Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  PÉTAIN’S GOVERNMENT began to lose its power during the course of 1942. When the Allies landed in North Africa, the Maréchal ordered French troops to resist them, but Admiral Darlan, on the scene, disobeyed. The French army soon rejoined the war effort on the side of the Allies, and Pétain and his minions faced an inglorious repudiation.

  Because of his decision to disobey Pétain, Darlan became beloved by the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. De Gaulle, on the other hand, could not overlook Darlan’s previous activities. Winston Churchill, out of deference to Roosevelt, “forbade de Gaulle from criticizing Darlan publicly,” but everyone knew that the general despised the admiral.29 When Darlan was assassinated in December 1942, a twenty-year-old royalist fired the gun, but conspiracy theories still abound about the death of the man whose son had thrilled Le Corbusier by choosing the architect’s dog to mate with his own.

  On November 11, the Germans moved into the Free Zone. The French population was less and less inclined to accommodate them; a new atmosphere was sweeping over the country. The improved military situation for the Allies, combined with the increased hardships incurred under German and Vichy dominance, were nurturing powerful forces of resistance. To side with Vichy was no longer to be part of the winning team. Le Corbusier had gotten out just in time.

  XXXVI

  1

  Le Corbusier and Yvonne did their best to settle back into the airy penthouse on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli, but the food shortages continued without reprieve, and during the frequent air raids they had to scurry into the cellars at night. Yvonne was now losing her patience: “Women (all of them) are overwhelmed and overcome by everyday difficulties. I myself stand firm,” Le Corbusier reported to his mother on December 22.1

  Although Le Corbusier had left Vichy, he was still working in compliance with its ruling powers. On January 8, 1943, he completed an agreement with Lallemant to open a studio that would be free for students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts—the institution whose values he had claimed to hate. The students would, according to Le Corbusier’s proposal, have the opportunity to be awarded a “diplôme Le Corbusier.”

  Le Corbusier’s idea, which the minister supported, was the fulfillment of a dream he had had ever since working for L’Eplattenier in La Chaux-de-Fonds: architecture would be taught in a new way. Having never received a diploma himself, he now wanted to make it possible for others to do so according to unprecedented principles. In the document he prepared for Lallemant, he wrote,

  1. in the last twelve months, young architects from the various studios of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris had asked LC to open a free studio at the school.

  But examination of the conditions under which the architectural diploma is awarded has shown that such a studio would confront the students with a cruel dilemma: studying architecture as they had hoped but being unable to obtain the architectural diploma and, consequently, under the new legislation, being unable to practice.

  2. The question is to decide whether the state diplomas, according to today’s legislation, will be of an exclusively official and academic tendency. This question deserves to be asked if there is to be any future for architecture in France and if an imminent rebellion of the candidates is to be avoided against those regulations that would satisfy only one aspect of architectural training.

  3. LC has lately settled, for a certain period of time, the question of his studio’s location at 35 rue de Sèvres. These premises will be put at the disposal of the students who desire to work under his supervision. But aside from these young architects, others who already possess their diploma have stated their desire to benefit from LC’s instruction.2

  The Vichy authorities were in accord. On January 19, the chief of the cabinet wrote to the minister and secretary of state for national education to confirm that Le Corbusier could open this studio. The chief informed the education secretary, “M. LC has shown me the invitation given him to work up a dossier of qualification for the architectural diploma. It seems highly desirable that such a theoretician and builder, from whom virtually all present-day architects, even the most official and most traditional, have borrowed their general ideas of architecture and their style, should be welcomed to the rank of Architects without indulging in polemics that would merely cast discredit, to a large degree, on present-day French Architects and that, in France’s current situation, would merely lower her prestige abroad by depriving her, in an unprecedented manner, of one of her most ardent workers.”3

  The answer on February 12—from the minister’s office in Paris at the Palais Royal—crystallized the plan. Le Corbusier had at last gained official approval for a radical way of teaching. The education secretary wrote that “the free studios have the same characteristics as the official studios except, with regard to these latter, for their leader’s appointment by the minister and the use of premises in a state establishment. The pupils of either studios undergo the same tests and are judged by the same juries…. It is important to emphasize, finally, that no distinction of principle has ever been made between the respective value of these two kinds of studios.”4

  On March 8, Robert Lallemant, in turn, sent Le Corbusier a note and provided copies of these letters. It was under these auspices that the studio at 35 rue de Sèvres reopened. In Maréchal Pétain, Le Corbusier had at last found someone in the inner sanctum of power to sanction his way of practicing architecture.

  2

  Life was looking up for the whole Jeanneret family. Le Corbusier was happy to learn from Swiss friends that his mother and Albert had performed together at a party at Christmastime, and again there was heat in the apartment on rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Yvonne, Le Corbusier boasted to his mother, became “heroic, alone, without a cleaning woman.”5 She was making marvelous meals with virtually no ingredients, delighting her husband after what he termed his eighteen months of starvation in Vichy.

