Most of the people at the Waldorf that night bowed to fashion or looked over their shoulders to figure out what everyone else was doing. Le Corbusier, as always, invented his own way. At the same time, he had outfitted himself to dance at the Waldorf with memories of Josephine Baker in his arms.
10
When Le Corbusier had set sail for America, he had expected his wildest dreams to come true. By the time he headed back to France two months later, he was devastated.
Le Corbusier characterized America’s culture by focusing on the taste for Caravaggio which had initially irritated him on his Vassar visit.
Caravaggio, a sixteenth-century Italian painter, “worked in a studio painted black; the only light came in through a trap-door in the ceiling.” Stop there! Here we discover an aspect of the American soul. If we add today’s surrealism, widespread in American collections, to Caravaggio, our diagnosis will be confirmed. This chapter will draw us into the dark labyrinth of consciousness haunted by young people with anxious hearts.
Caravaggio in university courses, surrealism in collections and museums, saltpetre in the army, inferiority complexes bedeviling those trying to escape the simplest arithmetical calculations, the principle of the molested family, the grimmest spirit manifesting itself at the moment of spiritual creation—such is the unexpected harvest that filled my mind upon completing these first journeys to the USA, where I was absorbed in the study of urbanist phenomena.45
It’s hard to fathom how a painter as wonderful as Caravaggio—whose sureness of construction, steely representation of physical space, emotional intensity, and true bravura make him more Le Corbusier’s match than his opposite—should have brought on such opprobrium. But the architect could not stop ranting:
His case is one for the psychiatrists. Young lady from Vassar, is it in the name of art that you are floundering in this sewer? I believe you are impelled to do so by an unsatisfied heart….
Here are sensitive, ill-constructed souls busying themselves with these splendid twilight decors. The sea withdraws; the sky bleeds to the horizon across the dark green water; ruins are heaped into cenotaphs, the clouds ripped to pieces; stumps of columns lie on the ground; by association, women’s bodies cut into pieces, the black blood streaming from them, birds, a horse of decadent antiquity. Symbols, short-cuts, evocations. What is such a liturgy? What refined, moving, spectral ceremony? What appeal to the past? Is something being buried? It is the past that is being buried, all that has ceased to be. The dead are mourned. Very lovely, all that.
Certainly! But the ceremony is coming to an end. The new world awaits the workers!
The USA of the intelligenzia indulges in such rites. This country which knows only technological maturity is anxious in the face of the future. The American soul seeks refuge in the bosom of things past.46
In this incoherent rampage, Le Corbusier next amplified the effects of saltpeter. The substance that gave a perpetual “spoonful”—Le Corbusier’s term for a nonerect penis—to American soldiers was comparable to the music and dance in Harlem in their effect on intellectuals and socialites, to the work people were forced to do in dismal skyscrapers, to “business” and a lot of other elements of American life that rendered its population, “timid” by nature, impotent.47 His image of American soldiers—the same breed as those robust young men Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had admired during World War I—and of the country as a whole was shattered.
11
Impotence in any form was Le Corbusier’s nightmare. Having thought that in the United States he would find clients and powerful patrons, he had discovered, instead, a neurotic culture of pathetic, defeated people whose lives revolved around the need to earn money. Men were working too hard to support their wives, while American women were “amazons” who dominated their beleaguered husbands.48 These women’s demands for jewelry, furniture, vacations, and other luxuries caused the husbands to die at the age of fifty. He was appalled by the ineffectiveness and timidity of all these creatures who lived as victims rather than celebrants of their existence.
Le Corbusier declared that in American design “a funereal spirit prevails, a solemnity which cannot yet be shaken off.” In this land of inhuman dimensions, in spite of the attempt of Hollywood to lighten life with the comedies of Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton, “reality is not so funny as the films. It is serious, overwhelming, pathetic.”49
Although everything was possible in this young country, the absence of an underlying philosophy meant that nothing had been achieved there. Le Corbusier had not disliked a place so much since La Chaux-de-Fonds.
THERE WAS, however, one aspect of American culture that had not let him down. His term for it was “the nigger music.” Jazz embodied many qualities that Le Corbusier held dearest. It was “the soul’s melody joined to the machine’s rhythm. It has two tempi: tears in the heart, throbbing in the legs, torso, arms and head…. It floods the body and the heart.”50
Le Corbusier identified the provision of pleasure through tempo and rhythm with the goals of his architecture. Not only did this American music with the power to make people dance obsess him, but so did the lives of America’s blacks. Focused on both the Pullman porters and slum dwellers, he believed that, however difficult their everyday reality, black people had music that enabled them to enter “the heart’s chapel.”51
The architect had a new hero. Louis Armstrong was “the black titan…Shakespearian…alternately demonic, playful and monumental…. This man is madly intelligent; he is a king.”52 In Boston, he had heard Armstrong perform in a nightclub: “It was absolutely dazzling: strength and truth.”53 For all that Le Corbusier disdained in America, when the values of John Ruskin were made corporeal, he was ecstatic.
