Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  At 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli, late 1940s

  Other things did not change, though. At the opening of an exhibition, Le Corbusier suddenly found himself face-to-face with Amédée Ozenfant. Ozenfant made the first move, attempting to shake hands. “We were two idiots,” said Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s former soul mate.

  Le Corbusier did not smile. “I see that one of us still remains so,” he answered, and walked on.12

  Le Corbusier told the story without regret.

  XXXIX

  Arrange things, Marguerite. Give orders, leave a key, give me instructions. You’re the mistress, you’ll do it. And I’ll have the key!

  —LE CORBUSIER TO MARGUERITE TJADER HARRIS, 1946

  1

  On March 24, 1946, Le Corbusier informed his mother that he had been waiting to write her until he had confirmation of some news that should make her happy. It was the identical sentiment he had voiced three years earlier, after being appointed to the government commission under Pétain. Referring to himself in the third person, he told her that, the previous evening, the newspapers had announced that Le Corbusier had been named by the French state as its architect in the planning of the recently founded United Nations, to be constructed in Connecticut. The project was to start immediately: “For here, in the midst of this architectural squabble, is the victory of the antiacademic camp. Moreover everything is advancing with giant strides…. The modern world is born, shifting its center, revising its values, etc. Everything is shaken up.”1

  As if he were observing someone else, Le Corbusier applauded his own steadfastness. He had stuck to a worthy program, and now it was paying off. To his eighty-five-year-old mother he explained time and again that his appointment to the UN project was the ultimate validation of the nobility of his behavior.

  The subtext was a justification of his time in Vichy. For if no internal guidelines were telling Le Corbusier how slimy his involvement had been, the trial of Pétain and the executions of collaborators forced him to examine the choices he had made, at least to the person who had enthusiastically supported them. Sewing everything up neatly for his mother, he was also assuring himself: “Amid this confusion I did not flinch, not having responded to solicitations and flatteries, having always been where the battle was fiercest, and I powerfully advanced my theses, my doctrines, installing them everywhere, keeping my distance, assuming a certain superiority. And I can say that I am bequeathing a healthy doctrine, uncertain only whether it will bear its fruits now or later.”2 When his old admirer Marcel Bucard was found guilty of high treason and executed that same year, both Marie Jeanneret and Le Corbusier presumably had little recollection of how proud and excited she had been a decade earlier when Bucard raved to her about her son.

  Le Corbusier told his mother that any day now he would receive a telegram that would send him off to Orly Airport and on to New York for two months. Delighting in the many simultaneous pulls on his life and the sense of urgency, he summarized his current activities. He could live serenely off his painting but didn’t have time to do it at the moment. Dividing his days between work in Marseille, the Pyrénées, La Rochelle, and Saint-Dié, where the municipal council now wanted to see another design, he often slept on trains. He was also one of six members of a government committee for architecture and urbanism—they were an “army of the mediocre,” but at least he had a voice.3

  “Here I go, speaking only of myself!” the architect then wrote, following his long exegesis on the international ramifications of his success. He knew his mother never approved of that focus. Yvonne, he now reported, had spent her birthday with another broken leg. Now blaming his wife’s situation on the deprivations of the war, he said the recovery process was an enormous struggle for her. He became solicitous of Marie Jeanneret herself. His mother could now see with only one eye; he coached her on how to adapt to this limitation, with which he was so familiar. Dutifully, he went over minute maintenance details of La Petite Maison and some repairs he wanted to make there.

  He also gave advice about Albert. Albert was trying to get a ballet produced; Le Corbusier offered to help get it performed in America if Albert would revise it, but the ballet was flawed because Albert tried to moralize rather than divert. The world in this postwar moment needed “sun, spring, courage, hope, relaxation (at last!!), nourishment, clothes, etc.”4 He hammered on about how Albert should be making recordings of a children’s orchestra; Le Corbusier regularly proposed this idea, which would be popular regardless of the nationality or class of the audience.