  Like many people that winter, Le Corbusier and Yvonne were obsessed with food. They felt saved by the parcels Marie Jeanneret sent from Vevey. After thieves twice stole Le Corbusier’s beloved salami before it reached him, he furnished his mother with packing instructions as detailed as building plans, in order to thwart further robbers.

  Le Corbusier saw nourishment and housing as the universal issues that were at the heart of his consuming desire to redesign all of human habitation. One thought chased the other. In March, he wrote his mother, “Yvonne struggles hard without help (virtually not to be found) to make three meals a day, standing in lines, doing the dishes, and cleaning the rooms. She is occasionally exhausted. My effort concerning architecture and urbanism is daily reaffirmed.”6 One of his greatest goals would be to make both food preparation and cleaning easier universally.

  IN LATE WINTER, four young students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts—Roger Aujame among them—started work under Le Corbusier’s guidance, in accord with the arrangements worked out with the Vichy regime.

  Aujame was with Le Corbusier when the architect entered his old headquarters on the rue de Sèvres for the first time in three years. The long corridor, which had not been heated since 1939, was bitterly cold. Papers, books, and writing instruments were scattered all over the floor. Le Corbusier showed no marks of distress. “Let’s roll up our sleeves…. This goes here, that there,” Aujame recalled the master saying as the young architecture students sorted through lithographs by Picasso, Gris, and Braque, the deluxe edition of L’Esprit Nouveau, canvases by Bauchant, photos of Josephine Baker, and masses of blueprints and architectural drawings.

  In little time, they were at work on the projects that had been called to a halt when Le Corbusier and Pierre had rushed out of Paris four years earlier. The students were on their own in the mornings, and every afternoon, like clockwork, Le Corbusier appeared in the office. There was no coal or wood; they burned newspapers in the one stove to stay warm. The students plied Le Corbusier with questions about the state of architecture, and he responded with long, passionate commentaries.

 
; Le Corbusier had the young people do studies of how human beings lived in their abodes—the way they habitually navigated in the kitchen and bathroom. Aujame quickly understood that “man was at the center of the architect’s preoccupations” and that human needs, rather than columns or capitals, were what counted. To Aujame, it seemed that Le Corbusier “was the only person who had ever insisted on this point.” He “was always practical. His questions were, ‘Why do it at that height? How will people reach it? How do you walk in?’”7

  The atmosphere in the neighborhood was dramatically different from how it had been in the old days. German officers were living less than half a block away in the Hotel Lutétia. People who were seen to enter, in order to be interrogated, were sometimes never to leave. But Le Corbusier, to a remarkable degree, had resumed his former way of life. He was painting again and took a philosophical approach to the overall situation: “If the burden of events in general did not weigh so heavily on each of us, life (for me) would be adequate and fulfilled.”8

  3

  Le Corbusier’s letters to his mother provide a vivid historical record of weather conditions in France throughout the course of World War II. In 1943, Paris had a beautiful, dry April. The idyllic spring weather renewed him, and he was cheered all the more because the Charter of Athens was finally published by Plon, with an “introductory speech” by Giraudoux.

  Le Corbusier met at this time with the sculptor Arno Breker, a Nazi whose greatest patrons were Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler, over dinner at the historic bistro Chez Josephine, on the rue du Cherche-Midi, only a short walk from the studio. Le Corbusier and the carver of muscular marble and bronze figures meant to represent the spirit of the Nazi party had a fruitful discussion “to exchange insights on urbanism and the future.”9

  By June, Le Corbusier reported to his mother that he was “very busy with a major effort to establish a building doctrine in France, an organization that absorbs all my time.” Writing about “this atmosphere of uncertainty that plunges the world into breakdown,” he assured her that, while the situation was demoralizing, life back in his apartment was “bracing from morning to night.”10

  Yvonne, meanwhile, had become painfully thin. In mid-June, her weight was down to fifty-one kilograms. Le Corbusier, as usual, was consulting specialists. The latest had diagnosed the source of her problem as “a distortion of the thyroid (hypertension),” although Le Corbusier continued to put the blame on menopause. The care packages of condensed milk and Gruyère from his mother were a lifesaver, without which his emaciated wife would have wasted away to nothing.

  Le Corbusier was nonetheless savoring his own existence. Deprivation always had its positive consequences for him. At a time when there was no fuel for cars, the air in the city was better than usual: “an extraordinary dryness for Paris, the air is so pure in and out of town that one’s vision is transfigured by it, one breathes magnificently—no more gasoline, no more dust.”11

  When Le Corbusier designed cities pierced by four-lane highways and grouped human living in towers clustered in one sector while keeping business and government separate in others, it was in part because he wanted to offer others that same sensation of communion with the elements. He sought for all humans the well-being that comes with a healthy connection, physical and emotional, to the universe. Ironically, better living and an appreciation of the natural world were the goals of the man who was so disconnected from the emotional truths of his frail wife and a collaborationist government. If the contradictions were apparent to others, they were not to him. Wanting the best for humanity, he sometimes chose the worst.

