branch, and today, when the elite concern themselves with my important case at Geneva (a battle of the old against a faith), I am increasingly anxious, in my innermost self, behind my closed door.”26
To Ritter, the architect allowed his deep-seated sense of isolation and fragility: “I was a child, and the elders were above me. I felt the shadow fall over me and the horizon was limited. The duties of solidarity were revealed. Strength leads us to be conscious of the weaknesses of the young and the old, those who have fewer powers of resistance. A lonely, a very lonely situation. No support. On the contrary. People turn to you for support. Which is serious. Such moments are no laughing matter. Then come events in one’s innermost self, and one realizes that life foments suffering everywhere.”27
Le Corbusier had written Ritter frequently in recent times and been devastated to have no response. He had assumed that Ritter was not answering because the music writer had given up on him; now he realized it was because Ritter was completely distracted by Czadra’s ill health. “You must have doubted me,” he wrote. “I told myself: it’s fate. You didn’t like (or no longer liked) a life of combat. You had taken refuge within yourself. I kept thinking: ‘he takes me for a lost cause.’ If you knew how indifferent everything is to me, aside from the tyrannical search for perfection. And now I realize quite clearly that it becomes more indefinable every day. But I don’t want to collapse into skepticism, I must avoid despair.”28
“Ch.E. Jeanneret” ended by lambasting himself for having been so consumed with his own issues that he had misconstrued Ritter’s silence. Their friendship waned with the passage of time, but William Ritter was one of the rare people whom Le Corbusier admired unfailingly. For in his music and fiction, and with his undisguised homosexuality, the writer was both passionate and brave: the essentials for a Le Corbusian hero.
7
It suited Le Corbusier to pin his failure to win the League of Nations project on bureaucratic rigidity and nationalistic competitiveness and to ignore the other factors. In November 1927, a committee assigned to review the nine schemes under consideration said of Le Corbusier, “In his desire to innovate, he unremittingly applies—to a structure that must nevertheless assume a representative role—certain formulas and procedures that, presented in so schematic a form, seem more suitable to purely utilitarian buildings.”29
Le Corbusier disparaged such disapproval as complete moral corruption—and occasion for the sort of battle he relished. At the start of December, he wrote his mother, “The blackest state diplomacy is at work. I’m quite informed. Will such intrigues prevail against public opinion? It’s all becoming very emotional. I’m flinging my last reserves into the front lines these days. We’ll see! If we’re defeated, it’s still not over. In any case it will be a fine spectacle!”30
The struggle was of originality versus conventionalism, courage versus timidity, and bureaucratic rigidity versus a logical variation of the rules. He did not allow that there might be intellectually honest reasons to oppose his ideas.
While thrilling, the imbroglio was taxing, and he was contending with the change of season: “As always I dread winter, death dealer in days gone by.”31 Yet the magnitude of the controversy, the richness of the stakes, and his belief in his own rightness in a battle of good versus evil were the perfect antidote to end-of-the-year blues. “Whatever happens our defeat will ignite the powder, and there will be a great demonstration on the part of the elite,” he wrote his mother on December 16.32
ON DECEMBER 22, 1927, the jury for the League of Nations complex rendered its final decision, declaring as the winner a scheme that had been designed by four academics: two Frenchmen, an Italian, and a Hungarian. Seventy-four-year-old Henri Paul Nénot, who for more than thirty years had been chairman of the architecture department at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was appointed director general for architecture.
Le Corbusier did not give up. He and Pierre rapidly came up with a second set of plans, which they submitted in the correct ink. When those revised documents failed to sway the jury, the architect asked Hélène de Mandrot, an influential Swiss with a passion for modern architecture, to intervene on his behalf. The Jeanneret cousins were encouraged when ambassadors from five of the member countries pointed out the many flaws and shortcomings of the winning proposal. The spaces for storage and the garages were inadequate; the lighting would not work; there were problems with the design of the facade; the scale of the staircases and elevators was not correct.
