He considered the city’s tall buildings the manifestation of the selfishness inherent in capitalism. The craving for personal financial gain mattered more to their developers than did the benefits to humankind. The many small-scale skyscrapers of New York were the direct result of human competitiveness gone unchecked.
The press was not going to give him an easy time about this or much else. Le Corbusier’s solution to the needs of the city—the Ville Radieuse—was translated in the Herald Tribune as “Town of Happy Light.” It is thought that the anonymous journalist responsible for that misnomer was Joseph Alsop, who spoke French perfectly but had little use for modernism and happily belittled it. Alsop mocked “M. Le Corbusier” as someone “whose egg-shaped head and face, bisected by a pair of thick spectacles with a heavy black frame, make him look like an up-to-date prophet.”5 It was not the welcome Le Corbusier had anticipated in the land where he hoped to realize his boldest aims.
Even though Le Corbusier quibbled over the size of America’s skyscrapers, they were a revelation to him. He was inspired by these buildings to abandon his usual stance against architectural historicism and the use of decorative elements on building exteriors. Having always declared his distaste for the architecture of the High Renaissance and his belief that new buildings should be completely modern in appearance, he now reversed himself on both fronts: “So it was in New York that I learned to appreciate the Italian Renaissance. You might think it was real, it was so well done…. The Wall Street skyscrapers—the oldest ones—add on to their summits the superimposed orders of Bramante, with a clarity in the moldings and the proportions which delight me.”6
Before he took the trip to the United States, Le Corbusier had imagined its skyscrapers constructed of steel, which he pictured as the dominant material of New York and Chicago. He was shocked to discover that many were clad in stone instead. Rather than having this unexpected use of a possibly inappropriate material mitigate his pleasure, here, too, he found himself happily surprised: “I must admit that this stone is lovely under the seaboard skies of New York. The sunsets are moving. The sunrises (I’ve seen them) are admirable: in the purplish mist or the dim atmosphere, the solar fanfare explodes in a salvo, raw and distinct on the side of one tower, then on the next, then on so many more. An alpine spectacle which illumines the city’s vast horizons. Pink crystals, of pink stone.”7
Focusing on what Le Corbusier disliked rather than what he admired, the journalists missed the way the world-famous architect still had the soul of that twenty-year-old who had succumbed to the colors of Siena.
2
Three days after the Normandie docked in New York, Le Corbusier gave a radio address from the RCA Building. He was introduced to his audience as “the artist-architect whose influence is recognized in all parts of the civilized world” by a Mrs. Claudine Macdonald, who explained that he would speak in French and she would translate.8
Le Corbusier described to the audience the vision he had just before his arrival, when the Normandie had stopped for quarantine, required at that time: “I’ve seen rising out of the mists a fantastic, almost mystical City. ‘Here is the temple of the New World!’ But the ship moves on, and the apparition has turned into an image of an unheard-of savagery and brutality.”9 Standing there in his impeccable suit, the architect continued,
This is certainly the most apparent manifestation of the power of modern times. Such brutality and savagery by no means displease me. This is how all great undertakings begin: by strength.
At evening, in the city’s avenues, I have come to an appreciation of this population which, by a law of life all its own, has managed to create a race: fine-looking men, very beautiful women.10
Le Corbusier declared, “I have brought into my realm of architecture and urbanism, with the simplicity of a professional who has devoted his life to the study of the first cycle of the machine age, certain propositions which appeal to every modern technique but whose final goal is to transcend mere utility. This indispensable goal is to give men of the machine civilization the joys of heart and health.”11 Here, the celebrant—the robust athlete and lover of women—and the manic architect who worked to make concrete and superhighways the frank vocabulary of modern life were one and the same: possessed by a supreme reverence for the magic of existence.
LE CORBUSIER walked through the rest of the RCA Building with Fernand Léger, who was also having an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. At the top of the seventy-story-high stepped tower, he was riveted by a large red needle; it was a second hand turning in a large clock that showed the passage of each minute in a circular frame marked one to sixty. To the side of this clock there was an hour clock. He said to Léger, “The hours will return tomorrow. But this first dial, of seconds, is something cosmic, it is time itself, which never returns. This red needle is a material witness of the movement of worlds.”12
“Time belongs to architecture,” he told his radio audience. “Today the city of modern times can be born, the happy city, the radiant city.”13
The United States, where stodginess was not as embedded as in Europe, was where such a birth could happen. “America, in permanent evolution, and in possession of infinite material resources, and animated by an energy-potential unique in the world, is indeed the first country capable of achieving this task today, and in a condition of exceptional perfection. It is my deepest conviction that the ideas I am setting forth here and which I am offering in the phrase ‘Radiant City’ will find their natural terrain in this country.”14
In the upcoming weeks Le Corbusier explained his concepts to anyone who would listen and searched for the clients who might transform them into reality. He gave lectures in Connecticut at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and at Wesleyan and Yale Universities; in Poughkeepsie, New York, at Vassar Collage; and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University and MIT. Then he headed south to the Philadelphia Art Alliance; north again to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; and then south once more to Princeton University, where he gave a sequence of three lectures before proceeding to the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore and returning to New York to speak at Columbia University—all this before heading off for a week in the Midwest. He was like a tireless politician on the campaign trail, energized by his faith in himself and his mission.
