Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Le Corbusier saw the perpetual movement of the ocean and its shifting tides as analogous to the perpetual flow and alterations of his own emotions. “The mind and the heart do their work, but in waves,” he reflected to his mother in July, before instructing her, “Spend a lovely summer at the lake. DON’T WORRY!”21 In the villa he had built her, overlooking the oceanic mirror of light as if one were on a ship at sea, she should know only life’s magic.

  6

  Le Corbusier had a grueling return to Paris at the end of the second week of July, with his plane held up for thirty hours in Newfoundland. Once he was back in France, he immediately had to take the train to Marseille to consider the details of l’Unité d’Habitation on-site.

  The urgency thrilled him, but the architect could not delude himself that everything in life was perfect. Yvonne was deeply upset that he had rushed to Marseille so soon after returning from America. She reminded him that they had had no vacation together since 1939. When, six weeks after his return to France—in the course of which he had been away from Paris as much as he was there—Le Corbusier went back to New York, Yvonne felt abandoned.

  THE FIRST HINT that Le Corbusier began to see Marguerite Tjader Harris almost as soon as he arrived in America was a letter he wrote to Yvonne in which he emphasized the silence and solitude of his room at the Hotel Grosvenor. He provided a profusion of details, with the zeal of a criminal declaring his false alibi.

  After checking in, he unpacked his recent watercolor sketches of Vézelay, Ozon, and Paris and put them on a pedestal table. An ink drawing—“beautiful…elegant,” he told Yvonne—disappeared on the first day.22 He summoned the chambermaid, and that night, it was back on the table. Le Corbusier believed that this uneducated woman’s having tried to steal it was a mark of his artistic success.

  Le Corbusier was as solicitous as he was chatty, asking his wife about the effect of her latest series of injections, addressing her as “little Von, brave girl, light of the Le Corbusier hearth.”23

  Bedridden with sciatica, Yvonne, in turn, made it her task to keep La Petite Maman and Albert apprised of what Edouard was doing in New York. She stressed that Edouard had been away for nearly six of the first nine months of the year and that she missed him terribly.

  Le Corbusier’s mother, in fact, knew more about what was happening in America than Yvonne could have imagined. The architect was sending missives directly to Vevey with information he certainly did not send to rue Nungesser-et-Coli. He was eager for his eighty-six-year-old mother to know that he was seeing a lot of Marguerite Tjader Harris that fall. At the start of November, he informed Marie that he had visited the divorcée and her son “several times on her estate,” and that Tjader Harris often asked after her.24

  ON NOVEMBER 6, Le Corbusier presented a report to the United Nations secretary-general with his master plan. It called for two skyscrapers, each a lithe rectangular slab on pilotis at right angles to one another, with lower structures between them accommodating public spaces. He had achieved his goal of becoming the dominant voice of the building committee, and Time magazine and others embraced his scheme, but he was not completely confident he could retain his full authority and convince the governing body of the UN itself. Between November 21 and 28, Le Corbusier went from New York to Philadelphia to San Francisco to Boston and, back to New York, campaigning for his proposal. Exhausted, he then decided to return to Paris.

  The main pull on him was Yvonne. Just before going cross-country, he had written her that a letter in which she referred to herself as “the poor little cripple” had brought him to the edge of tears. He told her she was “the poor little cripple I love so much, respect so much, who is the very soul of my hearth and home. Poor child, poor child.” She needed to understand, however, that he, too, was struggling—as the object of ferocious attacks because of his UN ideas. One witness, the architect Abel Sorenson, said that a report to the design commission by Le Corbusier, calling for the UN to be in “Manhattan…a fabulous fact,” as opposed to the suburban setting preferred by the commission, “landed like a bomb at the General Assembly.”25 The embattled Le Corbusier insisted that his lonely wife limping around their isolated apartment grasp his own suffering as he waged the war of architecture at the seat of power: “My nerves are at the breaking point. I have to control myself to keep from spoiling everything, letting everything go. I was fiercely attacked last Saturday, an incredible affront.” Le Corbusier wanted her to see their struggles in tandem: “If I stop now I’m a coward, and it will be the enemies who triumph. Little Von, will you be brave?”26

  On November 25, he wrote from San Francisco that it would take him only a couple more days to wind up his affairs and fly back to France. Pierre Jeanneret was scheduled to be in New York by the time Le Corbusier returned there; they had reconciled sufficiently for Pierre to have agreed to help. How glad he would be to head home!

