Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Jean Cocteau introduced Picasso to Errázuriz, and the adventurous heiress became his great patron and supporter, replacing Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s life during the world war, when Stein and Alice Toklas left Paris to drive ambulances. It was Errázuriz who convinced Picasso to go to Rome to work with Cocteau on Parade. She amassed a collection of his Cubist work, and when the artist and his new Russian wife, Olga, spent their honeymoon and most of a summer at a house Errázuriz had rented in Biarritz, Picasso frescoed some of the walls with naked nymphs and lines of texts by Apollinaire. Fortunately, Errázuriz’s son, who had more money than she did, eventually bought the house for her.

  Eugenia Errázuriz had other walls of that Biarritz villa whitewashed and used terra-cotta tiles on the floor so that it resembled a peasant dwelling. Cecil Beaton described a detail that could have been on Mount Athos: “A long wooden shelf, scrupulously scrubbed, ran the length of the wall; and on it…she placed a still life of hams, huge cheeses, and loaves of bread.”3 She had Le Corbusier’s sensibility before she even knew his name.

  “Throw out and keep throwing out,” Errázuriz instructed. “Elegance means elimination.”4 When Blaise Cendrars introduced the architect to his future client, he was putting soul mates together. Le Corbusier admired both his patron’s taste for rough, natural materials and her well-cultivated visual judgment; the tempestuous heiress and exacting architect got along splendidly.

  2

  Le Corbusier’s house for Eugenia Errázuriz was to face the Pacific Ocean. In drawings, its roofline is a broad V, resembling two unequal wings of a gigantic bird in flight. The off-center spine at the low point of the roof creates a gully, from which the expanses sweep upward. Le Corbusier had never before tilted a roof in this way. A bold gesture, well suited to the site, it was a breakthrough from the flat roofs of the 1920s and a predecessor of the fantastic canopied ceilings that were to follow. The architect was moving toward organic form and the appearance of motion.

  What was equally unusual about this house for adventurous art collectors in the rural splendor of Chile were the rustic materials: the architectural equivalent of Errázuriz’s preferred rough linens. Le Corbusier specified and sketched fieldstones for the floors and irregular, large stone blocks for the exterior. Coarsely cut tree trunks were to be used for the inside columns. Brick-colored, cylindrical tiles were to cover the roofs. It was a significant shift to what was local and biomorphic.

  The project never materialized; Eugenia Errázuriz ran through her money. Her fortunes changed to such an extent that Picasso secretly had to buy back some of his work from her so that she could stumble along. After the war, when she was in her eighties, she was robbed of all of her jewels at gunpoint; the sale of the one Picasso painting she had retained saved her from being completely destitute. But when she died in Chile, she still had the fantasy of Le Corbusier’s marvelous unbuilt dwelling for her where mountains and oceans meet the coastline of the Pacific.

  The project altered the shapes and materials of Le Corbusier’s architecture and introduced him to the possibility of building in a landscape that recalled Mount Athos, with the vertiginous drop of the mountains onto a sea presenting a vast horizon. In years to come, he grew to know such settings even better, overlooking the French Mediterranean.

  LE CORBUSIER’S design for Eugenia Errázuriz’s beach house was surreptitiously copied on the other side of the world. In The Complete Work, the architect writes, “We have had the pleasure of discovering in the Architectural Record for July 1934 a number of illustrations reproducing the very pretty house built by M. Raymond outside of Tokyo in Japan. The reader must make no mistake: these are photographs not of our house, but of a creation of M. Raymond’s!”5

  In Japan, the house was clad in wood and the roof covered with grass, but this was irrefutably Le Corbusier’s idea stolen and transformed. In an extensive text, he professed that he was flattered by the copying, that this fit into Japan’s wonderful tradition of domestic housing, and that Raymond’s project was admirable. But what fascinated him above all was the deceptiveness. Yet again, he was the victim of the forces of corruption.

