The outside support encouraged Le Corbusier and Pierre to write an appeal demanding that the Council of the League of Nations overturn the decision of the five-person jury. “There is a lot of wind in the sails. And also a lot of concealed withdrawal in my mind. The tête-à-tête is the great gain I have made in the last few year,” he wrote his mother in mid-February.25
Shifting back and forth between a hard-line aggressive approach and his insistent fatalism, the architect was resigned to letting the chips fall where they would. On March 3, he wrote Marie, “We have done the best we could with what was within our means. Now once again the imponderables will function. Conscience mollified by work well done, I await with a smile the coming yes or no. And I will not be discomfited if it is no. That will be the proof the thing is not yet ripe.”26
The warrior had again become a buddha. Or so he tried to convince himself, until an article called “Les idées de M. Le Corbusier. Maisons et Cités de demain” by Paul Bourquin appeared in two parts in L’Impartial, a daily newspaper in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Its content demolished Le Corbusier’s calm; there was no more feigning the equanimity he was trying to maintain over events in Geneva. This was one onslaught he could not bear, because it was read by his mother’s friends.
Bourquin began by accusing Le Corbusier of “certain distinctly communistic tendencies, an arrant materialism, the abolition of thought and the triumph of action. Everything is organized around these three concepts.” His take on Le Corbusier’s domestic architecture was: “Le Corbusier’s vision of the world manages to find a model of beauty in the humblest rabbit run. One trembles to think of the lot of the poor wretches condemned to live in such houses which a wicked joker once called—quite accurately moreover—suicide crates…the great specialty of the architect Le Corbusier whom the Germans seem to hold in special esteem are the thickly planted terraces, pergolas and verandas he lavishes everywhere. On one terrace I notice built-in Swedish gymnastic equipment; in one bathroom hangs a punching-bag. I shall not conceal from our eminent compatriot that certain of his inventions have somewhat astounded me. Why for example make the main entrance to a house through the cellar? As for those shoulder-high reinforced-concrete barriers separating the bedrooms, they seem to lack a certain intimacy.”27
Bourquin’s article followed the line of thinking put forward by Swiss architect Alexandre de Senger in an essay in Le Bulletin technique de la Suisse romande, which, in turn, had been picked up by the Gazette de Lausanne. De Senger’s text, which echoed the official reasons given for rejecting Le Corbusier’s League of Nations project, was yet another frontal attack: “Thus Le Corbusier—any polyphony wearies him, overwhelms him, exhausts him. He complains, ‘The moon is not round, the rainbow is a fragment, the network of veins in marble is disturbing, inhuman.’ Exasperated, he exclaims: ‘Nothing in nature attains the pure perfection of the humblest machine.’…And to escape this dreadful torment he adds: ‘Nature is geometrical.’ Architecture, too, diminishes, torments, maddens this exhausted man. Only the simplest forms such as cubes and prisms are available to his comprehension; he delights in them because they deliver him from the superabundance of nature. And Le Corbusier, who believes himself to be an architect at bottom, is merely a sectarian for whom any organic development is synonymous with disease.”28
Le Corbusier wrote the newspapers that these attacks were not simply a matter of aesthetic disagreement but were full of lies. He told his mother he was “in a violent rage” it was “a scandal, a dirty trick.” What upset him above all was the anguish this critique would bring her and Aunt Pauline, as well as the insult to his father’s memory. “Corbu is denounced as an element of disorder and materialism, as the negation of art, of thought,” he lamented. Switzerland itself had betrayed him: “Three years of struggle (committee, council, and general assembly of the League of Nations), and the details of this affair certainly represent for us the blackest, most desperate tribulation that can affect honest consciences. It was cruelty personified. From the beginning, the city of Geneva maintained a hostile atmosphere toward us.” But, Le Corbusier assured his mother, he was tough enough to survive it all. It was “a vehement and, I repeat, odiously dishonest attack. Apart from that, dear Maman, smiles all the way. Spring is coming, the weather is fine and everything else follows.”29
8
