Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

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  In South America, Le Corbusier further mastered the lecture technique that he had been developing throughout the twenties in which he memorized the key ideas in advance so as to give an extemporaneous performance like a theater act. The rooms were always crowded. Le Corbusier relished the idea that they were full not only of enthusiasts but of nonbelievers who needed to be convinced; he would wake the dead.

  Unrolling his large sheets of paper, explaining his ideas while sketching away with his sure and agile hand, Le Corbusier became further convinced of his own wisdom. By the end of the Latin America tour, he was so pleased by what he codified in the ten lectures he gave in Buenos Aires and Rio that they became a summa on the functioning of cities.

  AT THE END OF October, Le Corbusier again wrote his mother from the Majestic Hotel in Buenos Aires. Heading toward Patagonia, marveling at the tropical climate, he was elated: “How easy my life is here, I’m received by only the highest society—young moreover—and eager-minded. Great luxury, everything comfortable.”9

  He recounted a litany of successes. Plans had advanced to organize the meeting with President Hoover and rekindle the Geneva project; the French ambassador had attended all ten of his lectures. The previous Sunday, he had been at a rural hacienda with a splendid garden and a white ceramic swimming pool into which he had dived from the four-meter diving board, “impeccably,” six times in succession: “That’s all there is to it: I’m a good fish. Which for me is an extremely enjoyable situation.”

  He would, he told his mother, be making Buenos Aires “the counterpart of New York.” It was his most ambitious urban scheme to date, and he felt that in little time he would have a similar success in the United States. “People talk and know what they’re saying. And one is heard. North Americans are strong and young. Simple and not tricky. For them everything is action. In architecture they are completely backward. And then, they believe. I suspect my next voyage to the United States will be an important thing.”10

  Even in remote locations, Le Corbusier was now receiving lecture fees of one hundred thousand francs. And he was traveling in style with Gonzales Garrono, a new friend who was, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “from the oldest family in Argentina” and a descendant of a viceroy.11 For Le Corbusier, Garrono was the real thing: an aristocrat of impeccable style and bearing, cultured and educated, who was down-to-earth and who spoke to his valet as if to a brother. Garrono took him to one of his vast plantations, which had thrilling twelve-meter-long serpents. But for all the time he was spending with the grandest families, Le Corbusier insisted his head had not been turned: “Dear Maman, I don’t want this to seem like a fairy tale. I remain a modest fellow, longing for his 20 rue Jacob, his oil painting, his faithful companion Vvon; see you soon my dear Maman. If I accept this vagrant life it’s because I may make the kind of money here that will allow me to spread a little comfort around me, to my dear ones who lack the same occasion to make ‘big money.’”12 The term “big money” was in English, for it was America, the land of flashy millionaires, where Le Corbusier expected to earn enough to guarantee his mother and Yvonne and Albert the security and well-being he longed to give them. Writing these words on the day of the New York stock market crash, Le Corbusier was now confident that nothing could shatter his dreams.

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  Writing his mother five days later, Le Corbusier was even more manic: “To sum up, these are remarkable countries with gigantic tasks. They build everywhere, the cities are bristling with skyscrapers, money is flowing. Each private house costs from three to eight or nine million francs. In the provinces there are whole cities to be built. Room for millions of men. They think that Argentina is smaller than France. It may be bigger than Europe. Fertile to the highest degree.”13

  Marie responded by pointing out that, because of the language difference, his lecture audiences didn’t understand everything he said. She also cautioned him against being seduced by the splendid style of his new life: “My dear boy, we think of you all the time, we envision you telling a lot of things in French to these Spanish Argentines who perhaps will not understand much of what you say. Be simple and do most of it on the blackboard…. Yesterday morning the great happiness of your letter, your excellent letter, read and reread! So happy that this great journey has left you with such pleasant memories…. Why don’t you write a few of your impressions of the high seas! You have a good heart, and all this luxury will not corrupt our dear child. You must be strong in order to resist; but he who yields to the soft things of life sees his energies diminished and you need all yours, by Jove, in the great battle of life.”14