  3

  Le Corbusier also began a project in 1930 for a penthouse apartment for Charles de Beistegui on top of an apartment building on the Champs-Elysées. De Beistegui, the heir to a Mexican silver fortune, was a bon vivant and socialite who befriended the Surrealists. Unlike the house for Eugenia Errázuriz, his apartment was completed, although it no longer exists today.

  El Lissitzky might have made his assault even more ferocious had he known of this elegant folly. A confection of minimal forms on top of an old-fashioned apartment building, the penthouse was designed primarily for visual drama. The main floor had large glass walls facing the Arc de Triomphe; the crowning element was a tidy lawn that served as a rooftop solarium overlooking the wide Champs-Elysées and enclosed by the simplest of plaster walls. The solarium had a rococo fireplace, in front of which stood, in a haphazard arrangement, a couple of traditional and ornate wrought-iron garden chairs, in a dreamlike assemblage that was truly Surrealist—in spite of Le Corbusier’s disapproval of Ozenfant’s infatuation with the movement founded by André Breton.

  Downstairs, there was a library drawn according to the golden section, starkly modern, save for a spectacular Venetian glass chandelier that punctuated its austerity. A winding staircase, coiled like a corkscrew, did not quite reach the landing above—contributing to the dreamlike ambience. Climbing up the staircase, one would for a split second walk over a void, just before landing safely on the solarium floor. The start of the descent was even more disconcerting, with the slight feeling of alarm, as if one were about to go over the edge of a cliff.

  On the roof level, besides the solarium, a dining terrace floated above Paris. It looked more like the setting for a dance performance than a dining room, with its carefully sculpted garden plantings, pruned and trimmed into robotlike presences.

  This penthouse for a decadent aristocrat, unique in the body of Le Corbusier’s work, became the ultimate chic. In a 1934 spoof of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and of the world those magazines invoked, E. B. White wrote, “It is the magic hour before cocktails. I am in the modern penthouse of Monsieur Charles de Beistegui. The staircase is entirely of cement, spreading at the hem-line and trimmed with padded satin tubing caught at the neck with a bar of milk chocolate.”6 It was one report Le Corbusier did not send home to his mother.

  4

  At the same time that Le Corbusier was designing for the rich, he went to the Soviet Union for a third time. There primarily to work further on the Centrosoyuz, he had also been asked to consult on a new “Green City” on the outskirts of Moscow. In spite of the Russian authorities’ hope that he would become involved with this expansion that would have essentially created suburbs, he opposed it, disparaging any plan to dilute the strength of a densely packed city center.

  Le Corbusier did not mince words: “The principle of disproportionate urban extension is a sentimental heresy rooted in the devotion to garden cities, whose effect is to isolate the individual, and to force him to perform wearisome tasks and believe he is happy…the garden city is a narcotic; it shatters the collective spirit, its initiatives, its galvanizations, and atomizes human energies into an amorphous, impalpable powder…. ‘Disurbanization’ amounts to the annihilation of urban energy. If we wish to create a short-sighted people, let us disurbanize; if, on the other hand, we desire a people with strong, dynamic, modern ideas, let us urbanize, concentrate, build.”7

  For central Moscow, Le Corbusier came up with a transportation plan with several railroad stations, a subway, and a landing strip for airplane taxis on the roof of one of the train terminals. Cars were to be used outside the complex. A network of elevated walkways led to schools, clubs, and athletic facilities. What he considered the ideal new world was of no interest to the Russian authorities. Le Corbusier was accused of disregarding the new realities of the Soviet system and of having created
a plan better suited to capitalism.

  5

  In 1930, Le Corbusier published Details Concerning a Present State of Architecture and of Urbanism—the book for which the 1929 South American lecture tour had been the catalyst. In it he explains that architecture is often “pretentious and deceitful, motivated by human vanity,” while at other times “it embodies the Truth Spirit of Le Corbusier, and is resoundingly honest.”8 To achieve that purity, the Plan Voisin could be realized immediately in Buenos Aires; replacing the city’s complex of narrow streets with new buildings on pilotis, including a group of two-hundred-meter-high skyscrapers on the waterfront, would create open spaces with access to the sky and the sea. Le Corbusier devoted the rest of his life to trying to realize this vision of urban utopia.