In 1928, an organization called the French Appeal was formed to try to convince the League of Nations jury to reverse itself and select Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s design, and the architects themselves published a pamphlet stating their case. Marie Jeanneret wrote Albert and Lotti, “Edouard tells me there is wind in his sails. What splendid optimism! But this morning, receiving the dignified communication from the President of the French Appeal from Jourdain, from Elie Faure, etc. etc…. I remain impressed and moved by the quantity and especially the quality of the signatures attached to the notion. What would our Papa say confronted with this admirable testimony of faith. He left us too soon! Sensitive as he had become to the consideration granted to his sons, this would have caused him, coming from such men, a sort of immeasurable joy. Alas! In spite of everything, I do not believe in the reversal of matters with regard to the Palais des Nations, and as with this hard Nennot [sic] Le Corbusier will seem strange to many. Who will yield, the young man or the old one? But this affair will waken or reawaken consciences, and as a demonstration it is almost American.”30
Marie’s caution was warranted. On May 5, 1928, the jury considering the Jeannerets’ League of Nations appeal decided definitively in favor of the team to be directed by Nenot, with totally new requirements for the building. Again, Le Corbusier and Pierre protested. And, again, modern architects from various countries, journalists, and professional organizations chimed in on their behalf. But the affair ended disastrously. As Le Corbusier, still smarting, described it fifteen years later, “Fair-minded people, along with the intellectual elite in every country, demanded that justice be done. Nothing of the kind occurred. The Academy and politics finally triumphed in this memorable affair, this unprecedented scandal.”31 The only solution was to move on.
XXVI
1
Following the brutal slap of the League of Nations, Le Corbusier was heartened to be endorsed on other fronts.
In June 1928, CIAM—the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne—was founded, with Hélène de Mandrot its main patroness. The new organization was launched at the Château de la Sarraz in the canton de Vaud, of which de Mandrot, already a Le Corbusier supporter, was the chatelaine. A painter, architect, and interior designer—and descendant of a grand family—de Mandrot was a strong, imposing woman in her midfifties who wore her hair in a chignon and dressed in lavish ball gowns or expensive tailored suits and large hats. The eleventh-century structure where this colorful heiress graciously received twenty-five modern architects, as well as industrialists, politicians, critics, and artists, was a multiturreted affair with a valuable collection of furniture and paintings, a perfect place to combine old wealth with new art.
Le Corbusier was responsible for the program of CIAM’s first meeting, which tried to codify advances in building design all over the world. The major issues of architecture were to be addressed: the nature and potential of modern techniques, the relationship of the state and corporations to building programs, the value of standardization, and questions of urbanism, economics, and education.
CIAM’s ideology called for a redistribution of land and the sharing of profits between owners and the community. At a time when Le Corbusier was already under attack, this fueled the rumor that he was a communist. He was as interested in making a luxurious new home for his hostess as in accommodating the masses, but once people got a whiff of what could be construed as socialism, there was no convincing them otherwise.
IN JULY, Le Corbusier and Léger went to the villa at Garches, where the renowned painter was completely “estomaqué”—one of Le Corbusier’s, favorite words—and told the architect that the hous
e was a masterpiece.1 Then Le Corbusier’s burly colleague offered an even more significant endorsement. After a visit to the architect’s studio, the generous-spirited Léger, whose canvases were selling for forty thousand francs, proposed an even exchange of paintings.
Le Corbusier was on a high. He had recently taken an inspiring trip to Spain, and was working on urban plans for Tunis and Buenos Aires as well as on several houses. He was now prosperous enough to treat his mother and Albert to an eight-day holiday together in the mountains, planned for September.
But try as he might to restrain his fury over what had happened in Geneva, he could not obliterate it. Thanking his mother for a letter she had written to comfort him, he continued,
I have a furious rage against these bastards for what they have done and permitted to be done, and I am profoundly outraged, and perturbed by the blinding desires for “justice” by means of which the comedy has been rigged. That I will not swallow. And when I think of the problem itself, handsome as it is; when I see, as I do this evening, for instance, the photos of the splendid site, then all over again I suffer fits of indignation, of imprecations against this huge coalition that has crushed us with weapons having nothing to do with architecture. Nothing to do with architecture. There is the entire drama.
