Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  IN RIO, he became aware that six months had elapsed since he had seen Marguerite Tjader Harris. Being back in Brazil also brought on memories of Josephine Baker.

  Le Corbusier wrote Tjader Harris, opening the letter, “I no longer understand how I could sleep with black women. There are crowds of them here, some very beautiful. So much the worse.”2 Over the years, his need to tell this one woman about the others became chronic. She tolerated Le Corbusier’s disregard for the effect of his confessions.

  Having last been with Tjader Harris shortly before he set sail from New York, he now told her, with meticulous recall, “I haven’t made love since December 13. Ridiculous. Especially ridiculous to note the fact and to assume it means something. We spoil everything with these observations of minor circumstances which are quite inexplicable. Except for arithmetic, nothing can be explained. We paddle in incomprehensible seas…. Lacking yours, I have these. But here we must wear bathing-suits. And a simple piece of wool is a nasty privation of great delights.”3

  Le Corbusier had recently begun to write When the Cathedrals Were White. He told his mistress that he could not have written it without her, and his underlying idea was that she should translate it. This was when he subtitled the travel journal In the Land of the Timid. These “timid” Americans, he added, were “hefty” but purposeless: “they still don’t know what to do with their strength in order to have something in life to show for it.”4

  Le Corbusier had recently had his palm read and been told 1936 would be a year when he could take risks. The numbers concurred. He was forty-eight; four plus eight equaled twelve, two plus one (the digits in twelve) equaled three, and three times twelve was thirty-six. These figures all represented harmony. They gave him the reassurance and balance that, he told Tjader Harris, permitted him to face squarely the anguish of his American trip, which seemed even more disastrous in retrospect.

  In contrast to New York, Rio was a virtual paradise. Even in winter, there was sunshine; the sky was perpetually blue. He swam regularly in the middle of the day, and everything was a feast for the eyes: the men who dressed in white, the “roads of love” where hundreds upon hundreds of women walked hand in hand. Le Corbusier elaborated on those roads, where prostitutes welcomed their clients: “Before 1930 the whorehouses faced the sea. The preference was for French women. Today a moralizing rigor is in force, which jars in this exuberant site.”5 He relished the liberty of reporting it all to his aristocratic, Catholic, American mistress.

  ONCE HE GOT BACK to Paris, Le Corbusier received word that neither his urban plan nor most of the other ideas he had proposed for the Brazilian capital were wanted.

  He was becoming increasingly skeptical, and realistic, about his ability to inspire a universal revolution. In November 1937, when his friend Elie Faure, an art historian who specialized in antiquity, died, Le Corbusier reflected, “He had to die before his work could be revealed to the public and his views circulated. Now people are looking at his texts. Tomorrow will show that he was clairvoyant. Death is the sacrament of life.”6 For the rest of his life, he assumed that he and his work would be better appreciated once he, too, was no longer alive.

  3

  At least the pavilion Le Corbusier was building for the international exposition to be held in Paris near the Porte Maillot later that year was a reality. It was not a master plan for Rio or a city in America, but it would actually happen.

  The architect had been making proposals for the exposition ever since it had been conceived in 1932. Initially, he recommended that instead of being called “The International Exhibition of Art and Techniques” it become the “International Exhibition of Housing.” Housing, he decreed, was the essential issue confronting civilization. His megalomaniacal attempt to dictate the overall theme of the exposition fell on deaf ears, however, and he later publicly complained that his thirty-six printed pages of suggestions “did not even get a formal acknowledgment.”7 Between 1932 and 1936, he had drawn up three different schemes for his pavilion—all of which had been rejected. But just after the exposition had opened, the French prime minister, Léon Blum, had been dismayed to discover that Le Corbusier’s proposals had been turned down, and in December 1936, four months after the opening, Le Corbusier was offered the funds to build. The architect at first went into a public sulk and said “it was too late.”8 But having a prime minister take his side was irresistible. Le Corbusier reversed himself and agreed to erect a structure devoted primarily to the themes of town planning and Paris.