The victorious architects, Le Corbusier insisted, were guilty of plagiarism, neglecting to give him the credit he deserved for the many elements of his own scheme that they had stolen for theirs and now botched. He believed that it was “incontestible [sic] that this joint design was directly inspired by the design of MM. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,” and asked for a further meeting of the ambassadors.33 But for the jury the competition was over.
XXV
1
In 1927, Charlotte Perriand was a lively, svelte, flapperesque woman of twenty-four. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, and her smile revealed a flash of pearly white teeth. Everything about her bespoke confidence and flair.
In 1925 Perriand, who was a student of design, saw the Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau. It opened her eyes to modernism. The following year, she left her parents’ traditional middle-class Right Bank apartment for a new life. She married an Englishman, rented an old photographic studio looking out on Saint Sulpice, danced the Charleston, and marveled at “a stark naked black Josephine [Baker], her little ass embellished with a string of bananas, dancing to a wild rhythm—an authentic femme sauvage.”1
Determinedly adventurous, Perriand bobbed her straight, shining hair and wore a necklace of chrome-plated brass balls. She made her Bar sous le Toit—a daring, minimalist glass-topped unit on a truncated I-beam with a glistening nickel front—which was a hit at the 1927 Salon d’Automne. She became confident of her talent, but was unsure of what to do next.
Having read Le Corbusier’s books, Perriand decided to storm the architect’s headquarters unannounced. It was morning, however. Le Corbusier, as usual, was not there; he was at home, painting and designing. Pierre Jeanneret, who received her at the door, was cordial, but Perriand refused to state her case to anyone but Le Corbusier himself. That afternoon, she showed up again without an appointment, now with a portfolio of drawings under her arm. She was duly intimidated by Le Corbusier, forbidding behind his large glasses, but Perriand had moxie; when the master asked her what she wanted, she replied, “To work with you.”2
The architect took a quick look at the fetching young woman’s drawings. “We don’t embroider pillows here,” he snapped. He showed her the door. On her way out, Perriand told him about the exhibit at the Salon d’Automne and left her card. The next day, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret visited her stand at the salon and then wrote to offer Perriand a job.
When she excitedly told a professional acquaintance that she was going to work for Le Corbusier, he warned her not to. She would dry up, the friend insisted; to take a job in Le Corbusier’s office meant becoming a drone. She never forgot the warning, but for the next ten years Charlotte Perriand remained an employee at 35 rue de Sèvres.
PERRIAND was ignited by the intense engagement of everyone in the office: “Think of that heroic period, pioneering and penniless, with access to so few resources, think of all those projects of architecture or urbanism never to be realized yet so carefully studied and planned,…projects in relation to humanity…. To create the human nest a
s well as the tree that would bear it. We ended by believing in it all. Enthusiastic young men from the best schools the world over came here, not only for architecture but for Le Corbusier, for his way of reconsidering all problems, for his aura.”3
Perriand’s first task as an employee was to help with furniture and revisions to the interior for the Villa La Roche, which had been begun four years earlier. Combining the concepts of Vitruvius with the latest technological advances, she, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier worked in tandem to create seating and tables and the other necessities of comfortable living. Le Corbusier had long dabbled in apartment furnishings, but now he wanted revolution inside the house as well as outside—furniture as technically and aesthetically streamlined as his architecture.
2
Tubular steel had been introduced into furniture design in 1925 at the Bauhaus. The team at 35 rue de Sèvres worked on armchairs, chaise longues, and other pieces that employed this lightweight, tough tubing that had been invented for the construction of bicycles. At nightfall, Le Corbusier evaluated their progress. He was mocking and scurrilous, mainly in his insistence that the scale was all wrong. Perriand decided that she should make full-scale prototypes of the new pieces. She went to the enormous hardware store BHV to buy rivets and just the right springs for suspending the support of a chaise longue, got her locksmith to construct the steel frames, and located a saddlemaker who sewed hides in the style that had been perfected by the luxury saddlemaker Hermès. She used English leather, considered the best in the world, for armchair upholstery, and had cushions made with the finest goose-feather filling. With the same artisans who helped her create the Bar sous le Toit, she completed the assembly.
Drawing of different ways of sitting, ca. 1928
Le Corbusier Page 32