  4

  Le Corbusier’s Paris routine was back in full swing by the summer of 1943. With La Chaux-de-Fondian precision, at 7:15 every morning he performed a quarter of an hour of gymnastic exercises while listening to Radio Paris. He was aware that while Yvonne was suffering from a wretched summer cold—“fierce rheumatic pains”—he felt himself to be “an eternal cab-horse, I trot cheerfully enough.”12 In spite of his own medical issues, he saw his role as that of the healthy one married to an invalid.

  Yvonne’s symptoms worsened, and by October the doctors had determined that she had an illness related to her nervous system. She was advised to abandon all “muscular efforts” for the time being. While she had to remain sedentary, Le Corbusier, with his daily exercise program, took a Darwinian approach to his own superior fitness: “We have a tendency to believe that human beings are alike. Now even on the physical level it is clear that there are separate classes.”13 The person to whom he could express this sense of his own elevated position, was, of course, his mother.

  Le Corbusier was firmly convinced that he could control his state of well-being by taking care of himself and being positive even in the face of difficulties. It had been a year since he had smoked; he kept track of the date as carefully as he did his lovemaking, noting that it was on April 15, 1942, that he had had his last cigarette—in Algiers. He did not lament his eye problems, frequent colds, hernia, or the aftermath of his accident.

  His campaign for his own well-being was enforced by Marie Jeanneret’s remaining a model of good health. Shortly after his fifty-sixth birthday, he wrote his eighty-three-year-old mother another homily: “Your example gives me courage: I tell myself I still have 27 years ahead of me in which to achieve your present stage. And if I kept your lucidity I should then be quite capable of undertaking some plan of a great city or of an enormous edifice. Your predecessor Michelangelo built the dome of St. Peter’s at 90!”14

  These were, he acknowledged, hard times: “Newspapers and radios sing fantasies, and nothing is believable.”15 Nonetheless, he was determined to make the most of what had been a fallow period: “For ten years now, individuals and events have prevented me from undertaking anything at all. This exclusion from the circuit of action has somewhat the effect of appearing to be an unavoidable destiny. And yet I feel myself to be still a beginner, actually a student, though all my present efforts, among people of all ages and the most varied characters, indicate that as a matter of fact I am not quite the greatest fossil of them all. The question is not to continue on the previous level but to locate yourself, by decision and action, on another infinitely more advanced level. I consider that these 4 years of meditation have afforded me an exceptional situation. It remains to be seen whether my personal conviction can serve as an encouragement to others.”16

  Without heat or a telephone at 35 rue de Sèvres, Le Corbusier and the students were working away on ideas for postwar reconstruction. Le Corbusier started a new organization to develop standardized dwellings and to address issues of architecture: ASCORAL—the Association des Constructeurs pour la Rénovation Architecturale. The goals of ASCORAL were not unlike what Le Corbusier had been trying to establish in Vichy; but what he had tried to achieve for France under Pétain he would next attempt under the authority of Charles de Gaulle.

  5

  Le Corbusier had begun to develop the concept that was to obsess him for the rest of his life: the Modulor. This unit of measurement, two meters and twenty centimeters high, was derived from the standard height of a man with his arms raised, as measured from his feet to his fingertips. Its potential application to all of architecture was enormous.

  The idea was the result of Le Corbusier’s ongoing attempt to apply to architecture the ancient notion, articulated by Protagoras in the fifth century B.C., that “man is the measure of all things.”17 Others put the emphasis on God, or the gods, subjugating human beings to a higher force; Le Corbusier believed that men and women should always be the ultimate point of reference, glorified rather than reduced. Gerald Hanning, one of the young architects in the office, and Elisa Maillard, who was a mathematician and worked at the Musée de Cluny, were devoting almost all of their time to developing the device to honor that precept. Hanning carried out much of the research, while Maillard verified the numbers. As with the furniture designs, others played major roles in the collaborative process, but the en
d result is usually credited to Le Corbusier alone.

  LE CORBUSIER, meanwhile, had not yet completely severed connections with the stragglers from Pétain’s regime who still had authority. Toward the end of 1943, the architect was proud to accept Alexis Carrel’s request that he become technical advisor to his French Foundation for Human Research, with its goal of cleansing society of criminals and the insane. Carrel also asked Le Corbusier to be one of the “technicians of value” for the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, to assist with the specific task of creating guidelines and regulations that would improve sanitary conditions in factories, locker rooms, showers, and medical centers all over the country.18

  But for all the committees and titles and the panoply of rich ideas the architect developed between 1940 and 1945, not a single concept from those years made it to the stage of bricks and mortar. The most impressive, had they been built, were the law courts he developed for Algiers. The buildings as sketched conjure a triumph of civil reason; the bold, geometric assemblage of cell-like units raised on pilotis brings to mind the majesty of a high judge in his robes. A residence he wanted to build on an agricultural domain in Algeria would also have been remarkable. The construction was to have been in wood, local stone, and hollow bricks that could easily be made by local laborers in an era when there was little access to anything else. It would have fit in harmoniously with the landscape around it and was meant to please the local population with their preference for folklore and ancient building styles. When Le Corbusier was working in a setting he liked, both for its natural beauty and the authenticity of its citizenry, he envisioned some of his best architecture.

  But, like most people, he needed the war to be over before he could really get back to work.