Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Unlike the other women in his orbit, Tjader Harris had a rare combination of intellect, passion, and steely self-control. The independence he generally eschewed in women were part of what made the athletic, elegant Nordic redhead desirable. These halcyon escapades of 1935 were only a beginning.

  5

  The lectures Le Corbusier gave in America focused on La Ville Radieuse and his recent domestic architecture. Robert Jacobs, his translator on the tour, who stood at the architect’s side, was nicknamed “the faithful shade.”21 The lectures were often accompanied by a silent film that showed the Villa Savoye and the villa at Garches, accompanied by a recording of music composed and played by George Gershwin.

  Le Corbusier’s favorite lecture venues were at the East Coast colleges and universities attended mostly by upper-class youth. These enclaves of stone buildings and gracious lawns, reserved primarily for the elite, fascinated him. In the midst of the Depression, one generally had to come from a moneyed family to be at one of the Seven Sisters or at an Ivy League university for men. To Le Corbusier, who had had no experience of anything remotely like them, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton were each “a world in itself, a temporary paradise, a happy stage of life.”22

  Vassar College, with its impeccably manicured grounds and old-fashioned brownstone buildings, reminded Le Corbusier of a luxurious club. At this “joyous convent”—the architect’s term once he learned that its entirely female student body was there for four years—he was captivated by the young women onstage when he attended a student play shortly after arriving on the campus. He leered at them whether they were “in overalls or bathing-suits. I delight in observing these splendid bodies, braced and purified by physical training.”23

  Later that same day, six hundred of these fine female specimens filled an auditorium to hear Le Corbusier lecture. Looking at the sea of privileged, well-brought-up women, his first thought was “good blood.” He was surprised to discover that they all understood French, which further confirmed their distinction.

  The Vassar students were his most attentive audience to date. In the course of speaking that afternoon, he came to believe that they would be his “best propagandists.” When he was done telling them about new cities and unprecedented ways to live, they stampeded toward the stage. His new devotees feverishly cut up his large drawings so that each of them could take home a small fragment, like a holy relic. “One piece for each amazon,” he recalled.24 They begged him to sign the pieces of paper, which he willingly did.

  This felt like a real start at convincing the most influential people in the most influential country of the world to take up the concept of the Ville Radieuse. Surely those young women would promulgate his agenda for an architecture and urbanism that integrated the pleasures imperative to human existence with modern materials and a new vision. According to his own proud calculations, he made, in the course of this seminal trip, two tenths of a mile of drawings: six rolls of paper, each fifty meters long. As he gleefully watched the undergraduates tearing apart some of the sacred scrolls, his confidence soared: “The Vassar drawings were the consequence of an especially good mood. The amazons reduced them to shreds!”25

  Once the onslaught was over, the students asked him intelligent questions in impeccable French. They revealed impressive knowledge of sociology, economics, and psychology and a keen concern with the serious problems then confronting the world. Faced with their earnestness, he assumed a humility that had a phony ring to it: “I never felt so stupid. ‘But, Mesdemoiselles, I know nothing about the problems you envisage; I am merely an urbanist and an architect and perhaps an artist. Mesdemoiselles, you overwhelm me, you are too serious, I shall leave you and join those who are munching cookies!’”26 Today, students would boo or storm out; in the mid-1930s, they were charmed.

  Following the question-and-answer session, Le Corbusier went to the house of an art-history professor and began to drink whiskey. When “a superior student” told him she was studying Caravaggio, the architect responded that he disapproved and asked her to explain “the source of the strange power in this equivocal man.” He imperiously asked the student, “Do you too suffer from repression?”27

  It was beyond him that a young woman would devote her time to the blatantly homosexual Italian painter. Le Corbusier attributed the student’s misguided taste to an essential problem of America’s unwise preoccupation with the facets of the human psyche best kept private. Given his closeness to William Ritter, it isn’t that he condemned homosexuality. Rather, the architect joined a handful of other influential modernists—Josef Albers, the Bauhaus professor who had two years earlier begun teaching many of the leading young artists of the next generation at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, was another—who were rankled by the American taste for autobiographical art that deliberately revealed the psychological issues of its maker. These purists disdained all fondness for Duchamp and the Surrealists. They preached an adherence to the tenets of pure geometry and clearheaded design and an avoidance of issues they believed were extraneous. Le Corbusier reflected, “Caravaggio, rising out of the past, slakes a certain thirst of the American soul; furthermore the ‘surrealism’ of today has conquered the USA, the USA of the timid and the anxious.”28

