Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Le Corbusier wrote his seventy-nine-year-old mother, “Your fate may be as perilous as ours…. Yet I hope that Maman will be sheltered from it all. We must now see reason and realize, quite simply, that we have insufficiently appreciated all the years that were without pain.” Just as he had stayed calm when his leg was severed, he was determined to make sense of a senseless world. “Impossible to speculate about the future. Will the conflict be short or long? Unknown. Whatever the case, the consequences will be crucial. Ripeness is all…. I’ve already told you where I believe the heart of the matter is: a reorganization of consciousness and a major revision of the conditions of life.” Le Corbusier believed his imperative was “as much as possible, to pursue life, to create, to act, not to halt.”45

  The times were, of course, undeniably treacherous. On September 27, he wrote his mother and brother, “I am almost ready to acknowledge that the situation is so far beyond human capacities that it cannot be mastered by anyone.” Yet the “almost” was key: he was confident that “the new cycle will begin…. One thing is certain: men will leave their shoes behind and put on new ones.”46

  Le Corbusier hated “Germany infatuated by its belligerent violence, a violence so dense and heavy it terrifies us all and must be destroyed.” But he still saw the world as being on the verge of positive change and welcomed war just as he welcomed fire. Anything was better than stagnancy; destruction was always the preamble to construction: “There are great demolitions only when a great building site is about to open,” he assured his mother.47 Devastating as it was to see civilization pulverized, he was convinced that the losses would pave the way for him to design and build.

  13

  Jean Giraudoux was writing an introduction for Le Corbusier’s Charter of Athens. In July 1938, Edouard Daladier, France’s prime minister, had appointed Giraudoux head of the Information Commissariat, which made him responsible for French government propaganda and gave him great influence. Giraudoux believed that even if France lacked the economic or military power of other countries, it was distinguished by “the moral nature of her form of life.”48 He also had strong ideas of national self-improvement. The writer favored a firm policy concerning the physical well-being of French citizens, calling for active participation in sports and a comprehensive campaign against tuberculosis. Beyond that, he envisioned more urban planning.

  To his mother, Le Corbusier described the opinionated playwright as “a sympathetic type—a splendid head, very sensitive.” At the office on the rue de Sèvres, because of connections made through Giraudoux, the staff was working on “an excellent enterprise for temporary barracks, primarily for the refugee schools.”49 Requested by the national minister of education, these structures could be taken apart, moved, and reassembled as clubs, nursery schools, studios, or housing, depending on need. Le Corbusier believed that they would become prototypes for building throughout the country.

  In the second week of October 1939, Le Corbusier returned to Paris from Vézelay for a meeting he had arranged with Giraudoux. Its purpose was the creation of Le Comité d’études préparatoires urbaniques. The goal of this organization was to plan the work that might occur in peacetime, once this dreadful situation was over. After the two men met, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “The interview was really a moving one. I believe we are the left and right hands of a single body.”50

  Giraudoux invited Le Corbusier to lunch ten days later so that they could talk in greater depth. The encounter inspired one of Le Corbusier’s epiphanies: “And then I felt that the way lay open and that the hour of realities was striking…. It was some fifteen years of preparation that were bearing fruit.”51

  Infused with confidence, Le Corbusier set about meeting other influential government officials and their aides. His movement in the corridors of power paid off; he discovered that people high up in the Education Ministry had read his work and wanted to hear his ideas: “Result: the decision is up to me. Up to me to offer these men laden with cares a clear and objective plan. Giraudoux’s views are lofty—total. At last, the scope of human beings is here equivalent to the scope of events.”52

  Having secured the necessary backing, Le Corbusier said that the purpose of the new organization he would run under Giraudoux’s authority was “to establish juridically, legally, the status of urbanism in France and in the colonies.” His role, which he outlined with pride to his mother, was “to be the instigating, doctrinaire cell.”53 He could now put Giraudoux’s lofty ideas into effect.

