Le Corbusier
Page 35
When Le Corbusier answered her letter, he was able to tell her, exuberantly, that his scheme for the Centrosoyuz had been accepted. That endorsement made the Soviet Union all the more enchanting: “I am present at the birth of a new world, built on logic and faith, which plunges me into the deepest reflections. I rein in my optimism in order not to see things except as they are. O blind Europe who lies to herself in order to caress her sloth! Here one of the most explicit designs of human evolution is being realized; and what corresponds to generosity here is egoism there. I look, I see, I question, I listen, I explore everywhere this new event; people here are starting from zero and constructing stone by stone. I use the word constructing advisedly.”17
Marie responded practically by return mail that she was “deeply moved by your letter from Moscow. Here and everywhere in our newspapers, Russia has always been represented as degraded—the behavior of the people deplorable, the family debased and childhood abused, and above all intellectuals persecuted—so that I reread 3 or 4 times the letter in which with apparent impartiality you depict that country so differently.”18
His mother sent this letter to Le Corbusier’s apartment in Paris, expecting him to have returned there. Issuing a word of caution about Yvonne, she repeated the sort of admonitions with which he had grown up: “I assume that my dear boy has returned and found peace and affection in the rue Jacob…and that he might even be cosseted and adored (to excess perhaps); I always fear that a person’s character will be spoiled and distorted by such treatment. One is always inclined to enjoy such treatment, and one cannot help enjoying the comfort of being restored to one’s habits, one’s way of life, one’s daily work.”19
As she reeled off opinions, Marie Jeanneret voiced the blend of intelligence and ignorance with which she had reared her family: “You were understood, taken to their hearts, and I rejoice with you that your plans are prized. Bravo! Cultivated Russians have always passed for powerful minds, lively intelligences. They have always rebelled (nihilism) against an autocratic regime they regarded as monstrous. But the Bolshevist leaders are usually Jews of rather low extraction, and the various massacres they have inflicted have certainly rendered them odious. What are we to believe?”20
But for Le Corbusier, as long as the Soviets would let him help design their new world, little else counted.
5
At the very moment that Le Corbusier was hoping to clinch the Moscow commission, El Lissitzky wrote a scathing article about him. Allegedly about the latest version of the Centrosoyuz proposal, Lissitzky’s essay was an ad hominem attack: “The Bohemianism, isolation and inverted snobbery of today’s artists have reached their apogee in France. Given that Le Corbusier is an artist, he is a case in point. Like all Western artists, he feels compelled to be an absolute individualist, and to recognize nothing outside of himself, because otherwise one might doubt his originality, and because originality is the sensation that gives the measure of what is ‘new.’”21
Lissitzky, who had visited the villa at Garches the previous year with Piet Mondrian and Sophie Kuppers, quoted a member of the Stein family who said the villa was more interesting to visit than to live in. He attacked Le Corbusier as a figure of fashion and as the epitome of western decadence: “Le Corbusier the artist (and not the constructor, the builder, the engineer) was commissioned to build a house that is designed to be a sensation, a piece of magic, and the finished product is published in women’s magazines, along with the latest in fashion (cf. Vogue, August 1928).” Lissitzky described the standard Pessac dwelling as having been commissioned by a capitalist and as being “not a building to be lived in, but rather, a showpiece…. [H]e has designed houses that are disorienting to the user, and which he himself would never inhabit. The reason for this is the architect’s antisocial nature, the great distance that separates him from the expectations of the great mass of people. He has affinities neither with the proletariat, nor with industrial capital.”22 Lissitzky was willfully ignorant of Le Corbusier’s underlying sensibility. What Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had observed in remote Balkan villages at age twenty-three—the joy and contentment of the inhabitants—had helped determine his hope of harnessing the honest aesthetics of peasant huts to modern technology.
Lissitzky treated the architect as if he were simply a fraud: “In the work of Le Corbusier, the eye of the painter is everywhere present—not only in his use of color, which he manipulates as a painter, but also at the level of architectural design: he does not materialize his designs, but merely colors them in. His system involved the construction of a frame—a fact that explains why photographs of his buildings give an impression of unity even when they are upside down.”23
Lissitzky, a gifted photographer, had shot, with closed eyes, a detail of the stairs from one of Le Corbusier’s Weissenhoff houses. The image reads like an abstract composition and could be viewed in any direction without gaining or losing meaning. Besides using this as evidence of a fatal flaw, he also pronounced Le Corbusier’s urban ideal as a “city of nowhere…a city on paper, extraneous to living nature.”24
El Lissitzky was not the only antagonist at this crucial moment. Karel Teige, a Czech intellectual who had been a great supporter of Le Corbusier’s and who had reviewed Toward a New Architecture in 1923, now took up the cudgels, accusing Le Corbusier of approaching architecture as if he was designing for visual reasons only, describing a recent Le Corbusier design based on the golden section as “not a solution for realization and construction, but a composition.”25 The Moscow architect Moisei Ginzburg called Le Corbusier’s architecture “poorly defined and purely aesthetic in character.”26
Le Corbusier felt, nonetheless, more welcome than attacked in the Soviet Union: “I thought I would encounter my typical adversaries in Moscow…. Yet in Moscow I found, not spiritual antagonists, but fervent adherents to what I consider fundamental to all human works: the lofty intentions that raise these works above their utilitarian function, and which confer on them the lyricism that brings us joy…. My feeling is that what interests all these Russians is in fact a poetic idea.”27 The country of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky and constructivism would, he hoped, be the place where his own poetic vision could be realized.