  Le Corbusier was determined that his mother recognize that, in a time period when he was flourishing professionally, nothing concerned him more than his family. What mattered the most about the United Nations was the joy the news should bring Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret.

  2

  Le Corbusier’s greatest difficulty that spring was one he craved: an excess of work. A book devoted to his painting and sculpture—with 250 pages of reproductions—was under discussion with a New York publisher (although it was never realized). His ministerial committee met every Tuesday morning. The office at 35 rue de Sèvres was full of work, even if low on cash. He had now been asked to give advice on urban plans for Warsaw, Tunis, and Bizerte, also in Tunisia. There was going to be an international conference in Italy to debate Le Corbusier’s ideas against Frank Lloyd Wright’s: “these two theses of urbanism and even of ethics and social discipline.”5 In May he accepted yet another Legion of Honor, now as an “officer.” Most important of all, there was the United Nations. Le Corbusier was perpetually waiting for the telegram.

  To his mother, he emphasized the precariousness of things and the fortitude demanded of him: “The goals I pursue are intense and delicate, even perilous. One must keep a close watch, study continuously and do battle without respite.”6

  Marie Jeanneret replied with the information that she was thinking of selling La Petite Maison. He told her it was out of the question, an act of madness. But when she then proposed altering certain details to suit her own taste rather than his rigorous aesthetic, he did not quibble. He regretted that his busy schedule made it impossible for him to come to give her a hand, but she should do with her house as she wanted, even though her alterations, he let her know, would damage his reputation.7

  Le Corbusier asked his mother to send him and Yvonne some bed linens. They needed sheets and plain white pillowcases, absolutely without decoration or a scalloped edge, for large, square pillows. He emphasized that they never used bolsters—as if bolsters were the devil. Marie could live as she wanted; he would not compromise his style.

  Le Corbusier had doubled the size of his studio on the rue de Sèvres in order to make the first studies for l’Unité d’Habitation and work on La Rochelle, now that his initial proposal for its port had been accepted. Writing his mother and brother about his new prosperity thanks to the success of his books and other work, he was soaring.

  Then, at the start of May, the long-awaited telegram arrived. Le Corbusier jumped at the call to leave Paris immediately. He booked a night flight for Saturday, May 4. It would get him to New York twenty-two hours later, following a stopover in Iceland, at half past noon on Sunday. He would remain in America for the next two months. If others thought he would be merely an equal part of the United Nations team, he intended to be its mastermind; there could be only one primary designer for the single most important building complex in a newly unified world, and there was no question about who it had to be. For while he had not yet developed his scheme, he was confident that designs he had already made provided ideal prototypes.

  His conquest in mind, all was for the best. Yvonne was courageous, and France was waking up with a new creative spirit. The day before he departed, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “Aching, exhausted, my mind overwhelmed, yet I am filled with calm and joy and certitude: everything is working. Everything has worked. From these enormous trials all of us will draw a powerful new life.”8

  In advance of t
he trip, Le Corbusier also let his mother know that he had received a charming letter from Mrs. Tjader Harris. The tall, handsome woman Marie Jeanneret had introduced to Le Corbusier in 1932 wanted news of her. As Le Corbusier headed back to the United States to work on this project, the charming and intelligent divorcée, in whose Ford he had explored that part of the world a decade earlier, would not be far away.

  3

  The initial intention was for the United Nations headquarters to be built on untouched land, which would become an entire city. Besides an assembly hall and offices, there would be housing for the international population of delegates and their families, as well as schools, shops, and other support facilities.

  The plan to have the new complex in Fairfield County, the same part of Connecticut where Marguerite Tjader Harris lived, was not, however, definite. One of the main tasks of the UN Permanent Headquarters Commission was to evaluate five different sites, all in or near New York City, while determining the organization’s requirements in greater detail. The other four potential locales were the Palisades, alongside the Hudson River in northern New Jersey; Flushing Meadows Park, in Queens; suburban Westchester County; and Rockefeller Center, without the ancillary buildings.