  Still, he had great hopes for the twelve hundred women of Vassar College. The architect came to a conclusion that was remarkable in light of the woman he had chosen to marry: “In American society, woman exists by means of her intellectual labor.”29 These women of the new world could achieve great things.

  The day after his lecture, Le Corbusier’s admiration for the egalitarian spirit of these female undergraduates increased when he boarded the train to return to New York. It was a Saturday morning, and a group of students was heading into the city as well. They flocked toward the smoking car. Not only were the young ladies undaunted that their fellow smokers were muscular male dockhands and factory workers, but they relished the men’s company. Le Corbusier wrote about that sight: “Democratic spirit. At Vassar I detected hints of communism in this wealthy circle. It’s a familiar experience: the ‘good society’ of the intelligenzia, rich and eager to spend money, looks forward to the ‘great revolution’ with a touching ingenuousness.”30 His tone was snide, but he loved the warm spirits and good heart.

  6

  The lecture tour also gave Le Corbusier his first exposure to American football culture. Princeton had a winning team that year, and the visiting architect was impressed that sports rivalry could serve as “an intense springboard of solidarity and enthusiasm.”31

  The architect considered Princeton and the other institutions with fine grounds and Gothic buildings as erstwhile attempts at Eden in their removal from ordinary reality. But he questioned the merits of the isolation imposed by these enclaves. He recognized the idyllic aspect of four years in an artificial paradise but wondered if it would be better at this seminal moment of development to have “the total expanse of life, with its flaws, its poverty, its anguish, its greatness?”32 When he was the age of these undergraduates, after all, he had been sojourning independently from one European city to the next, taking part-time jobs and seeking apprenticeships.

  After Ema and Mount Athos, the rural villages of the Baltic, and the workers’ clubs in Moscow, Princeton presented a form of group living Le Corbusier had never before encountered: “These rugged boys—all of them athletes—this security of material life, this simple joy of camaraderie…these are the master trumps in America…. Across the USA, the student tribes form their de luxe encampments.”33

  Le Corbusier preferred the independence required of students at the Sorbonne, who lived on their own: “I’m drawn by the pathos of life and its dangers; much less by the assurance of these spoiled daddy’s boys, so well-fed, well-scrubbed, well-groomed.”34 Those sons and daughters of privilege were deprived of important things. The nature of their physical surroundings, too elegant and too isolated, was complicit in the problem.

  LE CORBUSIER greatly a
dmired the energy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and of the building campaign recently undertaken by the Works Progress Administration. An intermediary tried to arrange a meeting between the two men. As with Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover, Le Corbusier was to be disappointed. When word came back that Roosevelt did not have time, Le Corbusier blamed the all-consuming 1936 election campaign for the president’s missing something far more important than politics: “From my brief experience of the men in government, I should say they are not well-informed. They haven’t time to inform themselves and to meditate.”35

  But most people were excited to meet the architect, and his lecture became part of the legacy of each institution where he appeared. At Bowdoin College, it is still remembered that at dinner at the president’s house, when a guest asked the famous visitor for his views about city planning, he pushed away the dishes, got one of the female guests to give him her lipstick, and sketched in brilliant red all over the tablecloth.

  The lecture audiences were invariably attentive and excited, with no protests like those in Paris. On the other hand, the dean of the Harvard architecture school, where Le Corbusier spoke, labeled the visitor “a much over-rated individual.” The Christian Science Monitor disparaged the architect by reporting that he “never attended school, not even primary school.”36 At a formal dinner in Philadelphia, guests were appalled when he tried out certain new English expressions like “son of a bitch.”