A work so majestic seems to me incapable of being achieved on the basis of so many dirty tricks, which have become flagrantly public. I do not expect an immediate vengeance on the part of heaven. But one may grant that the measure has been so forced that the evil will fall back upon itself.
These people who are making the Palace are mountebanks, businessmen licking the boots of the Academy. Where is the lively, lofty, disinterested, passionate spirit that can carry out this task by an intense love of architecture? These people are “architects” in the dreadful sense of the word. And already they are fighting among themselves.
Our time had not come, nor were we wanted! We were hated because we had raised ourselves to the highest degree of prominence.2
His one remaining hope was that his mother understood this.
2
Le Corbusier was appointed the French delegate to a conference in Prague, where intellectuals from various fields were to converge. To get there, he traveled in an airplane for the first time. He was thrilled to be at the technological frontier.
The architect boarded the great machine with its wide wings and propeller engines at Le Bourget. After a stop in Cologne, it landed in Berlin, from where he took the train to Prague. “We started exactly on time and, miraculously…we arrived exactly on time.”3 This was high praise from a child of the watchmaking business.
On the second evening after he arrived in Prague, Le Corbusier was out drinking with friends in a bar. The poet Vesvald suddenly stood up and shouted out, so that everyone could hear, “Le Corbusier is a poet!” The travelers and businessmen and other strangers in the bar downed their drinks in toasting this idea. “That night I had my first and my profound reward. In vino veritas.”4
On the other hand, when the Czech foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, addressed him as “Maître,” Le Corbusier replied, “Be careful, no nonsense, you’re going to convince me I’m an academician!”5 A poet, yes; part of the established hierarchy, never.
HE WENT to Prague because he was on his way to the recently formed Soviet Union. The people who already believed Le Corbusier was sympathetic to communism now became further convinced.
In May 1928, Le Corbusier had been asked to enter a design competition for the Centrosoyuz—the central office of cooperatives in Moscow. In July, he had submitted the design. In L’Esprit Nouveau, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant had periodically published articles devoted to constructivism and the work of El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kasimir Malevich, the three most daring and inventive figures in the realm of art and design in the USSR. A reciprocal admiration for Le Corbusier had developed not only among leaders of the Russian avant-garde but also in the highest political ranks; as early as 1923, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote the architect reporting that “in one of his latest articles, Trotsky has spoken in highly sympathetic terms of the trends reflected in L’Esprit Nouveau.”6 Architecture periodicals reproduced Le Corbusier’s latest buildings. Malevich had written a magazine article praising Le Corbusier’s Stuttgart houses for “having borne in mind the needs of contemporary man” in their scale and furnishings.7 His championship had great value, for with his brave and utterly simplified abstract paintings—and then in his return to figurative art that honored the country’s ordinary citizenry—Malevich had achieved heroic stature.
On the building site of the Centrosoyuz in Moscow, 1930
Shortly after his arrival in Moscow, Le Corbusier was received at the Kremlin by the vice president of the USSR, M. Lejawa, and by Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva. A few days later, three prominent Moscow architects addressed a postcard to “Madame Jeanneret-Perret” at La Petite Maison with the message: “Madame, the architects of Moscow offer their affectionate respects to the mother of the world’s greatest architect.”8 For ten days, he was celebrated at banquets and parties. Everyone seemed to be campaigning for the acceptance of his Centrosoyuz design. If Geneva spurned him, Moscow applauded—and gave him reason to believe that at last he would truly realize a substantial building complex with which modernism could triumph at a seat of world power.