  Le Corbusier objected to all the sites proposed. He was adamant that proximity to the heart of New York was vital, but he also insisted that it should be on the edge of Manhattan rather than at the center. At least this was how he subsequently presented the history, claiming that from the start he only wanted the current site on the East River in Manhattan and never considered anything other than those seventeen acres which, with his usual mathematical calculations, he said was 1,500 times smaller than the 26,500 acres of the forty-square-mile parcel in Fairfield County in Connecticut preferred by others.

  Le Corbusier was less personally responsible for that choice than he later made it seem. He had in fact drawn a proposal for the Connecticut site. Moreover, he was just one of many people who were enthusiastic about the property that was eventually chosen, which was then owned by William Zeckendorf, a New York City developer.

  Then Wallace Harrison, the American architect Le Corbusier had met in 1935 with Harrison’s relative Nelson Rockefeller, had the idea that John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of the richest men in America, should buy Zeckendorf’s seventeen acres and give the parcel to the UN. Le Corbusier was pleased, but he did not anticipate the power that Harrison would assume concomitantly.

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Le Corbusier wanted to do after arriving in New York was to change the constituency of the architectural steering committee. He proposed that Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe be added. It was exceptional for him to include other architects who would have demanded equal footing rather than bow to his taste. But Harrison rebuffed this idea of a collaboration of the master modernists.9 A vision that might have yielded extraordinary results was scrapped. Problems had begun.

  Worse yet, Le Corbusier’s lover was not there. He had written Marguerite Tjader Harris to alert her that he was on his way and could hardly wait for them to get to her cabanon. Once he arrived in New York, he phoned her house in Darien. Alas, she was in California, working on a screenplay.

  Knowing that she was part of a circle of writers that included Ayn Rand, Le Corbusier immediately wrote to ask her to tell Rand how much The Fountainhead interested him. The novel that depicts architecture as a world of good versus evil—the hero a purist of relentless independence, the villain a weak academic of the Beaux-Arts style—hit home. But eager though he was to have his mistress give messages to Ayn Rand, he wanted even more for her to be at his side.

  On May 17, Le Corbusier sent Tjader Harris a second letter from the Roosevelt Hotel to say that, even with his charged schedule, in his quiet moments back in the room he missed her immeasurably. As he planned the institution he hoped would transform and unify humankind, his thoughts constantly returned to the vibrant woman who brought him such joy: “America without you is a mutilated country. No, I correct: New York, that frantic city, is for me a wounded bird without you.”10

  He continued: “I’ve been told you’ve become serious. So have I, but with needs for connection.” He followed “connection” with “violent,” which he then crossed out, replacing it with “imperative.” The next words were: “in order to commune in a few seconds of harmony: man and woman. And with age I, a man with grey hair, submit to the rule; a woman in spring.”11

  Le Corbusier let down his guard with Tjader Harris as with no one else. Although he still addressed her with the formal “vous,” he confessed that he hoped “that you would direct me to one of those bodies containing a solid heart, the sort you were so optimistic about in those days when you had not yet become serious.”12 He told her that both Albert and Louis Soutter, a painter who was his cousin, spent their lives dreaming of women without acting on their fantasies and doing what was, in Le Corbusier’s eyes, “necessary.” Le Corbusier analyzed their plight: society got in their way, and the circumstances of their lives were not favorable.

  In this uncensored narrative of his thoughts, he then wrote, “I seem to remember that a book exists by an important author, about an aging man who needs to penetrate young, healthy, laughing flesh.” Then the same conscience that had overcome him in the presence of prostitutes came into play, and Le Corbusier justified his need for pleasure: “From a certain point of view, my life is overwhelming, the life of a man sacrificing himself…. Ah, this quotidian!!! The ideal site for courage and sacrifice. Quotidian, i.e., banal, regular, constant, with no vacation or relief: every day, every hour. Ever vigilant.”13 He told her that his endurance was that of Jesus, stripped and flagellated. The image gave him a charge.