3
He had imagined audiences would embrace him as a messiah. The students and museumgoers who attended his talks were less than he hoped for, but there was one person who accorded Le Corbusier total understanding.
Marguerite Tjader Harris, a bright and lively American writer, was the daughter of a Swedish inventor and sportsman and an American heiress. She had a mesmeric smile, her father’s well-defined Scandinavian features, and her mother’s wealth. Married in 1925 to Overton Harris, a prominent New York attorney, in the early 1930s she had left her husband in hopes of finding a happier life in the Alps with their three-year-old son, Hilary.
In Vevey, when she wasn’t skiing or mountain climbing, the blue-eyed, red-haired Tjader Harris looked ravishing in her stylish clothes. She favored turban hats and sported a coat with an oversized leopard-skin collar and cuffs that matched her toddler son’s overcoat. She was quietly at ease in the world; in the sailing season, she did not hesitate to reveal her capable and athletic body.
One day early in 1932, Tjader Harris was out walking near Lac Leman. She gave in to her curiosity about what lay on the other side of the wall surrounding the garden at La Petite Maison and rang the bell. The diminutive, white-haired Marie Jeanneret appeared. Tjader Harris was instantly captivated by the older woman’s African slippers. Embarrassed to have disturbed her, the heiress faltered and then asked if the house was for rent. Le Corbusier’s mother explained that it was not, that her son had built it for her to live in year-round. When Tjader Harris then expressed her admiration for the design and for the slippers, Marie Jeanneret invited her in.
About a month later, Tjader Harris met the son who had designed t
he house. They began to see each other whenever he visited his mother. Soon enough, they were driving through the vineyards above the lake, discussing where she, too, might build a house designed by him. Le Corbusier assured her that the terrain was perfect and that it would be an interesting project. She quickly warned him that they could not start until she knew more about her current financial situation, which was changing because of the Depression and because she was in the process of a divorce. It would also depend on how her mother, who lived in Connecticut, felt about the project. Nonetheless, by the end of April, Le Corbusier had made plans; he told Tjader Harris that this was his way of expressing his gratitude for her kindness to his mother.
Marguerite Tjader Harris sailing, Long Island Sound, 1920s
At the same time, Tjader Harris had written to warn him that she was skeptical about her ability to proceed. The heiress had learned that her family was in dire financial straits—at least by the terms of the rich—and that she would have access to only a fraction of the funds she would need to build. In error, she addressed the letter to the rue de Seine rather than the rue de Sèvres. The letter was therefore delayed, and Le Corbusier had already sent her his ideas before receiving the warning.
Tjader Harris then decided that she could consider building a much smaller house if Le Corbusier could come up with a budget of between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand Swiss francs. She also wrote the architect that she had seen his mother again and greatly admired the older woman’s “splendid gayety of mind.”15
At the start of May, Tjader Harris received several neatly executed bird’s-eye views of the revised house. Ecstatic, she took an apartment near the beach in Vevey in hopes that she would be able to start the building project nearby. She wrote Le Corbusier that his design was “the realization of my dreams which you have crystallized so perfectly.”16 Ostensibly she was just discussing architecture and a house, but her tone had all the portent of a romance in the making.
The project had summoned a burst of energy. Le Corbusier’s design had two wings built on pilotis that interlocked in a bold central space with a third, shorter wing shooting out from the middle and supported by taller columns that elevated it above the other two. There was also a semicircular extension that resembled a Romanesque apse. The agglomeration of terraces, ramps, and gracious living spaces was a plastic manifestation of unmitigated ecstasy.
NOTHING FURTHER HAPPENED with the house project, but Marguerite Tjader Harris and Le Corbusier remained sporadically in touch. In 1934, shortly after her marriage was officially terminated, the divorcée sent Le Corbusier some photographs she had taken of La Petite Maison, for which he thanked her warmly.
As soon as he was in New York at the Park Central Hotel, he wrote her again. By now he was addressing her simply as “Amie.” Tjader Harris was at her mother’s house in Darien, Connecticut, an hour’s train ride north of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. He gave his complicated schedule—with the key information that he would be free from 11:30 p.m. on the coming Thursday until noon on Friday. A series of letters followed in rapid succession, simply to tell her even more precisely when he would be available. Because of professional obligations, the best moment would be starting at midnight.