12
On December 14, Le Corbusier wrote Marguerite Tjader Harris from the SS Lafayette, the boat that was returning him to France. With his letter, he enclosed a sketch he had made of his lover. The drawing shows her standing on the dock, sporting a hat and a tailored suit that accentuates her impressive height, full bust, and statuesque bearing. The New York skyline is behind her; clearly this was the last vision Le Corbusier had as his boat departed. The caption underneath the drawing reads simply “Au revoir, amie!”54
He had previously sounded the themes of this letter, above all to his parents. Certain terms of adulation for his mistress echoed the praise he had periodically showered upon his mother. But a lot of what he wrote to Marguerite Tjader Harris—the woman he discussed with no one and who in turn kept their relationship secret until well after his death, and whose name never appeared in any account by or about Le Corbusier during his lifetime—reflected a degree of admiration and love he showed to nobody else.
He wrote,
Everything was lovely, clean and careful, dignified and affectionate. Why shouldn’t the heart be entitled to love where it is allowed to open, reveal itself, and receive the maximum of joy and well-being?
The road the heart takes is—step by step—precipitous, headlong, dangerous, and leads to the peaks where something of real life is visible. Why not take a look at life?
I have seen you and not looked, then seen and known, and recognized…. You are strong, healthy, fine and fair. You are open and affectionate. Not closed. Around you the warmest feelings gather. You are strong and gay. Kind.55
Drawing of the “Piéton de Princeton,” made just before leaving the United States to return to France, with the caption “de revenir et de vous serrez à nouveau la main au revoir Le Corbusier 4 dec 1935”
Drawing of Marguerite Tjader Harris, December 14, 1935
Le Corbusier told the Connecticut divorcée that he could not imagine what New York or the entire trip would have been like without her. He savored his memories of the sea, her amiable mother, the beach shack, the Victorian house, and the roads around Darien.
You have been the peasant-maid of New York, a little Joan of Arc for Le Corbusier rattling in the void. A sustenance.
A kind blond light.
Friend, I thank you. My thanks.56
To no other lover did Le Corbusier express himself with such respect. He had let go of his usual sense of distance; there was none of the condescension of his communication with Yvonne. For the first time, he had met a woman on his own level.
LE CORBUSIER announced his new austerity to Tjader Harris, as if he were a priest who had strayed but would now put his collar back on: “And, now my life will return to its old ways, a believer’s heart, vital and transparent, one I can truly respect.”57 Le Corbusier declared that he would now stop thinking about their affair. Discipline would take over; the legacy of Calvinism, of Nietzschean self-control, would prevail.
For all of his steely resolve, however, his emotions shifted constantly. As if drawn by a powerful magnet, Le Corbusier jumped from that summoning of correct behavior back to his memories of the marvelous tenderness he had experienced with his energetic, warm-spirited lover. Then, in another turnaround, he lapsed into a pathetic image of himself at age forty-eight: “The future does not belong to us. The years pass, and continue to pass. Poor old Le Corbusier, so near Autumn, though his heart is a child’s.”58
Nonetheless, the architect maintained, in secret, his connection not just to Marguerite Tjader Harris but also to her son for the rest of his life.
IN HER LATE-LIFE MEMOIR, Tjader Harris provided a portrait of Le Corbusier with observations very similar to Josephine Baker’s. His lovers saw in him a simplicity and genuineness that eluded the larger public. The divorcée wrote that he “was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions.”59
Both women also understood his single-mindedness and his consuming dedication to his work. Le Corbusier’s American lover wrote, “His desire was to create, to work, to accomplish. Everything in him was united in this intention. If he needed a little relaxation, if he needed affection, it was to work better, afterwards. He cared nothing for a social life, nor for the hundred little subterfuges and gallantries necessary to the pursuit of women. We had found a free companionship without obligations nor demands.”60 She was as remarkable as he was.
13
On Le Corbusier’s first night home after the American trip, Yvonne put a record of American jazz on the gramophone in the spacious, modern living room on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli. He considered it a perfect greeting—as if the beguiling Monegasque knew intuitively what he had liked best on the other side of the Atlantic.
He was content to be back. During the festive time of year he normally detested, Le Corbusier “found the bistros mediocre, yet the sky everywhere above the city, and the grace of proportions and the care taken in the details affords real pleasure.”61 In Paris, at least, there were no skyscrapers to destroy the street and block the sunlight.