  In the midst of the battles of his life, how he craved sex. He told Tjader Harris that the intensity of his desire peaked especially in New York,

  where the potential of machine society makes its racket, emits its waves, its overwhelming electricity—such action calls for its sanctuary, its retreat, its profound vital juices: a naked body one can look at and love.

  And all this is worth nothing, indeed does not exist unless the secret is kept, unless no one is told, for then everything becomes stupid, and the sacred turns to gossip. It is only you my friend, to whom, being in New York, one can in all simplicity say such things and ask for help.14

  4

  In this secret relationship with the radiant woman he had first begun to love more than a decade earlier, Le Corbusier did what he could do with no one else: he acknowledged need. He implored her to return from California to New York as soon as possible. He told her he had a key to an apartment that was both intimate and unoccupied. She must join him there in “Calypso’s cave.”15 The moment she told him when she would be back east, he would provide the details.

  Ten days later, Le Corbusier was desperate. He wrote again. Of course she must realize that he was dreaming of the little beach in Connecticut and the romantic shack on the rocks. Couldn’t she meet him “for one or two weekends? Arrange things, Marguerite. Give orders, leave a key, give me instructions. You’re the mistress, you’ll do it. And I’ll have the key!”16 Begging her to take charge in any way, just so long as the plans brought them together, he told this extraordinary woman how much he longed to hear her “Amazon voice.” In his mind’s eye, he was seeing her as she looked on the dock when his boat pulled out of New York harbor eleven years earlier.

  By the end of June, Tjader Harris still had not returned to the east. The architect was falling apart. He wrote her that he was calling Darien regularly. He had to leave on July 8; he reiterated precise instructions on how she could get a message to him at the Hotel Roosevelt to organize a rendezvous before then. He urged her to phone at any hour—if necessary, at 2:00 a.m.; “I adore that…. Do what’s needful so that a film of time or of miles does not separate us once again like the width of an ocean.”17

  To his other intimates, Le Corbusier proffered advice. Only Marguerite Tjader Harris had him pleading.
>
  As his days in America drew to a close, Le Corbusier warned Tjader Harris that if she wrote him in Paris, she must realize that his secretary often opened his letters. Surely they could see one another before their privacy was invaded.

  5

  The work at the UN that spring went far better than his attempts to lure Tjader Harris. Le Corbusier proudly wrote his mother about his role in the site selection and building program: “I am fulfilling a delicate mission of considerable importance, representing France as a pioneer of the modern spirit.” Seven new books about him were in the works—three in New York, and one each in Algiers, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Zurich. “The Le Corbusier star is rising in the firmament, and this time the barriers may be knocked down. Life flows along with uninterrupted intensity,” he wrote. For fifteen years, Le Corbusier had built nothing, but he had kept conceiving ideas. Having “prepared a tidal wave against the ossified creatures who thought they could hold me back,” he believed now it would all pay off.18

  Le Corbusier became friends with the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola and his wife, Ruth, spending Sundays in their apartment on Eighth Street and carrying on only about what was wrong with the sculptor’s work. The Nivolas, the Serts, and Le Corbusier often ate at Greenwich Village restaurants, and the Nivolas regularly invited Le Corbusier for summer weekends on the far end of Long Island. That summer, the fifty-eight-year-old Le Corbusier improved his swimming, telling his mother he had made “amazing progress. I swim like a gentleman, even crawl!”19

  Water obsessed him much as the sun did: “My mouth waters just thinking of it and as I send my elementary thoughts toward you, Albert, and your blue lake. I see myself diving! For the moment I am behind my broiling studio windows. But New York has given me some idea of cooking…. What a terrible furnace! You can be in water over your head and still sweat!”20