Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  LE CORBUSIER long remembered the precise details of that first command to meet de Gaulle. The previous night, he had returned home shortly before midnight. His spirits were low; he was exhausted from a sixteen-hour train journey from Lausanne following a visit with his mother and irritated that people working at the train station in the Swiss city had given him the incorrect departure time. Casualness about time invariably sent the architect into a rage; like lateness, it was a violation of the order and precision imperative to a fruitful existence.

  At about 11:30 p.m., just as he was entering his building, the mayor of Warsaw got out of his car a few meters away. They greeted each other and, standing under the gas streetlight, had a conversation on the sidewalk. The encounter restored Le Corbusier’s spirits because he knew that the Pole had considerable influence with the new French government. He considered it a natural sequence of events when, the next day, he received instructions to go immediately to the Atlantic seaport town of La Rochelle to meet with General de Gaulle and Raoul Dautry, the first minister of reconstruction.

  It was a Friday; Le Corbusier scrambled unsuccessfully to find a car or a train that would get him there right away. In the aftermath of the war, transportation was limited, and for many hours Le Corbusier could not figure out how to get to this vitally important meeting. Then he was notified by the air minister that a plane had been arranged for him. The architect left Paris Saturday at 4:00 p.m. and was in La Rochelle an hour and a half later.

  Having momentarily felt important, he then waited for a day and a half. The idle time recalled Vichy. The architect chatted amiably with anyone he encountered but did not see de Gaulle. In his own office, Le Corbusier was imperious over the slightest delay; here he had no choice but to be patient. Then, on Monday, at noon, he shook de Gaulle’s hand.

  That was the extent of their meeting. That night, Le Corbusier took the train back to Paris. Even though the meeting with the head of the new France had been nothing more than a handshake, he felt it was immensely significant.

  WITHIN A COUPLE OF DAYS, Dautry approached him with a proposal that changed Le Corbusier’s life—and the course of architecture worldwide. The minister asked Le Corbusier to design a large apartment building in Marseille.

  L’Unité d’Habitation would change forever the concept of how humanity could house itself.

  2

  Today l’Unité d’Habitation is a Marseille landmark, signposted simply with the name “Le Corbusier.” But initially most people were skeptical about Le Corbusier’s revolutionary vision and ridiculed the apartment building, which burst the boundaries on every front. Its form and structure were without precedent, its facades inconceivable to anyone but the man who made them. Its interior corridors, the layout of its apartments, and the design of their fittings were all so new as to seem preposterous. More than half a century later, however, even those who do not admire the building accept its importance, and more and more people succumb to its beauty.

  Primary colors dazzle the eye inside and out. The roof garden brings the high drama of ancient amphitheatres into the precinct of everyday domestic architecture. At last afforded the opportunity to evoke the ferocious energy, as well as the clarity, of Greek architecture, Le Corbusier used the materials and techniques of modern engineering to do so.

  After l’Unité d’Habitation, no apartment building has ever quite equaled it. On the other hand, it has propagated thousands of clones. Imitations in distant lands sometimes improved living standards markedly but at other moments emerged as cold and lifeless developments; even Le Corbusier’s own subsequent l’Unités lacked the magic of the original. But for better or worse, Le Corbusier’s building in Marseille became the village of the twentieth century.

  3

  Le Corbusier often spoke in units of five. He habitually said that he was about to achieve the objective for which he had been slaving for the previous ten, fifteen, or twenty years. With the Marseille commission, using the verb “potasser,” which translates as “to cram” or “to bone up,” he gave fifteen years as the warm-up period to this monumental building in the second-largest city of a new and vital France.