  While the pavilion was being built, few people knew that, as was so often the case, Le Corbusier was afflicted by health problems. For about three weeks in April, he suffered from symptoms that suggest a flu or sinus infection or combination of the two. No specific diagnosis was given, but the architect was laid flat by headaches, congestion, and malaise. After a specialist assured him that he had no major health issue beyond the visual impairment that was a given, he became delighted with the enforced stop in his life. Yvonne took such good care of him in the new apartment that he wrote to his mother that the twenty days of illness seemed to fly. Bedridden, he had a wonderful view of the sky, and he was perpetually cheered by the optimism of André Bauchant’s paintings. He could not really be all that sick, he reassured Marie, because he was well enough to smoke—news he assumed would relieve her enormously.

  It was one of those moments when optimism and a sense of celebration permeated Le Corbusier’s psyche as surely as pessimism and regret catapulted him downward on other occasions. Positioned with great vistas from his apartment yet with the city center in reach, he believed the reason he could feel so well while being ill signified the “victory of the Radiant City!”9 Besides, he was building his pavilion and being accorded respect from both the fringes and the mainstream. In his penthouse on the outskirts of Paris, he imbibed life’s bounty.

  THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY was organizing a conference to take place that July to address the theme of the international exposition, and the honorary committee—which included Louis Aragon, André Gide, and André Malraux—asked Le Corbusier to be one of the main speakers. When, two weeks after he spoke under those auspices, the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux opened, the architect was finally decorated with a Legion of Honor. Having turned down the medal on four previous occasions, this time he accepted it in order to rebut recent attacks in which he had been declared anti-French.

  Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the International Exposition in Paris, 1937, entrance facade

  His new pavilion was true to the determination of the French Communist Party to challenge and confront the old ways of doing things. Le Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux was a fifteen-thousand-square-meter space with walls and a roof made of cloth that was boldly colored in yellow, blue, red, and green. Its structure depended on tensile vertical pylons, similar to poles used to support high-voltage power lines, and on steel cables that anchored it to the ground. The temporary structure looked like a building under construction more than one that was completed. To modern eyes, it resembles a wrapped structure by the artist Christo, in particular his Reichstag encased in paper and string, as if it were a gigantic package.

  Inside the pavilion, an airplane was suspended from the roof. Murals and dioramas by Le Corbusier and José Luis Sert evoked modern industry and the latest advances in technology. Le Corbusier told his mother that his intention was to create “an event, something strong, commanding, healthy, convincing. A battlefield, it goes without saying.”10

  Without some struggle, after all, how could he triumph? Le Corbusier publicly whined that “no bigwigs came to open it,” but he viewed the lack of attention as directly connected to the brilliance of what he had done: “It was the boldest thing you can imagine.”11

  4

  Le Corbusier showed his latest plan for Paris in the 1937 exposition. It left the French capital’s monuments and city center intact but added four large skyscrapers lined up in a row on the outskirts. The magazine ART, referring to the eighteenth-
century architect whose exaggerated classicism was a symbol of the ancien régime, called this proposal “a megalomania worse than Ledoux’s, a vandalism unique in history, the dreary uniformity, vanity, and monotony of these skyscrapers…have been proved morally and spiritually injurious, a contempt for historic and artistic tradition.”12 Le Corbusier quoted the diatribe in My Work; the more pulverizing the critique, the more he reveled in it.