  However splendid her son’s reception was, Le Corbusier’s mother wanted to make sure of his priorities: “My dear boy, you won’t forget Europe, its inhabitants, and the little old Maman with white hair who longs for her boy and for the good news that will invigorate and reassure her.”15

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  By the start of November, Le Corbusier had met Josephine Baker. Le Corbusier had just turned forty-two; Baker was twenty-three. She was already a legend in Paris. Four years earlier, on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the same setting where Charlotte Perriand had seen her clad in bananas, the Missouri-born mulatto had appeared naked except for a pink flamingo feather as she performed splits while being carried upside down on the shoulders of a large black man. That was not the sort of thing people forget.

  The poet Anna de Noailles—with whom Le Corbusier had had lunch in Paris the previous year—described her as “a pantheress with gold claws.”16 Baker was renowned for taking Chiquita, her pet leopard, for airings on the Champs-Elysées. At the Folies Bergère, she sang “in a high-pitched warble, with an unashamedly Churchillian accent” and walked backward on her hands and feet, all four limbs stiff like a monkey’s.17 Crowds loved her, and so did the men with whom she jumped into bed—among them, it was reputed, the writer Georges Simenon and, the first time she stayed in a Paris hotel, a room-service waiter. Her husband, Pepito Abatino, was not an obstacle to her freedom.

  Abatino was with Baker when Le Corbusier had his first encounter with her. The rapport was instant. We know this because Le Corbusier yet again made his mother privy to his experience. On November 4, from Buenos Aires, he reported that he had just met Baker and Abatino and that Abatino had proposed that Le Corbusier design a house for them in Passy, on the Right Bank not far from the Trocadéro.18 Abatino also discussed their intention of creating a village for orphans from countries all over the world, and he asked Le Corbusier to look for land where they might establish it. Baker, whose success had earned her a small fortune, wanted the architect to undertake a series of maisonnettes for the village. Her vision of that housing was in many ways the Corbusean ideal: straightforward in design, livable, and with a preponderance of vegetation.

  Le Corbusier excitedly quoted Baker and Abatino’s vision verbatim to his mother. These dwellings were to be “charming, small and without pretension, amid all the flowers and all the green.”19 With that exquisite notion and Baker’s vivaciousness and allure, Le Corbusier was instantly conquered.

  He described the famous dancer and singer: “Josephine is extraordinarily modest and natural. She is actually a Creole village kid, with the warmest imaginable heart. Not an atom of vanity or pose. Really a miraculous phenomenon of naturalness.”20 These were the human qualities he prized above all else. In tandem with a beautiful body, they beckoned irresistibly.

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  The man who told all, or almost all, to his mother wanted to make sure not only that she learned of his adoring friendship with the legend of Paris’s naughtiest music halls but that the good Calvinist had a clear picture of her son boozing and smoking.

  Some Belgian visitors to Buenos Aires who were great admirers of Le Corbusier’s were thrilled to recognize him one evening in a restaurant. They asked the architect out for a drink. He turned them down politely, but when they persisted he decided he could not refuse. After the first drink, he again tried t
o take off, but then one of them said, “You are Le Corbusier. The founder of the Modern Movement. The apostle, etc. Being with you is one of the great days of our life.”21

  The Belgians proceeded to drink themselves close to death. They got into a brawl, and the bartenders threw them out. None of this bothered Le Corbusier, who took one of his worshippers to his hotel for a nightcap. After only three hours of sleep and with a hangover, he still managed to meet with Victoria Ocampo the next morning to discuss her villa. He proudly told his mother that by doing gymnastics and swimming laps in the hotel pool that morning, he had overcome the effects of alcohol. Garrono informed him that everyone in Buenos Aires wanted him to build for them; all was for the best. His mother had instructed him to “invigorate and reassure her” quoting the strangers who recognized him, describing his packed life, telling her about Josephine Baker, Le Corbusier had provided the information he hoped would have the desired effect.22

  FROM BUENOS AIRES, Le Corbusier went to Montevideo. He adored this city on a coastal hill. It was bathed in intense light and had immense beaches from which he could swim in the sea. While Buenos Aires was possessed of a “fierce austerity” and a “fatality,” the joyful capital of Uruguay had a liveliness that reminded him of the three very disparate cities of Barcelona, Prague, and Moscow. The locals, who received him like a messiah, organized large parties in his honor, and he gave two lectures. The only thing that bothered him was the incursion of Germans.