  Among the people Le Corbusier offended at that dinner was the cantankerous art collector Dr. Albert Barnes. As a result, Barnes denied him the privilege of going the next day to view his extraordinary collection of Cézannes, Seurats, and Renoirs. Le Corbusier did not accept the collector’s refusal to open his doors. Since L’Esprit Nouveau had, in 1923, published an article by Maurice Raynal about Barnes and his collection and educational theories, the architect felt he had earned the right of entry. He dispatched a note to that effect.

  Barnes replied that Le Corbusier would be allowed to visit after all. The collector, however, specified a day well after the architect’s scheduled departure from Philadelphia, and he also stipulated that nobody from the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the organization where Le Corbusier had lectured, could accompany him. Le Corbusier replied that while he was “infinitely respectful of pride and wealth,” he could not wait “four days on the Barnes Foundation doorstep.” He signed the letter, “The founder of L’Esprit Nouveau who from 1919 to 1925 fought the good fight for the artists you buy.”37

  The maneuver failed. After he returned to New York, Le Corbusier received a typewritten reply, unsigned and in French, a language he knew Barnes did not speak. It was addressed to “Maître Corbeau, dit Le Corbusier.” Barnes wrote, “I’ve heard that you were quite drunk last Friday at the Sausage Alliance in Philadelphia; I presume you were in a state of similar intoxication when you scribbled your remarks. In any case, Maître Corbeau now knows that Maître Renard has no respect for clowns nor for the Nitwit Alliance that employs them.” The missive was signed “Maître Renard, known as ‘Albert C. Barnes’ founder since before 1910 of the New Spirit which seeks to differentiate the true from the false in art and culture.”38

  Le Corbusier responded calmly. He suggested that two people who loved the same things and shared certain passions should not feud and said that the three whiskeys he had consumed at the Art Alliance dinner had not made him drunk. Taking the upper hand, he wrote Barnes, “I enjoy a good fight in life, and I engage in such combats without fear. But in this instance I believe hostility is useless.” It was time for “the duel to come to an end.”39 The letter came back unopened. In large circular handwriting, Barnes had written “Merde” on the sealed envelope.

  Le Corbusier recounted the feud and quoted extensively from the exchange of letters in When the Cathedrals Were White, with the conclusion that “it testifies to the crude satisfactions of the men who in one, two, or three generations have ‘made America.’ If you like, it is a sort of ‘cowboy’ story!”40 The word “cowboy” was in English in the otherwise French text.

  He was eventually to be more flummoxed by those cowboys than he ever could have imagined.

  7

  In the third week of November, Le Corbusier began to make his way westward toward Chicago. Near Detroit, he visited the Ford River Rouge plant, one of the largest assembly-line buildings in the world. Watching the production of six thousand cars per day, he felt he had entered the modern world at last.

  That efficient, state-of-the-art automobile factory exemplified the ideal political state: “With Ford, everything is collaboration, unity of outlook, unity of goals, perfect convergence of thought and action.” By contrast, the practice of architecture in modern Europe struck him as inefficient and problem ridden: “With us, in the factory, everything is contradiction, hostility, dispersion, divergence of views, assertion of opposing goals, marking time.”41

  Ford’s production techniques convinced Le Corbusier that the traditional practice of architecture had not yet caught up to the possibilities of the modern world. He decided, as if he had never known it before, that architecture must make human well-being its primary goal as assiduously as Ford devoted itself to producing automobiles. Studios and factories alike must utilize modern techniques to achieve that objective with maximum efficiency. The assembly line demonstrated the possibilities of realizing the dream of allowing individual liberty and collective effort to thrive in perfect tandem with each other.

  Not since the monastery at Ema had Le Corbusier been as excited by an architectural prototype as he was in that facility near Detroit. The vast factory with its cacophony of sounds and its production of the vehicles essential to everyday life in a vast and powerful country had a similar effect to the fifteenth-century retreat devoted to the contemplative life on the outskirts of Florence. It was neither the first nor the last time in his life that Le Corbusier had fallen for a false god. His vision of the core of American capitalism helped pave the way for what soon was more than a flirtation with the forces of fascism and repression.