  That year, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret also designed a stadium and open-air theatre for one hundred thousand people. At the time, it was mocked—Balthus and Picasso, both of whom preferred grand French buildings, compared the stadium to a gigantic saucer missing its cup—although twenty years later the Iraqi government commissioned a sports center for Baghdad along very similar lines.13

  Le Corbusier’s design for a monument at one of the main entrances to Paris, made for a competition organized by the Front Populaire, was, Le Corbusier himself explained, “rejected with a certain amount of nastiness. The most advanced artists, friends of Le Corbusier, castigated him for putting forward such a proposal.”14

  With all these defeats, the architect’s fiftieth birthday hit him hard. To Marguerite Tjader Harris, he wrote that the official honors had been abundant, “but hatreds abound, and the struggle is as harsh as ever. For the time being, total ‘depression,’ no work.”15 Le Corbusier told her that an astrologist in Rio—not the same person as the palm reader—had said that at age fifty he would join the sun, Jupiter, and Venus in the most beautiful sky possible. Nothing of the sort had happened; no one in New York or Paris or Algiers was building Corbusean cities, and he felt deserted. And while he was stagnating, the bourgeoisie, the academics, and the lazy traditionalists were all thriving.

  In early December, Le Corbusier and Marguerite Tjader Harris managed to organize a couple of nights together at the Hotel de la Cloche in Dijon. Afterward, he wrote her, quoting his friend Maurice Raynal as having said, “Behind that stiff facade, Le Corbusier is a tender-hearted man” he asked her to confirm that this was so.16 He then leaped from the issues of human personalities to the personalities of cities. He complained that Zurich, like everything in Switzerland, was “intimate” he preferred grandeur. London had now become one of his favorite places; it was “sumptuous.” “This black city” offered a panoply of rich experiences, from the traditional clubs in their dignified nineteenth-century buildings imitative of the Medicis’ palaces to the beautiful merchandise in the shops, especially the woolens and leather goods.17 On a recent visit to the British capital, its strong and powerful life struck him as ripe for romance.

  He boasted unabashedly to his American mistress about a conquest: “Then a party at some gentleman’s house. I had noticed the loveliest woman there. And as fate would have it…. In three rounds, as boxers say.”18 He was telling her this only a month after their escapade together in Dijon.

  THEN THE ANSCHLUSS occurred. With Hitler’s invasion of Austria, the devaluation of the franc, and the failure of the Front Populaire, human civilization seemed threatened as never before.

  Le Corbusier saw both tragedy and possibility in all the changes: “March 18, 1938: Disappointing days. Imbecility everywhere, arrogance or funk. Dilemma. Terrible risks of a nameless war. Behind all this: nothing! Words, ghosts, and even so, there are the haves, unwilling to accept even the possibility of a new world. They’d rather die on top of their gold. But they will make everyone else die of impotent rage. At least such terrible death agonies will be the end of the disease, the birth of a new civilization, and there will be more to talk about than chimerical vanities. What I mean is, people will share, will start afresh, will group together! We must wait and see!”19

  In June, a Paris-based organization devoted to helping partisans wounded in republican Spain asked Le Corbusier to issue a statement. He complied by calling the fighting in Spain “satanic madness.”

  Under the pretexts of points of view, blood runs, and men’s bones are broken….

  What immense and total gratitude we have for those doomed to this hell. We must sustain them with our most active love.20

  Later that year, Le Corbusier asserted that the signers of the Munich accord, most especially the British prime minister, symbolized human evil: “Chamberlain seems to me the most dangerous kind of grim reactionary: the City, profits, money!” The invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 made him even more miserable: “Then the Jews treated as no one ever dared imagine.”21

  How long he would sustain the victims of fascism with his “active love” remained to be seen.

  5

  In 1938, a major exhibition opened at the Kunsthaus in Zurich presenting almost all of Le Corbusier’s paintings of the past two decades.

  Since the inception of Purism, his painting style had evolved significantly. His still lifes had become increasingly complex, containing myriad elements in lively, animated relationships. He had also taken to making bold, oversized figures—similar to Léger’s but even more broad shouldered and muscular. The effects of Braque and Picasso could also be seen in the ways human form, machine parts, and musical instruments were combined.

  Like his spoken and written language, his painting style is animated by a high energy level, a deliberate complexity, and an urgent charge. But also like his verbal communication, it occasionally lacks clarity, as if emotional tumult is more honest and valuable than self-editing.