  Enthralling as Le Corbusier found his new audience, he retained his sense of superiority.

  One learns to breathe deeply in these countries. One meditates, one takes it in. But the inhabitants are frightened, are timid; compared to them we are tremendously bold.

  The prestige of the Idea is a miraculous thing. Meditation leads to kindness, to generosity, to envisaging things in the light of benevolence and courage. What counts in all these impressions is the immensity of the countryside, nature’s formidable song and sign. One must either believe or despair. Better to believe.23

  On November 9, he left Uruguay on a small plane that returned him to Buenos Aires and landed in the harbor there. The voyage was glorious, and he had the satisfaction of having gained new allies. “The departure from Montevideo was very touching,” he wrote, “at the edge of the pier some fifteen architects and students. The speedboat took me with some others to the hydroplane, which had just come from Buenos Aires. Waving our arms we made somatic semaphores. Soon the pier is out of my myopic range. I raise my arm. I still see the fifteen silhouetted against the sky. The speedboat reaches the plane, which we enter through the ceiling. There are twelve of us. The propellers are turning. We make a wide circle, and then we’re out of the water. We’re up in the air. Down below, the pier with the waving arms.”24

  He was thrilled that the combination of plane and car reduced this journey from downtown Montevideo to his Buenos Aires hotel room to one and three-quarters hours—as opposed to the twelve it would have been by sea. “Precision and dizzying speed,” he wrote his mother.25 Now that he was on course, it was a metaphor for his entire life.

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  When Le Corbusier left Buenos Aires five days later for São Paulo, however, he again traveled by sea, and in true luxury. The ship was the Italian liner Giulio Cesare. As the son of a viceroy, his friend Garrano had considerable influence and had arranged with the captain for the architect to have the finest cabin on the boat. Le Corbusier explained to his mother that he was traveling in the manner of wealthy cattle barons or diplomats. He liked the treatment but hated the style: “My salon is huge in the purest fake Faubourg-St.-Antoine Louis XVI. Louis XVI! They cut his head off but he takes his revenge with a resurrection which seems to last forever!”26

  Le Corbusier had boarded the ship with plenty of time to spare before it was to pull out of the port. Once he was settled in his lavish quarters, he went up on deck. He wrote his mother, “Josephine Baker and her husband arrived five minutes before departure, cheered by a huge crowd on the pier. Standing for about three quarters of an hour in the rain, shouting: Merci, au revoir, Madame. Merci, Madame. Au revoir, Mr. Stoll. (Mr. Stoll, as the tug pulled the ship away from the pier, uttered a tremendous ‘yodel’ and suddenly unfurled the Swiss flag.) Josephine wept, shouting like a little girl: Au revoir, merci, merci, Madame. She is the most authentic little Negro child, simple as an ingénue, extraordinarily simple. A simple hardworking artist in every respect. She arrives in Rio in the afternoon of the 17th and begins her first performance that evening. She finished last night at 11:30, and the ship left port at midnight.”27

  With Josephine Baker aboard the Giulio Cesare en route to São Paulo, via Montevideo, November 1929

  Like him, she was totally devoted to a task she loved. That dedication to an art that brightened other people’s lives mattered more than anything else (see color plate 8).