XXVII
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Two days after Le Corbusier’s return to Paris from Moscow, the president of the Cooperatives of Russia met with him to work out the agreement for the architect to do the Centrosoyuz. The Russian characterized Le Corbusier’s design as a modern palace. Although Le Corbusier was suffering from one of his terrible colds and a headache that was to last eight days, he had rarely been as completely content.
He saw the Russians as just like him: pure, brave souls scorned by reactionaries. On November 11, he wrote his mother, “The western world has shown itself to me under a rather shabby aspect. The sort of heroism, of inevitable stoicism, which exists in Russia…leaves a strong aftertaste. And I have always been sensitive to pure ideas, or to the idea itself. So I am sad to see the world rise up against an idea (however debatable). And opposing this faith and this sincerity, the rather fragile structure of bourgeois morals with all their artificiality, and injustice and falsehood.”1
His mother, he told her, was the polar opposite of those lifeless, self-deceiving people. She and his father were pure and righteous, which is why he and Albert were the same:
You are a model—a model of life, strength, confidence, and artistic generosity. You are certainly not a bourgeoise, and that is a legacy you bequeathed us at birth. To be firm in life yet to be broad-minded, so that such breadth is inspired by an element of kindness.
Georges Dubois has written me about the photograph of dear Papa (at the clinic). That teeming life cannot bear comparison with this already diminished image. Yet I find in this portrait much of what constituted dear Papa’s farsightedness—that distance he knew to take in all his judgments, that perspective which was his wisdom. Maintain your faith and your action, your precise and upright functions, as well as that
freedom of appreciation which affords the heart an open road. Sunday kisses to my dear Maman.2
The compliments were a tactic. By praising both his parents for their broad-mindedness and kindness, Le Corbusier was not just pushing for Marie’s approval of his new affiliations with the Soviet Union. He had a plan to cast aside his own heritage, and he wanted her to accept it.
2
Slowly, Yvonne was being integrated into the family—to the extent that anyone might penetrate the nuclear unit of Marie Jeanneret and her two sons. Yvonne and Le Corbusier dined on occasion with Albert and Lotti and Lotti’s two daughters.
In reporting on these events to his mother, Le Corbusier commented on the difficulties of Albert being Swiss, while Lotti and her girls were Swedish. It was the lead-in to telling his mother that he thought it would be better if he and his partner shared the same nationality. He wondered what she thought of the idea of his changing citizenship from Swiss to French.
Le Corbusier knew this might not be well received. He advised his mother not to mention it to Aunt Pauline and emphasized that he wanted to be naturalized not out of disloyalty for his country but for Yvonne’s sake. Then he asked another bold question. Should Yvonne come with him to Vevey for Christmas? What did she think? We don’t know Marie’s precise answer, but he would end up going on his own.
With Pierre Jeanneret and Lotti Jeanneret in the late 1920s
THAT FALL, Le Corbusier began to obsess over basic housing types. He had developed a radical theory: the assumption that Neuchâtel mountain farmhouses had been designed to withstand heavy snows was erroneous. In fact, their form came directly from Armagnac, where it rarely snowed, and had been exported to Switzerland when the Albigeois from that region were exiled to the Alps around 1350.
In Le Corbusier’s eyes, this proved that domestic architecture revealed that where we come from has greater importance than the requisites of climate or other external conditions in our current location, and that style derived from reasons other than efficacity. We may move from southern France to the mountains or from the mountains to Paris, but we remain who we have always been. Like the Neuchâtelene farmhouses in which he had spent some of the happiest moments of his youth, Le Corbusier was at heart French, even if transplanted by happenstance to Switzerland.
Architecture told the truth, he insisted—and he settled for nothing less. Those farmhouses proved that his origins were French, whatever others thought; this was as inviolable as his being, at the core, a modest and private artist as much as an architect absorbed in the hubbub. He wrote Ritter:
There is no faking when it comes to architecture, there are always reasons. In any case I am somehow comforted to know you agree with me, for I have incessantly and passionately worked in utter good faith. And this search for purity is a need for truth. For a long time you have supposed I was lost in Parisian fads. I want you to realize that having arrived at a certain pinnacle of fame, I continue living down to earth, working away, filled with ideas, devoured by time, not talking but doing. Since 1916 no more than ten people have knocked at the door of the rue Jacob where I am every morning. Later, the office is another affair: a veritable procession.