  On December 1, however, Le Corbusier was still in New York, writing his mother to say that he hoped to leave in ten to fifteen days. He was postponing his departure because Nelson Rockefeller, as influential as Le Corbusier had imagined him to be, had now heeded Harrison’s advice and persuaded his father to donate $8.5 million to acquire the Zeckendorf site on the East River in the Forties. The UN leaders worked out an agreement with the city of New York, and it became definite that the new complex would be built at the location for which Le Corbusier had campaigned.

  In a letter to Dr. Eduardo Zuleta Angel, chairman of the Permanent Headquarters Commission, the elder Rockefeller wrote that it was “a source of infinite satisfaction to me and my family to give the property to the United Nations since New York was a center where people from all lands have always been welcomed and where they have shared common aspirations and achievements.”27

  BEYOND THE UN, Le Corbusier had another reason for delaying his return. On December 3, he wrote Marguerite Tjader Harris,

  He who has entered

  Into life must seek

  To remain as long as

  Pleasure makes it endurable.

  LUCRETIUS (De Rerum Naturae)28

  On December 16, Yvonne was awaiting instructions as to whether to go to Orly in two days with friends who had a car. Le Corbusier’s latest bulletin had scheduled his arrival for the eighteenth. In an exceptionally cold December, with no coal, the activity of getting the apartment ready for his return was the only thing that kept her warm. By the time he left for Paris on the twenty-first, Le Corbusier knew he would not make it to Vevey, as he had promised his mother, but at least he and Yvonne would have one of their rare holidays together.

  7

  Le Corbusier had hoped for a quiet and calm Sunday following his morning arrival back in Paris. But the moment he saw Yvonne at Orly, the rare tranquility he had enjoyed on the flight—this time a mere eleven and a half hours, nonstop—was over. His wife was in tatters. With her worsening alcoholism, she didn’t stop berating him all day long. He reported this to his mother, emphasizing the inconvenient effects of his wife’s condition on his own busy life but adding, “Yvonne has been heroic, much more than anyone imagines or carelessly acknowledges.”29

  The wife of the former French president Léon Blum invited the architect for Christmas dinner at the official state residence, with André Gide as the only other guest.30 No one even considered the possibility of Yvonne attending. But Le Corbusier was happy enough, reporting to his mother that the main subject of conversation was his project in Marseille. The next day, he met with the director of urbanism, then with the minister of reconstruction.

  The hectic schedule, a relief during the usually slack period between Christmas and New Year’s, was possible, he informed Marie Jeanneret, because he was in perfect health. But what he wanted her to know above all was that he had escaped the shackles of his upbringing. “Bravo!” he concluded. “Will life relax its ordeal of trials now? When I think of our youth and how we felt obliged to consider ourselves unhappy or dissatisfied!”31

  JUST AS THE
SUN was going down on New Year’s Eve, Jerzy Soltan, a young architect in Le Corbusier’s office, brought his wife and their new baby, born two days earlier, home from the hospital. The Soltans had only a few francs to their name. Watching the splendor of limousines with people in evening clothes cruising along the boulevard St.-Germain, they could hardly afford groceries and were facing the evening in their small apartment with a nearly empty larder.

  Shortly after they had begun to settle in with their infant, the doorbell rang. It was the building superintendent. He delivered an enormous package of holiday food, including a magnum of champagne and a colorful papier-mâché rooster. The card said “from Yvonne and Le Corbusier.” The Soltans asked the super who on earth had delivered the package on New Year’s Eve. He answered that it was a tall white-haired man with round eyeglasses and a bow tie.

