I count on you, in Papa’s name, whose daily life for so long (40 years) was so gray and so dim. I say to you: you can live a happy woman.18
For himself, he assured her, he had what it took for such happiness. His apartment was not as spacious as the places where she and Albert lived, but it suited him. There was room to write and paint. He sketched in trains, boats, cars, waiting rooms, or wherever he had a moment to spare. Albert, too, was productive and composing seriously. Le Corbusier had learned that the worst obstacle to personal joy, if one was otherwise fortunate, was oneself; he was determined that his mother see this.
7
In mid-September, on a Sunday when he was plagued by a particularly nasty cold, Le Corbusier ran five and a half kilometers without stopping. Later in the month, he went to Venice, where the beauty intoxicated him as always. But by mid-October, his spirits began to flag. He wrote his mother, “I feel I am abandoning you at this season’s end, when rain, wind and dead leaves spread an invincible melancholy. And you’re alone there, confronting nature.” With winter approaching, sunlight was no longer coming through the windows on the rue Jacob. The cure was clear: “As long as we give due battle, we are active, and being active we are impervious to melancholy.”19
He wrote his mother, “I become ever more certain of the causes of happiness: inner life. With this realization, the horizon widens, deepens, we are drawn toward it; every minute is useful, used…. We are filled with desires and we ourselves are entirely capable of satisfying them.”20
Le Corbusier and Maître André Prudhomme, a lawyer (“a vocat à la cour de Paris”) who was a professor at the Sorbonne, had created a thirty-six-page legal claim concerning the League of Nations project. Officially, the document was “not received” the league declared it could not respond to protests from private individuals. Even then, Le Corbusier did not give up. With Le Corbusier and Pierre having come up with a construction estimate of twelve and a half million francs, for this project on which the ceiling cost had been stipulated as thirteen million, the league was now maintaining that the scheme would have run to at least double the cost. “Thus the League of Nations embarked on the problems of building a home for itself by a deliberately premeditated act of injustice,” Le Corbusier insisted.21
In September 1930, following the failure of the legal claim, the architect wrote a letter to Nicolae Titulescu, president of the eleventh assembly of the League of Nations, that was published immediately. He again maintained that his and Pierre’s ideas were at the core of the winning scheme, and that if they had been kept on the architectural team the end results would have “become a pure and effective work.”22 But there was no response.
He was generating a lot of paperwork for another purpose as well. On September 19, 1930, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret—as he still was for legal purposes—was naturalized (his preferred word for it was “intégré”) as a French citizen. The reason he gave was that, in mid-December, he was to marry Yvonne Gallis.
IT WAS a good moment for giving up his Swiss citizenship. Within a year, Le Corbusier would have to recognize, this time definitively, that all of his efforts in Geneva had been to no avail. He would hire another lawyer, Philippe Lamour, but nothing helped, and the only result of his continued efforts was to further his reputation for audacity and insolence. When the Secretariat was completed in 1936 and the Assembly Hall in 1937, their neo-Classical architecture was that of second-rate public institutions everywhere.
Today these pale and lugubrious structures are a sad reminder of what was once the League of Nations. The columns and Palladian porticos intended to evoke stateliness and power convey instead the weight of failure.
The shimmering assemblage of glass and steel and concrete that never got past the drawing boards would have honored the optimism of the new international organization and served its many purposes impeccably. Alas, the saga of the idealistic vision Le Corbusier hoped would advance world peace and the moribund structures built instead was like the fate of the League of Nations itself.
8
The emotional cycles that in Le Corbusier’s early years had each been of many months’ duration now sometimes occurred within the span of just a few minutes. Following the League of Nations disaster, the architect wrote his mother of his “invincible melancholy.” Proposing hard work to combat his despair, he responded instantly at the mere thought of his self-prescribed cure on the next page of the same letter: “Everything seems easy, the world turns a smiling face, events themselves favor us.”23 His sketches from Athens and Italy and France had been requested to illustrate a special edition of Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, and his Journey to the East was now going to be published. (In fact, neither book came through as planned.) He had been invited to go to America (or so he thought; it was to be five years before he went there), and he had been commissioned to show the Plan Voisin in two important expositions in London.
In his exuberance, Le Corbusier was further refining his concept of the ideal city. “I am quite tempted to call these studies ‘the radiant city,’ for in such a site everything would be joy, activity, health and peace,” he told his mother, using, perhaps for the first time, the term that became a staple of the vocabulary of modern architecture.24 The worsening economic conditions worldwide made him all the more optimistic that this city could bring unprecedented well-being to the masses.
Usually impatient with his office staff, Le Corbusier was now so content that he declared them “a magnificent team.” These people who diligently helped him achieve his dearest goals were true kin: “It’s a family—I have a great big family!”25
The day following his forty-third birthday, he gave Marie Jeanneret one of his status reports on himself: “My ideas are expanding. As I see it, this is the beginning of maturity. For work and achievement are becoming joy.”26
LE CORBUSIER was keenly aware that his mother suffered from psychological shifts like his own. “Very glad to hear you have overcome this wave of depression,” he wrote her in late autumn.27 He offered her the consolation that Lac Leman was beautiful even in foul weather, while Paris in the rainy season was melancholy and difficult.