  Jean Giraudoux considered France an “invaded country” suffering from having welcomed too many refugees; this “continuous infiltration of barbarians” was bringing the nation down. The playwright favored a draconian immigration policy that would incorporate “pitiless surveillance” and “send back those elements which could corrupt a race which owes its value to the selection and refining process of twenty centuries.” Foreigners were “swarming in our arts and in our old and new industries, in a kind of spontaneous generation reminiscent of fleas on a newly born puppy.” He lamented the “Arabs polluting at Grenelle,” the “Ashkenazis, escaped from Polish or Romanian ghettoes…who eliminate our compatriots…from their traditions…and from their artistic trades…. A horde…which encumbers our hospitals.”54

  Giraudoux wanted to create a minister of race. The man whom Le Corbusier called the other hand of the same body, whose book he urged his mother to read as the epitome of rectitude and grandeur, declared—in that very book—“We are in full agreement with Hitler in proclaiming that a policy only achieves its highest plane once it is racial.” Giraudoux distinguished himself from the Germans with their search for the perfect Aryan by emphasizing “moral and cultural” qualities rather than physical ones, but nonetheless pointed out that immigrants “rarely beautify by their physical appearance.”55

  Was Le Corbusier overlooking these ideas in a blindness induced by the rekindled hope that he had found the means to build his ideal cities? Now that the Swiss, the Soviets, and the Americans had let him down, was he simply convincing himself of Giraudoux’s merits because he thought Giraudoux would allow him to construct on the scale of which he dreamed, or were these thoughts about other races his as well?

  14

  Le Corbusier stepped up the pace of his return trips to Paris. By the end of November, the arms minister, Raoul Dautry, had asked him to design a large munitions factory intended mainly to produce shotgun cartridges. Dautry gave the architect the rank of colonel and Pierre Jeanneret that of captain. In this time that was the start of a nightmare for many in France, the office staff was increasingly productive.

  The onset of winter weather changed that. Since there was no heating oil available, it was impossible to keep the office open and continue staying at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Le Corbusier returned to Vézelay. Back in the Burgundian village, he painted, worked on large panels, and read English detective novels. He wrote his mother little domestic reports: “Yvonne’s eyes ever dynamic: dynamite.”56 “Pinceau wants to make pipi, Pinceau wants to make caca.”57 He also reflected on the changes he hoped to effect in France:

  The country needs several kicks in the ass. There is too much dust and dirt, too much sleep, too many false terrors and ghosts. And too much love of money. Money is over and done with.

  It’s all coming to an end, and when it does, we shall have won back the true values and the spirit of things.

  Hope is in season.58

  IN A LETTER to Marguerite Tjader Harris from Vézelay, Le Corbusier wrote that in his new job he was accepting only the salary paid to military people on the front. He hoped to sell enough paintings to provide the additional funds needed for his way of life—not easy since for seven years his architectural practice had been in what he termed a “dépression,” with no work at all.

  Desperately, he asked his mistress in Connecticut if she or her friends could buy his paintings—abstract or figurative, gouache, watercolor, or pastel. He said he would sell them starting at thirty dollars ea
ch. Now praising Americans for sympathizing with the French cause, he believed that, if they understood his dire financial straits, they would be more willing to purchase his work. Tjader Harris did what she could to help. She looked for collectors and agreed to give up her translation fee for When the Cathedrals Were White. Le Corbusier regularly took his secret letters to the Vézelay postbox without Yvonne knowing what he was doing. But in his own way, he was loyal to his wife, writing Tjader Harris that Yvonne was “strong, pure, whole, clear. I have great admiration for her. She is a peasant girl, as I have told you. For me, a perfect companion. But I must remind you that I, too, am a fine fellow.”59

  15

  That December, Le Corbusier told his mother that the shortage of trains would make it impossible for him to go to Vevey for the holidays. He reported diplomatically that Yvonne insisted he make every effort to get to Switzerland without her, but that was not feasible.