  8

  From the moment 1947 began, Le Corbusier regarded it as the year when he would turn sixty: “For God’s sake! After sixty, one is on the downward slope.” He felt “thickened, with heavy, creaking joints where everything should be swimming in oil.”32

  That January, the UN General Assembly officially designated Le Corbusier as one of the ten architectural consultants for their new building. Secretary-General Trygve Lie had opposed Le Corbusier’s appointment—it’s unclear whether the issue was his personality or aesthetics—but he was named nonetheless, thanks largely to support from Wallace Harrison, who had been appointed head of the planning office.

  Oscar Niemeyer, the chic garçon who had done drawings for Le Corbusier’s project in Rio in 1936, and Vladimir Bodiansky, an engineer who was on staff at 35 rue de Sèvres, were on his team, and he was delighted to consult with both. But he was so eager to initiate the UN design process on his own that he decided to rush back to New York two months ahead of the date when all the experts were scheduled to start work.

  In his usual psychological pattern, Le Corbusier saw himself as not just triumphant but resurrected. After arriving in New York at the end of January, he wrote his mother, “For the last 10 months I’ve been fighting a desperate battle. Now, total victory: the World City will be built in New York according to my ideas.” But after all his years of crushed hopes, he was both unequivocally confident and fearful that the victory might be pyrrhic: “March ’47 will see the Le Corbusier Explosion everywhere. This must be written in the stars, for it will be a kind of symphony. I don’t like to prophesy results, for each time Fate sneers and produces her own version.”33

  He amplified on the “Explosion”: When the Cathedrals Were White was to come out in America with the publisher Reynal & Hitchcock. The fourth volume of his Complete Work was to appear, as was The World City. There were to be further publications and exhibitions devoted to his painting and sculpture. Le Corbusier then added, “Dear Maman, I’m boring you with all this. I think of you often and even occasionally talk about you.” And, he continued, “Marguerite Tjader Harris also speaks of you when I occasionally visit her seaside estate. I’m working like a dog.”34

  Le Corbusier went on to say that he was painting at night and on Sundays and that the New York winter was “extraordinary…a cold dry sky: stimulating climate.” The freezing temperatures were bearable because the heating at the Hotel Grosvenor was “fantastic.”35 Even if he knew that there was still no coal available at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli for poor Yvonne, Le Corbusier could not contain his own happiness.

  9

  In the middle of March, Le Corbusier interrupted his UN activities to fly back to Paris for ten days. The rapidity of Yvonne’s decline was horrifying.

  Le Corbusier became enraged at both the Swiss and the Americans for their blindness to the tragic deprivations suffered by those people who lived where World War II had actually been fought. In Paris, he was stupefied by the American abundance that had so recently enchanted him. The standard of living on the other side of the Atlantic seemed outrageous, while he and Yvonne still had no heating fuel. Yvonne managed to put together her miraculous meals with scant ingredients, but there was not enough food; there was not even soap.

  The hardships shattered people’s nerves. “My poor wife is a tragic example of the phenomenon,” Le Corbusier wrote his mother; Yvonne’s weight was down to forty kilograms.36 He now attributed her limping and chronic exhaustion to vitamin deficiencies.

  He had hopped back to Paris in part to check up on his wife but mainly to make sure that everything in the office was up to speed. There were now thirty-five employees. Among them were Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret, who could not resist when he told them that the office was engaged in actual building, rather than simply theory and research. André Wogenscky was studio head, while Bodiansky, even if he was temporarily in New York, was technical director.