Nonetheless, he did not spare her discouraging details about an infuriating dinner in early November when he and Yvonne had dined at Albert and Lotti’s house. Le Corbusier had invited a friend of his, a Soviet architect, to join them at 10:00 p.m., following the meal. After the visitor arrived, Albert and Lotti treated him as one of those “terrible men from Moscow.”28 Rather than ask a single question about life in the Soviet capital, Albert put disks from Rigoletto on the gramophone. Le Corbusier launched into a diatribe against his brother as a dilettante who had willingly missed the opportunity to learn something new and enrich his mind. He insisted that their mother recognize this, at whatever cost to her tranquility.
9
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and Jeanne Victorine Gallis were wed in a modest civil ceremony on Thursday, December 18, 1930. That evening, they celebrated at a traditional country inn thirty-five kilometers outside of Paris. Albert and Lotti, the Lipchitzes, Christian Zervos, Klipstein, the Raynals, Pierre Jeanneret, and the Légers all journeyed to the half-timbered, double-gabled Auberge St. Pierre at Dampierre-en-Yvelines in the Vallée de Chevreuse.
“Yvonne Le Corbusier,” ca. 1931
With Yvonne’s parents in Monaco, ca. 1930
None of the bride’s relatives came up from Monaco for the festivities. The groom’s mother was not there either, but the newlyweds and all their guests signed a card for her. Her new daughter-in-law was thrilled by the beautiful flowers Marie had sent that day, and before the night was over she wrote to report on the simple but happy celebration. The bride and groom intended to go to Vevey immediately.
Alas, Yvonne’s passport did not come through. This meant that she could not leave France. Less than a week after the wedding, therefore, Le Corbusier went home for Christmas without her. Heading off to Switzerland by car, he had Pierre at his side as far as Lausanne and
then drove the rest of the way alone. Yvonne spent the holiday solo, except for the cat.
Le Corbusier was, however, back with her by New Year’s. They traveled together to a farm in the Landes for the sort of quietude he loved as a respite from the full flurry of work. To the extent that world events would permit, the structure of his life was now in place.
XXXI
1
His domestic life organized, his professional life was torn asunder.
Three editorials in a La Chaux-de-Fonds newspaper berated Le Corbusier for his collusion with the Soviets and accused him of taking French citizenship for unpatriotic reasons. The day that he received the articles, he cried. His father’s spinster sister—wonderful, religious Aunt Pauline—still lived in the horrible city, and he could not bear her suffering the ignominy of her nephew’s bad publicity. Then Le Corbusier’s books were banned in Germany, where they were declared to be Bolshevik, and the League of Struggle for German Culture labeled Le Corbusier “the Lenin of architecture.”1 The league’s Nazi affiliation did not mitigate the sting.
Regardless of these attacks and his change of citizenship, the Swiss government forgave Le Corbusier and hired him to design its pavilion at the Cité Universitaire near the outskirts of Paris. And he accepted invitations to travel to Sweden, Norway, and England to lecture and meet with people about urbanism. Le Corbusier also took a long trip to Spain, Morocco, and Algeria with Pierre, Albert, and Léger.
With Léger and Pierre Jeanneret, motoring in Spain, July 1930
He loved Marrakech especially, but developed terrible dysentery on his way home. His mother wanted to treat him with “a milk diet,” a concept he later wrote about even though it failed. What fixed his Moroccan malady, he was convinced, was a civet—“burnt black”—and “wine almost as black” that he and Yvonne consumed on a peak in the Jura.2
LE CORBUSIER was further heartened when he was one of the twelve architects invited to submit a scheme for the Palace of the Soviets. Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, and Auguste Perret were among the others; for once, he respected the competition. Le Corbusier’s concept evoked soaring confidence and imagination. It called for an enormous and sweeping concrete arch, with the roof of a fifteen-thousand-seat auditorium suspended from it. Perpendicular to the arch, at the other end of the building complex, were five right-angled buttresses resembling oversized angle brackets. A flurry of cylinders and rectangles, vastly different in scale from one another, contained, among other spaces, a second auditorium—for nearly six thousand people—and two theaters. Some of the surfaces were opaque and solid, others translucent. Graceful curves, rigid verticals, gentle horizontals, and long sloping angles, each the by-product of the demands of the interior circulation, combined to give a fantastic energy to the overall result.
The team at 35 rue de Sèvres slaved away at the project. For three months, all fifteen of them stayed at their drawing boards most nights until 2:00 a.m., sometimes even until dawn, and worked every Sunday, too. Le Corbusier considered the teamwork a “beautiful collaboration,” with everyone aware of what everyone else was doing.3 Finally, he insisted that no further modifications would be permitted, and forty meters of plans went off to the Soviet embassy three days before Christmas 1931. From there, they went to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch.