  He became ecstatic about everything. Visiting Vevey, he found the eighty-five-year-old “la Petite Maman” especially well; afterward, he allowed, “Maman so careful not to turn her nose up at this dirty Le Corbusier, Albert so attentive.” Now that the war was over, he was “happy to rediscover France with her grand handsome landscapes and that enormous task which we must now attempt to perform.”1 Civilization was being reborn that summer. Le Corbusier was content to eradicate the past, especially elements of his own previous five years, as if with a fire or a bomb. With the Unité d’Habitation, he was to succeed in putting this manic joy, the power of the sun’s rays, into plastic form, transforming steel and concrete into the substance of euphoria.

  4

  In March, Yvonne had broken her femur at midcalf. She had spent three months in a plaster cast that extended from her navel to the end of her foot, and she had been unable to emerge from her horizontal position for the entire time. Fortunately, Le Corbusier was able to get a maid who had helped in Vézelay to come take care of her. While Yvonne had broken her leg falling down drunk, Le Corbusier told his mother that it was the result of “decalcification.”

  Although at the end of June Yvonne began to get around the apartment using a side chair as a walker, there was no thought of a summer holiday. In August, she suffered another “attack of cruelly painful neuritis” that again completely prevented her from walking.2 Le Corbusier was content to be working, going back and forth to La Rochelle on the night train to develop a new plan for a fishermen’s port built around the natural gulf. At the office, his young crew was busily working on details of this project and the plan for Saint-Dié.

  Initially, the scheme for Saint-Dié was applauded—“Msgr. the Archbishop had found it very attractive. The industrialists were delighted”—Le Corbusier reported euphorically. But then local authorities, members of the Association Populaire des Sinistrés, an organization opposed to the idea of any new solution to Saint-Dié’s urban issues, rejected Le Corbusier’s project definitively. As usual, Le Corbusier saw the defeat as evidence of human stupidity and willful ignorance. A complacent bourgeoisie had managed to annihilate the efforts of the messiah: “This is a plan for modern times. A man sitting in an armchair has managed to cancel it!”3

  The martyr did not stay down for long. Dautry submitted a contract to him for the Marseille project, to which Le Corbusier agreed only under the condition that he get a special dispensation from the usual rules about how the design team would be formed. His demand was met, and he hired a slew of younger architects for the office, among them André Wogenscky, who had worked in his studio between 1937 and 1939 and who now became his “assistant-architect.”4

  His spirits soared. His latest treatise on housing, The Three Human Establishments, sold out an edition of six thousand copies—an extraordinary response for a book in 1945.5 The book introduced the idea of “the industrial linear city”—to be installed on such a scale that it would cross national borders. Le Corbusier claimed that, at dinner in the presence of André Gide, Léon Blum called the book “‘the most remarkable he had ever read.’…The statesman who had spent his entire life on propositions to no effect suddenly discovered the new paths leading to actions and enterprises relieving crises and creating ‘Tomorrow.’”6

  That fall, Le Corbusier’s and Yvonne’s beloved black-haired schnauzer, Pinceau, died at age eleven. Beyond being their roommate in Vichy, Pinceau—whose name means “paintbrush”—had been their constant companion since 1934. When he was one year old, the puppy had nearly died of pulmonary congestion. Yvonne had sent a telegram to her husband care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to say that Pinceau was in the clinic and that there was “little hope.”7 But he had survived and been an integral part of the couple’s existence.

  Le Corbusier proudly kept the pedigree that n
amed Pinceau’s parents, Graal du Paddock and Irma von Wartberg, and traced his lineage back to his eight great-grandparents. The architect was often photographed with the sweet and sympathetic creature with his long, floppy ears, unkempt hair, and large eyes.

  After Pinceau died, Le Corbusier, at great expense, had the dog’s body skinned and tanned. He also had his skull preserved, with a spring mechanism in the jaw. The services were provided by “naturalists” with offices a short walk from Le Corbusier’s old digs on the rue Jacob. This was probably the skin used to cover his old copy of Don Quixote—extant to this day—but what he did with the skull is unknown. Entrances fascinated Le Corbusier; at Ronchamp, he was to create incredible doors. Perhaps that dog’s mouth, able to open and close with his manipulation, became an inspiration.