  For a while, in spite of the rejection of his transportation scheme for Moscow, he continued to see Russia as the place where that “Truth Spirit of Le Corbusier” might take hold. On his last weekend there, luxuriating in a czarist-style hotel room, he wrote his mother:

  Sunday. Moscow–March 1930

  I have just won a complete victory in the big committee settling the life-or-death question of our facades, that question which overwhelmed me in Paris. I have found the people here remarkably intelligent.

  What lies are told, what lies! Resisting to the best of my abilities, remaining as distant as possible, I observe with astonishment the creation of a new spirit. Esprit Nouveau. On the social level I note the reorganization that seems so urgent everywhere. Here, in everything, an enormous forward impulse. This year is a year of fulfillment. Russia is building now, after having demolished. One must be honest, one must be able to acknowledge; I have not advocated an architectural reformation to remain unaffected by this unanimous impulse. The new world is being made here. And I say, very coolly, without passion, that our people who calumniate this world as they do are liars and deceivers. Moreover, theirs is a wasted effort: power explodes here within the general will. Does this astonish you? Yet so it is. One would do better to resign oneself rather than to play the ostrich.

  Arrived Wednesday morning, have not stopped working since. My Centrosoyuz affairs were settled this afternoon. There are sides one must take.

  Lodging: I am in a luxurious bedroom of l’Ancien Régime, surrounded by every possible comfort.

  Here one feels how splendid it is to move.9

  Le Corbusier then made an extraordinary comparison. The Russians, he said, had come up with forms of housing that evoked some of the best qualities of the monastery at Ema, which had remained the supreme example of architectural clarity for him ever since he had first seen it twenty-three years earlier: “The Charterhouse of Ema is a model of housing, and the Muscovites come close to it without imitating it in their new housing program.”10 There could be no higher praise.

  Fortunately, Marie Jeanneret had already received a letter he had written her a few days later when he was back in Paris. There he declared, “As for proposing myself as the apostle or defender of the Russian regime—no such thing. One must be prudent. I myself have as yet no opinion on the whole affair.”11 Had she not read this assessment first, she might have feared that Edouard was attracted even more than he was to the land run by “Jews of rather low extraction.” What ultimately counted for Le Corbusier was not a country’s leadership or its political system, but its hospitality to his ideas, and unless he received major commissions in Moscow, she need have no fear.

  6

  That April, after Le Corbusier’s return from Moscow, he was in high spirits. Yvonne was over her cold, and they spent most weekends at Léger’s farm in Normandy; he was delighted by how well she got along with his other friends, who were also houseguests. The office was busy; among other things, Le Corbusier was exploring the possibility of doing a villa in Florida for the wife of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. He was painting a lot, which kept him calm amid the hecticness. In mid-May, he wrote his mother, “The days are full. Madly full. The further we go, the more I undertake.”12

  With Fernand Léger at Léger’s farm, Normandy, late 1920s

  Le Corbusier either was informed or believed he was informed that he would, after all, be doing the League of Nations. He may have been delusional, but he was in one of his phases of being confident about everything: “You cannot imagine how my activity displaces or places me—on unexpected sites. I crystallize around such ideas certain groupings that seek prominence. And on the left as on the right I am incorporated: here by communists, there by fascists, here by royalists, there by international organizations. Thought spreads like a drop of oil, touching many realms. For me there is, these days, an irresistible crescendo. Increasingly, therefore, I act with speed, with precision, and seize each gesture of my day. New enterprises everywhere, of all kinds, and always that safety measure: painting. And Yvonne happily consenting to be present when necessary and to be ever my good companion. At least my simple hearth is calm and good-humored, a real solace. I call this a priceless boon.”13

  His only annoyance was that his mother had been frugal on a trip to Florence he had funded, and she had returned the money left over. He sent it back to her, with instructions to buy phonograph records and take boat trips on the lake.