  When Le Corbusier arrived at the office each afternoon with the sketches he had made at home that morning, he would first sit alone at the worktable of one of the younger architects assigned to the current project and begin revising his subaltern’s work. Jerzy Soltan described the process: “Now, all of a sudden, Le Corbusier wanted a piece of charcoal. I found a forgotten stub in a drawer. He started sketching with a deliberately shaky hand. He stopped for fractions of a second. He went on. Meanwhile he succeeded in erasing half of what he began with. The charcoal stub was ridiculously small in his big fingers. He stopped again. He returned with a light, jittery line to the spots that had already been drawn and erased. The new line was almost the same—almost. He barely looked at the drawing. His eyes were ‘turned inward,’ attending to his subconscious. Finally, he stopped. He looked this way and that at the drawing. He pondered it, and then he said, ‘Maybe it’s worth retaining?’ He pulled out his own pen, an old Parker 51, and traced with a slow movement on top of the charcoal the final (for the time being) version of the concept.”37

  Le Corbusier had recently reconfigured the office, so that the open space, where everyone had talked freely with everyone else, had been chopped up into little cubicles, with a corridor that led the employees to Le Corbusier’s own office, which felt like the summit. The hierarchy was clear.

  The office ran like clockwork. If anyone returned from lunch a minute after 2:00 p.m., when collaborative work with Le Corbusier was scheduled to begin, the architect issued a strong reprimand: “Exactitude is a necessity. It is a mark of respect for others. To be exact is merely to be polite. The excuses of modern life, or of Parisian life, are merely foolish pretexts. How can you command, how can you be a leader if you have no notion of the time of day, the very meaning of exactitude? Even a joke is a question of timing! Beforehand, out of the question. Afterwards, too late. In my own case, I find that I must wait very often for others, for I’m usually on time. I’ve always been and am still a punctual and exact fellow.”38

  In those afternoons of clockwork precision, Le Corbusier had one imperative for the resultant architecture: “It has to be beautiful!”

  10

  The main project on the drawing boards during the ten days’ return was the building in Marseille. New techniques of prefabrication guaranteed a breakthrough in the construction process there, and Le Corbusier declared it the greatest housing idea anywhere in the world. La Rochelle, he was confident, would be another triumph. He also had his Paris team working on the UN, which he felt would be the most extraordinary and magnificent building built in centuries.

  When Albert urged him to come to Vevey, Le Corbusier chided him for even proposing that such a deviation from his schedule could be possible. And he was out of patience with their mother’s recalcitrance: “The line of conduct is clear: Maman must no longer serve, but be served.”39 If she would not hire domestic staff at home, she would have to move to a pension. Le Corbusier said he would arrange to rent out La Petite Maison to generate income and told her exactly what objects to take with her.

  He lectured his aged parent by mail, “I beg you to consider your troubles in their true proportions. I know that the everyday irritations are a veritable wound. Have the
wisdom to take prudent and useful measures…. You’re at peace in your labors and healthy in body and mind, in a magnificent country beyond the horrors of war. And you’re religious into the bargain! What more do you need?” In the pressured state brought on by this brief return to France, he then let loose: “If our two women, Maman and Yvonne, had had the brains to reach some kind of agreement instead of each trying to bring the other around to her own point of view, both would have enjoyed being together. You’ve missed the bus, and that is the bitterest remark I can be led to make.”40

  Having found Yvonne in such a wretched state, Le Corbusier blamed his mother. Marie Jeanneret could either have gone to take care of her daughter-in-law or invited her to Vevey. He urged his mother to think of “poor Yvonne sick and stoical, alone in the world, and distributing to a whole group of good people around her, all that overflowing heart of hers she gives to her true friends: those who understand.”41 He made clear to his mother that he adored Yvonne’s generous, fragile soul and could not forgive Marie Jeanneret for her coldness.

  His mother’s response was to tell Le Corbusier that she would act toward Yvonne as she wished. Moreover, she refused to move to a pension. He, in turn, instructed her to respond “graciously” to people who wrote to her. He advised his mother and brother to try to be “a little practical on this occasion.” They should also consider his busy schedule; they were wasting his time. “Try to take events as they come: with good humor and without getting all upset,” he counseled.42

  If he couldn’t change his mother’s attitude toward his wife, there was no point in further discussion: “All right, everything’s for the best and heading for the better: it’s spring.” He signed off, “your son who does what he can. Ed.”43 Underneath that nickname reserved only for her and Albert, he wrote a single word: “affection.”