Once the project was complete, Le Corbusier slept until one in the afternoon three days in a row. Exhausted but happy, he wrote his mother, “With all this, a deep inner joy: creating.”4
IN THE MIDDLE of trying to wrap up the Moscow design, Le Corbusier was asked to give a lecture at the Salle Pleyel, one of the most prestigious concert halls in Paris. The event was organized by Architecture d’Aujourd’hui—an organization devoted to progressive building theories that published a review of contemporary architecture in which Le Corbusier was often the subject or author of articles. Le Corbusier used the occasion to talk about the need to plan buildings from the inside out—and to blast those who violated that principle.
One hundred and thirty students of the Beaux-Arts had been invited, but more than five hundred showed up and shouted throughout the lecture. Le Corbusier believed the insurgents were there at the instigation of his old foe Lemaresquier—the man who had called attention to his League of Nations proposal not being penned in China ink—who was one of their professors. The proponents of the belief that buildings required traditional facades regardless of what happened behind them so hated Le Corbusier’s viewpoint that at subsequent lectures numbered cards were distributed individually to the attendees, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was not invited. Modernism now required security measures.
2
At least he had his loyalists. Le Corbusier was working in this time period on a compact luxury villa in the isolated countryside between the mountains and the sea near Toulon, in the south of France, for Hélène de Mandrot. The heiress, who, in addition to her Swiss château, had a house in Paris not far from the Invalides, was now looking for a smaller modern getaway.
Le Corbusier addressed Hélène de Mandrot as “Chère amie.” He told her he put himself in the category of “men of action and ideals…. We are professionals, prevented at every step from expressing a pure conduct…. Politics? I have no particular identification, since the groups attracted to our ideas are the Redressement Français (bourgeois militarist Lyautey), communists, socialists, and radicals (Loucher), League of Nations, royalists, and fascists. As you know, when you mix all colors you get white. So there is nothing but caution, neutralization, purification and the search for human truths.”5 That openness about his innermost feelings was a mark of respect, but to his mother, Le Corbusier put a different slant on his wealthy client. She was, he told Marie Jeanneret, “as disagreeable as you are.”6 He was thrilled with the house he designed for her—“remarkable, new, strong, solid, splendidly incorporated into the landscape”7—but “the chatelaine is seriously stricken with client disease: acute crisis and lack of sang-froid.”8
De Mandrot had reasons to be upset. Made of local rocks applied to a reinforced-concrete structure so as to resemble old-fashioned stone walls, the sequence of interlocking geometric forms fits into its setting with grace and harmony, but, like his mother’s house, it leaked. Shortly after the elegant villa was completed, de Mandrot phoned Le Corbusier in a state of high anxiety. She described “a lake” that had formed on her living-room floor during a recent downpour.
The Villa de Mandrot, near Toulon, ca. 1931
Le Corbusier quickly boarded a train to Toulon. When he entered the luxury villa—his suit and bow tie as impeccable as ever—he did not appear the least bit bothered as he viewed the pool of water. He asked de Mandrot for a plain piece of paper. The architect took the white sheet and carefully folded it into a simple toy sailboat. He set the boat down in the large puddle and watched it float. “You see, it works,” he told his client.9
Le Corbusier then studied the construction of the windows through which the water had seeped. They had not been properly fit. He addressed the befuddled aristocrat: “Hélène, you’re an architect. How could you have permitted the builders to get away with this? You were on site. Now, really, get the mistake corrected, and please don’t ever again disturb me with my busy schedule in Paris about something of this sort.”10 He left, and returned to the capital as quickly as he had arrived.
3
In the spring of 1931, Le Corbusier took Yvonne to her birthplace. He reported to his mother, “She’s had a childish delight to be back in her Monaco. And everywhere she went she was made much of by good, simple people.”11
With Yvonne, Le Corbusier then made the first of many visits to Algiers. Initially, the intense sunlight, the hills surrounding the city, and the lush vegetation there made him oddly uneasy. He wrote his mother, “I’ve had too many struggles and misfortunes to be able to contemplate these gardens in Algiers without a certain uneasy feeling. Such radiant harmony and such perfection have a crude aspect wounding to a sensibility hungry for reality; these gard
ens plunge you into a convention of happiness, they are a stereotype of the beautiful.”12
After Algiers, Le Corbusier and Yvonne went to the Côte d’Azur and then drove back to Paris. The Easter holiday made it nearly impossible to find places to stay overnight, but his wife was an agreeable travel companion. He explained Yvonne’s nature and his strategy for dealing with it to his mother: “once one learns to maneuver around her basic nervousness, which is considerable, she offers the most perfect and delightful good humor. And I have the impression that ever since the mayor officiated, she’s infinitely calmer. As dear Papa would have said, ‘All’s well that ends well.’”13
4
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret were in this time period also making designs for a museum of contemporary art in Paris. They were so fascinated by their idea for this project that they decided to pursue it even knowing there might never be anyone who would support it. Le Corbusier explained the concept in a letter to his friend Christian Zervos. It was to start out as a building without facades, with a single exhibition space, fourteen by fourteen meters, which could be built for the modest sum of one hundred thousand francs.
Le Corbusier Page 40