  To Le Corbusier, death, like war, was a source of transformation. Saving bones, reconfiguring his dead dog’s skin and skull, he tried to control the next stage of existence according to his own terms.

  5

  De Gaulle’s government, through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had created a Mission on Architecture and Urbanism to examine how other countries were handling those areas. Le Corbusier was appointed chairman. A grander version of the task he had been given as a young man in La Chauxde-Fonds when L’Eplattenier had commissioned him to study the latest developments in modernism, it made him an architectural ambassador—on a global stage—for a client who would presumably listen. He was euphoric to be doing exactly what he wanted for the government in power at a turning point in history.

  One of his first tasks in the new position was to return to America, the hotbed of progress and new ideas. On December 22, 1945, Le Corbusier boarded the cargo ship Vernon S. Hood, which had been refitted after its use for the transport of war materials, as one of its twenty-nine passengers. The voyage, which took twenty days, gave him the chance to be with a new friend, Eugène Claudius-Petit, the beginning of an alliance that was to last until Le Corbusier’s death. The trip also provided him with the opportunity to elaborate on the idea of the Modulor with his office colleagues Justin Serralta and André Maisonnier. While crossing the Atlantic, they developed the spiral that was a central image to the Modulor idea. This semiabstract rendition of a human being provided an empiric method to harmonize all the measurements used for the construction of a building.

  When Le Corbusier arrived in the United States, all of his clothing was, by his standards, unacceptably wrinkled and full of holes. Paul Lester Wiener, José Luis Sert’s partner, who was there to greet him, lent him a jacket and trousers. In his published accounts of the time, Le Corbusier depicted himself as not having eaten for four years and, with his skeletal physique, being unable to fill out the new clothes.8 Focusing on himself as an emaciated Christ-like figure and on his own shabby suit, he seemed oblivious to the worse problems others had suffered during the war.

  Wiener soon took the architect to meet Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton so that the great scientist could give his view on the Modulor. Wiener served as translator. Le Corbusier’s report of the encounter emphasized their comparative states of nutrition and appearance more than any aspect of the discussion: “Einstein had eaten normally, I had not. Which demonstrates the method leading to underdeveloped countries. The Swiss gentlemen arriving in Paris after the liberation found it dirty (no paint on the façades, no wax on the parquet floors), and the French in a lamentable state: those cheeks, those bellies!”9

  What was Le Corbusier saying? The mockery of Swiss arrogance and insensitivity to the wartime suffering of the French is clear, but was Le Corbusier also deriding himself as part of a culture that might think the state of the wax on the parquet really mattered? Or did he only see himself as being among the downtrodden victims of recent history?

  A photograph of Le Corbusier and Einstein gives a totally different impression than the architect’s plaintive depiction. Le Corbusier looks fit and elegant. His bow tie is as straight as a steel beam. He is sporting an impeccably tailored, double-breasted navy blazer; the triangle of his white pocket handkerchief emerges in starched perfection, its proportion just right. His trousers are neatly creased, and there is a shine to his shoes. He walks in a brisk gait that suggests the peak of health. Einstein looks every bit the refugee, his trousers crumpled, his sweater fitting poorly, his expression awkward and worn. The evidence of that photo only adds to the bizarreness of Le Corbusier’s notion of his own deprived body and sorry clothing.

  With Albert Einstein, Princeton, 1946

  After their meeting, Einstein wrote Le Corbusier a letter about the Modulor with a pronouncement that the architect quoted forever after: “It is a range of dimensions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy.”10 The reduction of complexity to simplicity was a mutual dream of both these geniuses.

  The dapper Le Corbusier, as he walked around Princeton with a disheveled Albert Einstein, might well have discussed the scientist’s summer getaway with him. Before he left Germany, Einstein had, in the small town of Caputh, where a path through the woods overlooked Templiner Lake, built a simple wooden house where he and his wife could escape Berlin and his existence as an internationally famous figure. Einstein had initially wanted solid logs, and while he agreed to a less expensive structure sided in planks, he rejected the modernist look that had been proposed to him and opted instead for architectural ordinariness and the functionalism of a monk’s cell. He shocked visitors by greeting them barefoot and in his sailing shirt. Le Corbusier’s own choice of a getaway for himself and his wife, and his way of life there, was to be nearly identical.