  A week before Christmas, Le Corbusier wrote Marie,

  A good nap leads to collapse. Doctor Carrel, whom I saw last Thursday, told me as much: comfort annihilates the human race. There must be struggles. So don’t take life’s difficulties (whatever they may be) as catastrophes, but rather as good hygiene. It’s what makes life possible. For if the contrary point of view prevails, everything seems merely disaster.

  We have philosophized with Carrel down to the last issue—the search for what is best for mankind, and we are in perfect agreement: the power to create, to intervene, to act is our lifeblood. Otherwise, deterioration. Carrel will work with us.60

  Alexis Carrel, a scientist who had won a Nobel Prize and whose wound treatment had benefited Le Corbusier after his swimming accident, had published, in 1935, the best-selling Man, the Unknown. In it, he insisted on the most traditional gender differentiation: “The sexes have again to be clearly defined. Each individual must be either male or female, and never manifest the sexual tendencies, mental characteristics, and ambitions of the opposite sex.”61 The primary role of woman, Carrel maintained, was to bear children.

  Whether he subscribed to every word of that best-selling book, this was the man with whom Le Corbusier described himself “in perfect agreement.”

  XXXIV

  1

  A man who prides himself on following a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things as principles: there are only events, there are no laws but those of expediency…. A man is not obliged to be more particular than the nation.

  —HONORÉ DE BALZAC, Eugénie Grandet

  At the start of 1940, Le Corbusier and Yvonne moved back to Paris, where there was now heating oil. Pierre and Albert also returned to the capital. Le Corbusier reopened the office on the rue de Sèvres and met again with Raoul Dautry about the proposed munitions factory.

  Le Corbusier boasted to his mother that the arms minister had said, “Le Corbusier is a man of courage, and he has done something with his life.” Proud to have garnered approval in the precincts of the new government, he wrote her, “You cannot imagine what perseverance it takes to offer one’s service to one’s country when such service means dealing with tomorrow.”1

  Dautry, like Giraudoux, was a strident nationalist whose faith in hard work and the common man appealed to Le Corbusier. For the catalog of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the minister had written, “In France it is the peasant who holds the secrets of the race. In the harmonious construction called France, the land and its cultivation provide the fundamental economic, social and cultural foundation.”2 Le Corbusier was delighted that the author of that statement was now his main client. By mid-February, the munitions factory had evolved into a structure for three thousand workers, with temporary living facilities for one thousand.

  Not only was he fulfilling his hope of being part of the war effort, but Le Corbusier also believed that he had found the cure for his perpetual foe, the common cold. “Colds,” he wrote his mother: “I’ll give you the prescription: from the first symptom sleep with a woolen turban or ski helmet around your head. If you do this, the cold goes no further. For years I’ve been victimized by these damned colds that used to flatten me several times a winter. You can understand this: at night your skull is exposed. And when the skull gets sick, we leave it out in the cold. You must enforce this procedure, it’s a golden rule.”3

  YVONNE REDID the apartment on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli, impressing her husband immensely with her clever management of domestic life in a period when there was neither staff nor cash. The architect bragged to his mother that his wife got up before him in the morning and went to sleep after: “She does her work admirably.”4 But Yvonne was suffering from an obstruction of one of her tear ducts, which periodically had her screaming in pain. For the first time, Le Corbusier reported her in a dark mood—the product of her physical discomfort combined with their isolation in a deserted section of Paris.