  In his studio at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli, late 1930s

  When the show opened, there was no press coverage, and his friends remained silent—with just one exception. Le Corbusier’s old pal and banker de Montmollin sent him ten bottles of Neuchâtel wine to celebrate the event—a gesture the architect would never forget. For it was a bittersweet experience. Le Corbusier wrote of his Zurich exhibition, “I couldn’t have been rejected more completely. At least I’ve shown myself for what I am: a competent technologist, pursuing the harmonious path: poetic creation, the sources of happiness.”22 Rejection had had two effects: to show him who his real friends were and to reinforce his belief in his own achievement.

  6

  Le Corbusier had first overlapped with the stylish and aristocratic Anglo-Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray at the 1922 Salon d’Automne, where he presented his Citrohan house. Gray, nine years his senior, had exhibited an inventive black lacquer screen, as well as other furniture and textiles. These highly original forays in pure and vibrant geometric abstraction had made Gray’s name one that everyone knew.

  Two years later, Le Corbusier’s friend Jean Badovici, an architect and editor, asked Gray to design a house for him in the region of Saint-Tropez. Looking for a suitable spot, Gray went far afield from the normal holiday haunts. The intrepid Irishwoman explored the wild and undiscovered reaches of the Riviera countryside on foot, with a donkey to carry her bags over the mountains. In the course of her search, she checked out a property completely inaccessible by car in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Having found an equivalent of the rough Irish coast, Gray was determined to build there. The natural setting was as daunting as it was beautiful: craggy, difficult to navigate, and full of precipitous drops.

  Between 1926 and 1929, Gray built on that spot “E. 1027,” a handsome and streamlined villa closely related to Le Corbusier’s architecture of the time. Gray knew Le Corbusier’s work well from having visited Ozenfant’s studio and gone to Stuttgart for the Weissenhof Siedlung. The house Gray built had the identical vocabulary as Le Corbusier’s villas; while it had the imprint of Gray’s own design sense, it was clearly derivative. It was named E. 1027 to evoke Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici—the “E” was for “Eileen,” and the “10,” the “2,” and “7” for, respectively, “J,” “B,” and “G,” because of their positions in the alphabet.23

  In the 1930s, when Le Corbusier and Yvonne were visiting her birthplace on one of their trips south, they stopped by E. 1027 for tea. Le Corbusier was astonished by the lush and rugged landscape sloping to the sea, similar in topography and dramatic beauty to Mou
nt Athos. For all the south-of-France elegance of the general region, here one felt in direct connection with the forces of the universe, with the sea and sky as they had been for tens of thousands of years. Yvonne was delighted with the view of the coastline westward, where her native Monaco, at that time still a village, was in plain sight.

  In 1938, Le Corbusier and Yvonne stayed at E. 1027 during the course of a summer holiday in Saint-Tropez. By this time, Gray, who had initially lived with Badovici, had moved out. Le Corbusier was disappointed that the fascinating Irishwoman was not there. He wrote her a fan letter about the house, applauding “the rare spirit which dictates all the organization inside and outside.”24 But for all the praise, Le Corbusier decided to improve on her design by painting murals there. Gray was not consulted.

  Having become passionate about wall painting, Le Corbusier painted, both on that holiday and the following summer, eight enormous floor-to-ceiling frescoes—mostly of oversized naked figures cavorting sexually. One of the murals was on the previously spare white wall behind the living-room sofa, so that what had been specified by Gray to be a point of visual respite was now an animated scenario. In 1939, the architect was photographed working in the nude on these bacchanals.

  Gray was outraged. Her biographer, Peter Adam, summed up her response: “It was a rape. A fellow architect, a man she admired, had without her consent defaced her design.”25 But the rest of his life, Le Corbusier would proudly reproduce the murals, pointing out only that he had painted them “free of charge for the owner of the villa.”26

  Painting the exterior mural at the villa E. 1027, summer 1939. The scar was from a swimming accident.