3
In a lecture on urbanism “in the great hall of the Polytechnic Museum, the headquarters of the Association for the Promotion of Political and Scientific Knowledge,”9 Le Corbusier presented his Moscow equivalent of the Plan Voisin. He told the large and influential audience “that Moscow was still an Asian city, which it is necessary to care for by building new pavements and demolishing old houses, yet leaving old monuments in place. It is important to enlarge our parks and gardens, shift the business center elsewhere and, by surgical elimination of all side streets, lay out new ones beside existing main streets and line them with skyscrapers.”10
He attacked the current preference for classical revival architecture over modernism: “I find Moscow in the same trance as our Western nations…. It is a criminal mistake to resuscitate things of the past, for the result is not living organisms but papier-mâché ghosts.”11 Le Corbusier pitched the idea that traditional academic architecture—of the type that had prevailed with the League of Nations—was the equivalent of the czarist regime. The visual revolution he championed was as radical as the political revolution in which his audience had participated. Surely they should make the leap in aesthetics, too.
Le Corbusier worked intensely for a number of days with a team of architects who were helping him fine-tune his design for the competition. He was impressed with what he saw in their office. A lunchtime buffet enabled employees to work productively throughout the day, with minimal interruption. When the workday ended at 3:30 p.m., they congregated in clubs, performed in amateur theatricals, played sports, or simply read in an organized environment. This systematized existence appealed immensely to Le Corbusier’s belief in a scheduled combination of work and recreation.
One revelation followed another. In a village a couple of hours from Moscow, the architect saw remarkable vernacular architecture where the izbas (cottages) were built “on pilotis.”12 A Soviet architect introduced him to the film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin Le Corbusier considered a masterpiece. In an interview with a Moscow journalist, Le Corbusier declared, “Architecture and the cinema are the only two arts of our time. In my own work I seem to think as Eisenstein does in his films. His work is shot through with the sense of truth, and bears witness to the truth alone. In their ideas, his films resemble closely what I am striving to do in my work.”13 That goal was unequivocal.
With Sergei Eisenstein (center) and Andrej Burow in Moscow, October 1928
4
One afternoon, Le Corbusier was standing on a Moscow street corner, pencil in hand, with his sketchbook open. He was immediately stopped and informed that such drawing outdoor
s was forbidden. A commissar tried to get him special permission, but failed. Le Corbusier could not tolerate the idea of not capturing things visually. In the following days, he concealed his notebook under his overcoat so that he managed to illustrate, hastily and awkwardly, some onion domes and monuments. But the need to be furtive astounded him. Such restrictions on human liberty were intolerable.
Nonetheless, when he officially presented his proposal for the Centrosoyuz headquarters, the Russians accorded him all the respect he had been denied by the soulless misanthropes who had pummeled his League of Nations idea. Even though he saw flaws in the economic approach—“The system lacks a stimulus, a dynamic factor…. Lethargy is present”—he imagined the Soviet Union as his stage.14
His mother did not like that idea. When Le Corbusier had arrived in Moscow, a letter from her awaited him. Following warm wishes for his recent forty-first birthday, she finally gave him some of the praise he craved, but then proferred advice—which she pinned to the existence of Yvonne and potential children. “You have been a good son, tender, respectful of the memory of a father who died too soon, generous to the mother left behind who takes great pride in your moral qualities and your intellectual gifts. You must maintain your health and not abuse it—not too many late nights, too much work. Now that you bear responsibility for a soul (and perhaps souls), you must not wear out the mechanism; the great years of youth are past; the summer is still warm and brilliant, yet autumn is approaching, filled, it is true, with marvelous promises to those who set their sights high, making every effort to realize an ideal ever held in mind, despite underhand attacks; and who will triumph because they have had faith.”15 Above all, Marie Jeanneret was worried about how he might comport himself in the Soviet Union: “And now there you are in the vast Russia full of such alarming legends. Here, too, I trust in your lucky star and hope that the Russians, an intelligent people, their modern ideas so advanced, will find yours to their taste and will grant you their confidence in this great architectural project. Be careful what you say, don’t meddle with politics, remain an artist who desires to speak solely of his art. I shall rejoice to know you are on French territory once more.”16
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