  6

  Le Corbusier started his New York stay in a shabby third-rate hotel, but after three days his trip organizers moved him to the Carlyle. He considered the lithe and elegant tower on upper Madison Avenue the most beautiful hotel he had ever seen. He proudly wrote Yvonne that a room cost two thousand francs per day—which was fine because he wasn’t the one paying the bill.

  The architect traveled to Washington to meet the French ambassador and from there went on to the Tennessee valley to see a spectacular dam. On his return to New York, he visited the Museum of Modern Art and was delighted to see one of his own paintings hanging in the permanent collection alongside masterpieces by Matisse, Picasso, and Léger. He returned to France by plane on January 29—his longest flight to date, requiring a change in London and taking nearly an entire, marvelous day.

  Jerzy Soltan, a young architect who had recently started work on the rue de Sèvres, described the master’s return: “Le Corbusier left for the United States highly excited over what would happen in New York. We expected that he would be absent a long time. But suddenly, a couple of days later, the door opened and Le Corbusier entered with a small suitcase. He was obviously coming directly from the airport. Keeping his coat and hat on, he zoomed to the Modulor table. The short sojourn to the United States revealed to him a blunder in the Modulor reasoning. The Americans were tall and the United States intensely industrialized; one had to recognize these facts. The Anglo-Saxon measures—the foot, the inch—are far more human than the metric system’s meter, an arbitrary segment of the equator’s length, or the centimeter, an arbitrary part of the meter related to it only by decimal order. A six-foot-tall man should be the starting point of our anthropometric considerations. Le Corbusier was enchanted by this new development, and he left me with the new computations. Soon he was on his way back to New York.”11

  In fact, someone standing at six feet with his arms at his sides was not so different from Le Corbusier’s previously established standard of two meters twenty centimeters for someone with his arms raised, but in his mind Le Corbusier had made a profound discovery in America.

  LE CORBUSIER had planned eight Unités d’Habitation for Saint-Dié, none of which were constructed, but one building did come to life there. This was a factory for Jean-Jacques Duval, which had its proportions based on the Modulor and provided Le Corbusier a chance to push color to
a new extreme. Against the neutral background of rough concrete, strong reds sung from the ceilings and from the plumbing and heating pipes that were blatantly revealed. That frank celebration of the guts of a building was a precedent that was to affect modern architecture to an astonishing degree; today we take for granted this approach that was radical in 1946.

  Duval’s manufacturing plant reflects Le Corbusier’s keen awareness of the everyday needs of its employees. It stands on pilotis that permit an airy and useful courtyard to exist as the transition between the outside world and the inside, with a large bicycle park at ground level that protects bikes from rain and snow without requiring their users to deal with doors or stairs. The sidewalls are faced with sandstone indigenous to the Vosges mountains and scavenged from the remains of old local buildings; their texture is warm and rich. There are other poetic touches rare in an industrial building, such as the large photographic enlargements of Le Corbusier’s own paintings, which add color and vitality to the offices. Lively tile work on one of the roof-garden walls injects color, rhythm, and lightness into the daily existence of the executives who are invited there. Built-in shelves have a jazzy rhythm. In the following decade, this innovative emphasis on art and nature as essential elements in the workplace influenced corporate architecture all over the world.

  SHORTLY AFTER the Saint-Dié defeat, Joseph Savina, a talented cabinetmaker from Brittany, asked Le Corbusier if he could make sculpture based on the architect’s paintings. Le Corbusier jumped at the idea; he and Savina proceeded, with the understanding that the architect himself would color the work. With the move into sculpture, a new life opened up before his eyes.