  8

  In Chicago, Le Corbusier came to admire the buildings of Louis Sullivan but disparaged both the poverty of the slums and the spread of America’s second-largest city horizontally into suburbs. Insufficiently connected with an urban core, isolating families on little plots of land, these communities were the antitheses of Le Corbusier’s ideas. He told his Chicago audiences that American production techniques had led the way in what he termed “the first machine age civilization”—the century from 1830 to 1930—but that now capitalism was destroying American cities by producing architecture not in the best interest of urban planning.42 He still believed that the United States had the potential to lead the world in facilitating a new urbanism—if only the country would listen to him rather than continue to cluster its skyscrapers and expand its suburbs. Le Corbusier showed his own work—the Swiss Pavilion as well as unbuilt projects like his art museum and the Palace of the Soviets—as examples of what public buildings should look like. He also pushed his urban schemes.

  Le Corbusier’s hosts tried to organize a meeting between him and Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived a couple of hours away. It made perfect sense for two of the greatest names in modern architecture at least to shake hands. Along with Mies van der Rohe—who was soon to move to Chicago but who had for the time being remained in Berlin following the closing of the Bauhaus under pressure from the Nazis—and Alvar Aalto, in Finland, Le Corbusier and Wright were the gods of the field. But Wright declined to make the journey to meet the visitor from Paris, let alone to hear him lecture. To the Chicago-based architect who had invited him, Wright wrote, from Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, “I hope Le Corbusier may find America all he hoped to find it.”43

  At the Drake Hotel, Chicago, Thanksgiving morning, November 28, 1935. Photo by Robert Allan Jacobs

  A more successful encounter was arranged on Le Corbusier’s behalf with a prostitute, procured for him by his translator. When he
woke up next to her on Thanksgiving morning in the Drake Hotel, the architect was in such good spirits that he took a silver-plated dome from room service and donned it as a crown, posing for a photograph in which, with his striped pajamas and trademark glasses, he resembles a circus clown. Later that same day, his spirits high, he took a TWA flight back to New York. Le Corbusier was invited into the cockpit, which he considered an architectural marvel, especially as it facilitated a smooth and quiet journey that took only three and a half hours.

  9

  The architect stayed in New York until mid-December. This time he was at the Gotham Hotel, an ornate building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. (Today it is called the Peninsula.) Feeling that he was at the center of a universe—one that had even more potential than the inner sanctum of Argentinian high society, where he had anticipated his ascent as master builder six years earlier—he was determined to use his proximity to wealth and power to full advantage.

  In those few weeks, he took every chance he could to pitch ideas to Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s mother was one of the three founders of the Museum of Modern Art, and the young millionaire was closely connected to many people in the financial and political establishment. Le Corbusier imagined Rockefeller as the magician who might enable him to realize a new League of Nations proposal, a housing scheme in the New York area, a contemporary-art museum anywhere, a headquarters for CIAM in Paris, and his design for a pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair.

  Once he was back in France, all these prospects came to nothing. But for those few weeks in New York, Le Corbusier believed he was on the verge of major conquests.

  ON DECEMBER 6, the former child of La Chaux-de-Fonds went to a ball for 2,500 guests at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The ball, given by the Beaux-Arts architects, had the theme of a night in India. When Le Corbusier had gone a few days earlier to rent a costume, he had been offered a turban and “brocaded robe” suitable for a raja or a khan. But he had other ideas: “Thanks, but no usurped titles! Not being a handsome fellow, I’ll leave my anatomy in peace. Despite his protests, I’ve obliged the man who rents costumes to give me a prisoner’s outfit, blue and white stripes, and a vermillion tunic of the Indian army (my supplier would have preferred a top officer’s outfit!); I dislodged an enormous gold epaulette which I pinned on the left side. No kepi, sir, a pointed white dunce cap, please. To create a balance of colors, I attached a big blue scarf across my chest to a gold sword-belt. Damn! no pockets in my prison trousers: banknotes in my socks then, my pipe and my tobacco-pouch stuck in my belt. And to finish off, on my cheeks and forehead, three broad yellow patches of different shapes to mislead the curious.”44