They saw each other sooner, however. On the weekend before the Thursday to which he referred, Marguerite Tjader Harris drove into the city. In 1984, Tjader Harris wrote a “Portrait of Le Corbusier” that has never been published. In it, she describes Le Corbusier’s first Saturday in New York, five days after his arrival. She and he went to the top of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the RCA Building so that he could observe the city from above. This is another case of a discrepancy in different accounts of Le Corbusier’s life. In When the Cathedrals Were White, the book Le Corbusier wrote in 1937 about his American trip, the architect describes going to the top of the RCA Building on his third day in the United States—only hours before his opening at the Museum of Modern Art a few blocks away—and makes it the occasion of his observing the clock needle with Léger. Tjader Harris’s recollections have him first reaching that sweeping view of New York two days later. It seems likely that Tjader Harris’s account is the more reliable, and that when Le Corbusier wrote his memoir of the trip three years later, he made Léger his companion because he had reasons to leave her out of the scenario.
Le Corbusier and Tjader Harris took the subway down to Wall Street and up to Harlem: “He was like a horse, fretting against the bridles of his many activities…. Already, he was trying to formulate some form of urbanism that could bring order into the confusion he saw…. You could feel how his brain registered every impression, visual and audible; one minute he was enthusiastic, the next, disgusted.”17
That evening, Le Corbusier and Marguerite Tjader Harris went to Connecticut. The small and exclusive residential enclave on Long Island Sound was almost entirely the bastion of rich white Protestants, a “restricted community” where neither Jews nor blacks owned property and where Tjader Harris was among the few Catholics. She lived with her six-year-old son and her mother in the family’s Victorian mansion.
They also owned a beach shack nearby, on a small island. A simple and straightforward cabanon with a fireplace and a deck that faced the sea, it could be reached easily by rowboat. Le Corbusier and Tjader Harris went out there that evening. He impressed her greatly when he removed his glasses and dove into the bracing saltwater.
For years to come, the architect and the American divorcée reminisced about their subsequent hours in the shack, their romance at the edge of the sea. When Le Corbusier ultimately built his getaway in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, it strongly echoed the place where he and Tjader Harris spent that October evening.
4
New York remained Le Corbusier’s base camp during the upcoming weeks as he gave his lectures to the north and south of the city. This served well for trysts with Marguerite Tjader Harris. Besides meeting in the middle of the night, the two went to jazz clubs in Harlem and toured the region.
The automobile figured in their romance. Le Corbusier’s urban schemes featured highways as central elements; vehicular circulation and parking facilities were pivotal concerns. Beyond recognizing the growing reality of cars, the architect had also long reveled in their capability and the power and fun they afforded their users. He loved to drive from Paris into the French countryside with Yvonne or on his longer trips to Spain or Switzerland. Now he was in the country of Henry Ford and the assembly line and of highways that allowed higher speeds. With Tjader Harris in that autumn of 1935, he experienced the pleasures of driving as never before.
Marguerite Tjader Harris owned a brand-new Ford, a powerful V8 painted a sporty tan.18 Six-year-old Hilary was happy in the rumble seat, and the three of them took to the road. The weather was ideal, the days crisp and bright. Le Corbusier marveled at the noble bridges spanning the rivers surrounding Manhattan. The George Washington Bridge struck him as the most beautiful in the world. Taking its giant step across the daunting width of the Hudson, it was marvelous with its steel cables and its height that permitted large ships to pass underneath. Le Corbusier felt that suspension bridges were “a spiritual feature,” and that the G.W. was “the sole site of grace in the disheveled city.”19
When they left Manhattan through the dramatic darkness of the Holland Tunnel and crossed the marshlands of New Jersey, Le Corbusier was likewise exhilarated. Without indicating who his traveling companions were, he later described the experience in When the Cathedrals Were White. He wrote, “This afternoon I crossed the Hudson through the Holland Tunnel, then took the ‘Sky-Way’, so-called for the way its enormous length rises high above the industrial districts, the coastal bays, the railroad lines and highways, on its arches or its pilotis. A roadway without art, for no thought of that was taken, but a prodigious tool. The Sky-Way rises above the plain and leads to the sky-scrapers. Coming from the flat reaches of New Jersey, it suddenly reveals the City of the Marvelous Towers.”20
ON THE EVENING of Thursday, October 31, the divorcée compliantly came in from Darien and went up to Le Corbusier’s room at the Park Central Hotel, as specified, shortly before midnight. The architect had just returned from dinner with twenty-seven-year-old Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the Junior Advisory Committee at the Museum of Modern Art, and the architect Wallace Harrison, who was related to Rockefeller by marriage. Le Corbusier saw Rockefeller and Harrison as perfect stepping-stones to his own success, although in time he realized that the woman who appeared in his hotel afterward was his only real loyalist.
For the rest of Le Corbusier’s visit to America, Marguerite Tjader Harris met up with her lover as often as his schedule permitted—sometimes at the hotel, at whatever hour he designated, and sometimes in Darien. There they would sit in the evening by the fire with Tjader Harris’s mother, whom he likened to his own, and her dog, whom he compared to Pinceau, his and Yvonne’s schnauzer. Hilary, whom everyone called Toutou, was also on the scene. During the days, Tjader Harris and Le Corbusier often repaired to the shack on the small island in the sound.
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