In traveling to the USSR and the United States, Le Corbusier had visited the two most powerful countries in the world. In each case, he had embarked as a believer, hopeful to have found the answer and the place where he would realize his dreams of new building types and of the Ville Radieuse. What he had anticipated had not panned out. Now he had to acknowledge that neither country had adopted him as its leader and master planner.
Subsequent events only confirmed his disappointment with the United States. In the following year, Le Corbusier feuded with Museum of Modern Art authorities about unpaid lecture fees and their failure to publish an English edition of La Ville Radieuse, as he had hoped. He had won himself a number of fans in America, but many of the people with whom he had been closely associated there—Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art among them—had found him intolerably contentious.
Le Corbusier’s starting point with the United States had been a faith in utopia, the hope of perfection. He now accepted that this did not exist. On the other hand, he had confirmed his love for the woman who best understood both his heart and his genius.
XXXIII
1
After returning from America, Le Corbusier retreated to the privacy and comfort of his studio; it was his usual formula of immersing himself in the luxury of creativity on the most intimate scale whenever he despaired of his ability to change the entire world. Paintbrush in hand, a canvas in front of him, his wife just a room away, the aromas of garlic and tomatoes simmering in olive oil wafting from the kitchen, their dog scurrying around the apartment, he was content.
The moment, however, that he was beckoned to make large-scale architecture, with a chance of designing cities as part of the package, he jumped. The Brazilian government asked Le Corbusier to help develop plans for headquarters for both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Health. In July 1936, he returned to Rio.
At 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli, ca. 1935
Sketches comparing the structure of a fir tree and a brise-soleil on a skyscraper, early 1940s
Le Corbusier made the trip on board the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible airship filled with hydrogen that took four days to go from France to Brazil. He was thrilled by the custom-fitted interior of the unusual vessel, its mechanics, and the hoopla when it landed—all the Brazilian natives rushing about to anchor the great airship.
His mood plunged when he saw the site chosen for the Ministry of Education. Then he and his clients found a more suitable setting for which he designed a vertical slab with end walls made from the local pink granite. His spirits soared, even when the minister of education told him that the plan would not work: one of the main facades faced north and would heat up intolerably in the sunlight. Le Corbusier was elated rather than discouraged by what might have been a hurdle. He had a breakthrough idea: he would use brises-soleil.
He had initially developed brises-soleil for his studio at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli and had then proposed their use in some of his designs for Algiers. These “sun shields” were further inventions through which Le Corbusier intended to change the way people lived and worked. The idea was to use horizontal slats to protect windows from direct sunlight. Le Corbusier believed that by observing the movement of the sun in the course of an entire year, one could fix these brises-soleil at the correct angle so that during the summer there would never be direct sunlight on the windowpanes, while in the winter, when it was desirable, there would be. Deferring to the ruling power of the sun, they accommodated the need for living conditions that are neither too hot nor too cold. The project in Rio would allow him to employ these splendid devices on an unprecedented scale.
TODAY THE RIO building is smaller than many structures around it, but it radiates a power they lack. The slab on tall pilotis manages the Corbusean feat of being dense and graceful at the same time. Its solid side walls have fantastic presence. But the brises-soleil that cover the larger northern exposure are not as Le Corbusier intended. Whereas he would have preferred all the elements neatly aligned with one another, they were immediately adjusted to various angles according to the wishes of the inhabitants of individual offices. Their differing positions give the building a haphazard look.
With his device purportedly designed to benefit a large group of people with a range of needs and tasks, did Le Corbusier truly care about their comfort above all? Or did his ability to impose an aesthetic standard, to dictate someone else’s way of life and maintain authority regardless of the actual experience of his beneficiaries, matter more than anything else? The architect had himself convinced he was serving humankind; his effectiveness was debatable.
2
While in Rio, Le Corbusier was asked to design a university campus, which would include a law school, medical school, hospital, museum, sports stadium, restaurants, clubs, housing, liberal-arts departments, and other facilities. Government regulations forbade his receiving a fee for the project, but the local authorities found a loophole. They asked the architect to give six lectures, for which he was paid substantial stipends that compensated him for the design work. At those lectures, the architect proposed one of his most radical urban schemes. To counteract what he dec
lared to be the “horrifying chaos” created by the rapid and random development of the nineteenth century—where “everything here is false, frightful, cruel, ugly, stupid, inhuman”—he designed a unifying scheme for all of Rio that honored its specific geographical situation.1
A second city was to be built on top of the existing one. Le Corbusier’s proposal resembles a gigantic elevated ribbon snaking among the hilltops that flank the Brazilian metropolis. The undulating slab would sit on top of pilotis 120 feet high. In one direction, it faced the bay—the shape of which is echoed by the serpentine lines of the slab. In the other, this continuous line of buildings looked toward the mountains. On top of the slab, there was a divided motorway. It was one of Le Corbusier’s most daring and imaginative schemes—however unrealizable.
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