  The architect himself had made a giant step away from Swiss parsimony. After sixteen months of paperwork and red tape, he learned that his naturalization as a French citizen was finally certain to come through.

  TOWARD THE END of July, Le Corbusier went to Spain with Albert, Pierre, and Léger, while Yvonne stayed behind at Léger’s farm with the art critic Maurice Raynal. Anticipating the trip, Le Corbusier told his mother that, if disaster struck him, he had a valuable art collection that would guarantee her economic well-being. Marie could now depend 100 percent on the same son who had a decade earlier destroyed his parents’ life savings. Lipchitz and Léger, along with the gallery owner Jeanne Bucher and his friend Christian Zervos, director of Cahiers d’Art, would help her sell off the work at good prices. There was also cash in his bank account, and she needed to know that de Montmollin and Raoul La Roche would assist her in managing her finances if he was no longer there to do so. He had written his will so that she, Yvonne, and Albert would all be beneficiaries; Pierre was also named, but for a smaller percentage than the others: “My intention is not to cross the Rubicon, still less the Styx. But there are my many journeys, risk, chance, etc.”14

  Le Corbusier’s life plan was working. In August, from Le Piquey, he sent his mother sketches of himself with the physique of a god, diving into the ocean with perfect form—his arms and legs taut, his body as firm as a knife blade. He was again convinced he would win the League of Nations job following a fourth round of deliberations. Other commissions were flooding the office; his advice was perpetually sought; he was designing houses and cities; he was lecturing and publishing.

  Only his mother gave him trouble. One Sunday night at the end of September, Le Corbusier wrote her an eight-page letter that pitted her values against his, Switzerland against Paris. He had just been with her in Vevey; the visit had ended on a sour note. Following conversations about her refusal to hire household help, Yvonne, and his change of citizenship, that he considered “melancholy, grotesque, caricatural,” he had departed in a huff. “Setting foot in Paris again, the atmosphere immediately changes: occasions for meditation and appreciation appear at every step. Here there is the whole dramatic spectacle of life…. In Switzerland, providentially sheltered from storms, there are things you do not know and will never know. And your judgment is limited.”15

  Speaking for himself and Albert, Le Corbusier continued: “You, you were a great worker and a model of moral strength. You were endowed with a powerful instinct rather than a meditative mind. For us you remain a magnificent image, and your example is present every day in our labors. You have instilled in us a sentiment of energy. You and Papa have endowed us with a judgment independent of public opinion. We are free men, and we act—virtually—as free men. Must
we see you, then, at the age when everything should be at peace, swallowing the public opinion of this parcel of land deplorably populated by the bourgeoisie? So that by virtue of habit, without any real motivation, you subject your life, and your former liberty, to the enslavement of ambient foolishness?”16

  Le Corbusier wanted his mother to change her attitudes both for his sake and for her own:

  You have shuttered your universe too closely. You no longer take adequate views of the outside world. You must not think so often of yourself, and never of your misery, but of your happiness. Remember that you are our model!

  You are a tyrant. You want everything to coincide with your conception, your idea, your way of doing things. When I call you a tyrant, I mean petty tyrant, yet you persist in imposing your way of seeing things, even on your sons who are over 40!17

  That said, Le Corbusier presented himself as the diplomat who could broker peace even with this impossible despot:

  My dear Maman, let those storms which broke the other day serve as a warning to us: beware!

  Take advantage, I implore you, of this occasion which has furnished the warning. For unfortunate things were said and we must stop short here and see the situation clearly for what it is. My dear Maman, you see how right Papa was to tell me to look after you. It is I who am the elder now, the wise man. I give this advice with tenderness and love. We want you to be happy. You can be. But you must take responsibility for being so. Do you realize that you add to our worries if we must think of you as disarmed? You must be an armed woman, you must be vigilant, you must resist.