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  The architect used the time on the Giulio Cesare to plot his return to France. He charted out his schedule as carefully as he drew a floor plan. On December 9, he would leave Rio on the Lutétia, which would arrive in Bordeaux on December 21. Yvonne and Pierre were to meet him in Bordeaux with a car. Still trying to get his mother to Paris for New Year’s, he proposed to her that she join the party; he would pay for her train ticket from Switzerland. Then the four of them could go to Le Piquey for Christmas, after which Marie could end the year with Albert and his family.

  “This proposition is quite serious. Distances in America make it impossible to have epistolary arguments. This must happen: I am writing definitively here. Life is short, we must take advantage of it.”28

  LE CORBUSIER PREFERRED the Giulio Cesare to the Massilia, both for its scale and its layout. He was especially conscious of boat design because of his own work that year on the “Floating Asylum” project for the Salvation Army. This eighty-meter-long barge resembled a freighter. Its three equal rectangular blocks with industrial windows housed dormitories with rows of 160 beds. The boat was to be parked each winter in front of the Louvre to “shelter the derelicts whom the cold drives far from under the bridges.”29 In the summer, it was to be moored on the outskirts of Paris and serve as a camp for children.

  The asylum was more of a floating building than a vessel intended for long voyages, but some of the principles of nautical design applied. The project enabled Le Corbusier to replicate the tight spaces, the need for buoyancy, and the purposefulness that enchanted him on the Giulio Cesare. For a man who liked to make buildings that were elevated above the ground on pilotis, here was one that was literally afloat.

  Drawing of drinking Neuchâtel wine, Rio, Copacabana Bay, 1929

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  Why does Baker’s backside rock the continents? Why have throngs of men been roused and even women’s jealousy is disarmed? Why of course it’s because it’s a laughing backside.

  —GEORGES SIMENON

  In planning so carefully for his return to France, Le Corbusier had neglected to mention a factor that was probably more than a coincidence. Josephine Baker was also going to be taking the Lutétia. Baker and Le Corbusier had been seeing a lot of each other on board the Giulio Cesare, when he made the decision to be on the same boat as her for a far lengthier crossing.

  These details concerning the architect and the stage performer are knowable because of the letters Le Corbusier continued to write to his mother. On their first sea journey together, from Buenos Aires to São Paulo, he reported to Marie Jeanneret, “Tonight Josephine, ill in bed while Pepito pastes stamps in his album, explained the Bible to me: In the beginning God created Adam and Eve. Americans are red because American soil is red and God made men out of the soil. Jesus Christ is a divine man. Religion is good because it teaches love, loyalty, and a kind heart. Jesus did not like priests; he chased them out of the temple. And then she picked up a tiny guitar and sang all her Negro songs. Wonderfully sweet, tender, pure: ‘I’m a little black bird looking for a little white bird.’ She acknowledges only what is noblest in the Negroe
s. Outraged by the caricatures. She wants to show white people the greatness of the Negroes. From head to foot this woman is nothing but candor and simplicity; she led us down into the third-class hold to see a cat that had had five kittens; she couldn’t tear herself away. After the ‘intelligent’ women of Buenos Aires society, I recognize truth here. Josephine reminds me of Yvonne. They have the same conception of life.”30

  Like his Monegasque girlfriend, the woman who danced in feathers was to be appreciated not just by him but also by his mother.

  IN SÃO PAULO, the novelist Oswald de Andrade told Le Corbusier, “We study you, along with Freud and Marx. You’re on the same level and just as indispensable to the study of the present social movement and to the establishment of a new community organization, etc.” Naturally, he quoted this to his mother, to whom he explained the significance and potential ramifications of his lectures to important audiences: “Actually a lecture is a real creation, like a successful drawing. It begins with a few sketches scribbled on paper. And the idea develops, is expressed, connects, makes its way, its quality of expression varying with the audience that hears it. There is a tension, a flux of ideas in the lecturer’s mind, and their choice and arrangement becomes his creation. When it’s all over, you realize, by the strange fatigue that overcomes you, that you have made an effort.”31 It was as if he were an outsider wanting his mother to join him in observing the phenomenon they had both created.