Perhaps you are unaware that since 1918 I have passionately committed myself to painting. For five years I have not exhibited, having shut my door on my daubs. Painting every morning is what allows me to be lucid every afternoon. But what battles, what dramas! And in just the last few weeks, journalists and dealers are making a great fuss about my painting. I am attempting to repress all such behavior. I do not want this matter to be ventilated just now. Which shows you how loyal I am to my brushes.3
He was, moreover, a painter in the French tradition, just as those Swiss farmhouses were quintessentially French. He was convinced the nationality he would soon make official was in his heart and blood.
XXVIII
1
Frank Lloyd Wright called the Villa Savoye, which was completed in 1930, “a box on stilts.” Some observers likened it to a space capsule fallen onto an unwelcoming landscape. Today, it is an icon of twentieth-century design and has spawned countless imitations all over the world.
Le Corbusier considered Pierre and Emilie Savoye the ideal clients. Upper-class, prosperous, and cultured, the couple specified little more than that they wanted a summer house on their land in the town of Poissy, not far from Paris, where they lived the rest of the year. They had few demands other than adequate servants’ quarters and a garage, and they were amenable to all of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic ideas.
What he built them was, above all, a vehicle from which to savor nature. Le Corbusier’s own description of the floating white container makes clear that everything was in service of the landscape: “Site: a magnificent property consisting of an enormous pasturage and orchard forming a cupola surrounded by a girdle of high hedges. The house must have no ‘front’ situated at the summit of the cupola, it must be open to all four horizons. The habitation floor, with its hanging garden, will be raised on pilotis allowing views all the way to the horizon.”1 The purpose of the faceless building was access to the wonders of the universe.
2
The villa at Poissy resembles Le Corbusier’s previous houses but is simpler. The sashes of the industrial windows were the most refined to date. The overall form—a perfect square, supported on pilotis—is a statement of rightness and order. The ramps connecting the stories make the activities of ascent and descent feel ethereal.
This pared-down structure, confident without being arrogant, is an eloquent statement of humankind establishing its presence on earth: a modernized Parthenon. The supporting columns have none of the details of their Greek ancestors—spare and lean, smooth rather than fluted, perfectly straight rather than tapered to simulate straightness as were the Greek prototypes—but they still lend a classical order. The color is pure Mediterranean whiteness.
From the outside, the impression is of simultaneous mass and levity, a harmony of contrasts. The round, smokestack-like forms that pop through the roof play against the square block of the house. Everything is varied but congruent: the strong horizontals and verticals, the shimmering whites and bold blacks.
Services and garage space were kept at entry level and out of sight. Today, by contrast, garages declare themselves in front of homes as if they are the main point, boasting of the cars they protect and making clear that modern living is as much about commuting as residing. The Villa Savoye, while fully acknowledging its inhabitants’ dependence on the automobile with its three-car garage positioned at a convenient angle for entrance and egress, has it tucked behind the pilotis. The car serves; indeed, it charms; but it does not own its owner. Le Corbusier kept human experience at the forefront.
If you stand facing a corner of this country retreat dead-on, you experience the force of a massive minimal sculpture: an absolute, irrefutable presence. But for all its authority and precision, this building is friendly and welcoming; once you head toward the entrance, you are greeted with a wide smile.
Le Corbusier’s concept was clear: “Four identical walls pierced all the way around by a single sliding window.”2 What is achieved as you approach that body and take the splendid upward journey inside is a sequence of vistas; the act of looking is encouraged at every turn. You go from one tableau to another, from a halting view of a solid black door and white impassive walls to a sweeping vista, as in a musical progression from silence to a rhapsody.
Today, Poissy is a populous suburb, and the charm of the setting is almost completely lost. But when the villa was built, the views of fields and sky were sublime. With the latest materials assembled in a neat framework, the architect had provided an experience stunningly akin to what he had tasted on Mount Athos nearly two decades earlier.
THE HOUSE AT POISSY is designed for well-being, for dining or working under optimal circumstances, for relishing life. While more space is devoted to splendid terraces and the vast solarium than to the enclosed rooms, it has an inviting fireplac
e and snug womblike nooks in which to keep warm; every doorknob lends charm. The blue of the bathroom tiles is the color of the Alpine sky in clear winter weather (see color plate 7). Inside and out, there are well-proportioned tables and neat seating units. These details serve life and enhance a sense of pleasure with no unwelcome distractions. The ever-present balance of the plan helps provide calm, and the graceful lines and correct proportions of the highly refined architectural elements help one breathe deeply and regularly: all to facilitate the purposes of contemplation.
The Villa Savoye, shortly after construction, ca. 1930
The Villa Savoye is both a place to live and a temple to the sun. Most of the house, open to the sky, puts you closer to the space that surrounds the Earth. This platform for observing the universe recapitulates those Sunday outings of Georges and Marie Jeanneret and their two young boys in the snowy mountains. Everything is about the journey through whiteness, rugged and challenging in its way (neither the ramp nor the stairs are easy), offering as its reward the miraculous sky (see color plate 5).