  In mid-March, at the first hint of spring, Le Corbusier again took up gardening—in a deliberate attempt to maintain his “euphoria under the daily threat of horrors.”5 And then the horrors came. On May 10, he and Yvonne were woken at dawn by an air alert. At 8:30, they learned over the wireless radio that the Germans had entered France.6

  2

  At noon, while waiting for a second radio broadcast, Le Corbusier informed his mother, “Such events do not discourage me; on the contrary, my temperament finds in them that movement and that struggle which alone can ultimately lead to the world’s improvement. One cannot, one must not cling desperately to a dead past. Ultimately one must raise one’s head and set out.”7

  At a moment that sent shivers of fear up the spines of almost everyone else in Paris, Le Corbusier counseled his mother that she should enjoy her existence and maintain a light touch. “Let a good life flow gently past, whatever follies it commits, whatever pleasures it chooses.”8

  At 1:00 p.m., he added the news that Switzerland was mobilized; Pierre, a Swiss citizen, was going to have to leave Paris. Le Corbusier was worried that Albert would have to as well.

  The day was a turning point in the history of France. It was the start of the Wehrmacht offensive; within five weeks, the Germans would kill some ninety-two thousand soldiers and take nearly two million prisoners. The French air force was inefficient and underequipped, unable to resist the German advance. For Le Corbusier, this invasion of a foreign culture, even though he disdained it, was stimulating; he was determined to flourish with the change.

  ON MAY 21, Le Corbusier and Yvonne were still in their penthouse apartment. There were frequent air raids, but they felt themselves out of danger. Having mostly avoided the cellar of 20 rue Jacob during the previous war, now he was proud that the basement at number 24 was considered the best bomb shelter on the street.

  Le Corbusier reported to his mother, “Yvonne is doing just fine. All the same, her ultra-nervous temperament makes her suffer at times.”9 His plan, although he did not follow through on it, was to send her to Vézelay while he would remain in Paris to work on the munitions factory, which was under construction in the foothills of the Pyrénées and was to be two kilometers long. Le Corbusier was to have the responsibility for housing its twenty thousand workers and their families; the plight of these people in the mining basin had become desperate, which meant that he could realize his ideas on urbanism as he had dreamed: to benefit the people who needed the most help.

  It was a moment of opportunity, even if Hitler’s power and success were horrific. He loathed the Nazi leader and his backers—“that cruel Hitler…. In truth the German people is stupefying in its choice of such a master. For they have chosen him”—but was determined not to crumble.10

  “One develops a sort of hole in one’s stomach when one imagines even for a second that this dreadful simpliste—powerful because of his simplicity, a beast for being so deliberately simple—could annihilate us here,” he wrote, “before the horror of such a situation, the world comes to a realization, belatedly, as ever. It is up to us to be vi
gilant, to exert strength in our turn, once the pressure is off. There is such a thing as courage, there is such a thing as faith. But our conscience must have new motives.”11

  AS THE GERMANS advanced into Paris, government authorities urged the city’s inhabitants not to panic and ordered them to stay where they were, but the plea was to little avail. Some of the people in charge fled, leaving a betrayed and resentful citizenry to follow. On many farms on the outskirts of Paris, only the livestock was left. Observing the exodus from the air, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry compared it to the sight of an enormous anthill toppled by a giant.

  By June, the Germans had completed their takeover of the French capital. They were to remain there for the next four years.

  CONSTRUCTION ON the munitions factory came to a halt, and Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier closed their office at 35 rue de Sèvres. They and Yvonne left Paris together and went almost as far from the city as one could while still remaining in France—to Ozon, near Tournay.

  Seeking a secure location now that it could no longer maintain its traditional seat in the capital, the French government, under Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, moved to Tours and then to Bordeaux. The deputy prime minister, Maréchal Henri Pétain, became its main spokesman. On June 16, Reynaud resigned in Pétain’s favor, and the following day, five days after Le Corbusier and Yvonne arrived in Ozon, Pétain went on French radio to say that “with a heavy heart” he was declaring the end of hostilities.12 Five days later, he signed the armistice, accepting the defeat of France.

  To many French people, Pétain, who had played a heroic role during World War I in the battle of Verdun, seemed a savior. They believed that with the French army having succumbed to the Germans, the British now would as well. In all likehood, the war was lost, but, thanks to Pétain, at least the devastation of France would not be total.