ON THE TWENTY-ONE-HOUR flight back to America, Le Corbusier had a dream worthy of recounting to Yvonne. “A ‘Bastard’” was painting the bottom of Le Corbusier’s pants with rustproof red paint. Le Corbusier ran after the culprit, who stole his jacket at the same time.
Le Corbusier also reported to his wife that, before landing, “I shaved, washed, shat.” He then explained to her that he was writing this account naked. Lying on his stomach on his hotel bed, he had a thermometer in his rectum for ten minutes: “The thermometer somewhere = a sentimental situation!”44 He was measuring his fever because of an infection in his arm, but the swelling had gone down. He continued the letter from the bathtub, again providing a graphic description of his physical situation at the moment of writing.
Anyone who could be coated in rustproof paint must be made of iron; on the other hand, in all these images, Le Corbusier wanted Yvonne to see him as completely vulnerable.
There was another reason for all the intimate details. They made Yvonne feel that she knew every last thing about his life. They were combined with the information that he was going to Long Island to see the Nivolas. It was all a perfect ploy. For what was left out were the increasing journeys to the little beach shack in Connecticut.
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“It’s a sure thing: Le Corbusier architecture victorious one hundred percent,” Le Corbusier wrote his mother on March 27. It was a complete triumph; he might even make some money. “The page is turning, has turned. This is the architecture of tomorrow.”45
On April 18, Le Corbusier announced at a meeting of the board of design consultants that this would be a collaborative vision: “We work as a team…. Each helps his neighbor….[W]eare united…the World Team of the United Nations laying down plans for a world architecture…. We are a homogenous block. There are no names attached to this work. As in any human enterprise, there is simply discipline, which alone is capable of bringing order. Each of us can be legitimately proud of having been called upon to work on this team; that should be sufficient for us.”46 There is a charm to the architect claiming to espouse the tradition of the Gothic cathedral—architectural creation as a joint effort—but in truth he could imagine only himself as the designer of the new headquarters dedicated to international understanding. In the drafting room where all the design consultants were working together, on the twenty-seventh floor of the RKO Building, Le Corbusier told Geoffrey Hellman of The New Yorker, “I am in complete calm here. I think God has come down to earth. I don’t even mind working in a room with other people. An architect shouldn’t be alone…. You develop ideas when you have an audience. And anyway, you don’t have to listen to what the other man says.”47 That last sentence was key.
During lunch with the other designers at an Italian restaurant, Del Pezzo’s, near the office on Forty-seventh Street, Le Corbusier was observed to pay little attention to what other people were saying.48 To Yvonne, on April 22, he wrote that he was in a “period of deflation” architects inferior to him were trying to have their say.49 The problem was that he did not have the power to ignore them.
The “one hundred percent” victory of Corbusean architecture about which he had written his mother less than a month earlier was no longer certain. In the moments when Le Corbusier thought he was changing the world unimpeded, the universe had been in perfect order, but now that he knew his power was not absolute, he was miserable. As the architect George A. Dudley, who took notes that served in lieu of minutes for the “forty-five meetings of the Board of design for the United Nations Headquarters in 1947,” observed, the main issue revolved around a scheme for the UN that had been developed by Oscar Neimeyer: “The comparison between Le Corbusier’s heavy block and Niemeyer’s startling, elegantly articulated scheme seemed to me to be in everyone’s mind. As different as night and day, the heaviness of the block seemed to close the whole site, while in Niemeyer’s refreshing scheme the site was open, a grand space with a clean base for the modern masses standing in it.”50
Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne, “On the road there are so many insignificant details! Unimaginable!! I can tell you one thing: those who pursue an ideal, struggling on its behalf, must be made of tempered steel.” Although he publicly voiced approval of Niemeyer’s concept, to Yvonne he treated it as a rejection of his own—and tried to take the long view about the architects who were opposing his ideas: “This will pass, such things are merely human nastiness.”51
There were still beautiful things in the world. He was astonished by an exhibition of modern masterpieces at the Museum of Modern Art, where a Bonnard and two Matisses moved him far more than the Légers and Picassos; he was fascinated that Matisse, the artist whose work he had disparaged as a young man, now seemed greater than the artists he had expected to prefer. He also relished an hour on a Saturday night in mid-April when he met Charlie Chaplin; not only did Le Corbusier joke with the great comic, but he did so in English.52
Le Corbusier continued to calibrate his image of the denizens of the nation where he had once believed he would do everything he had ever wanted: “Ah, Americans are funny people! Their ways are different from ours!…I tell you, these people are kids.”53 When he became so sick that wintry spring that he spent twenty-four hours in bed without eating, he wrote Yvonne that his inadvertent fast didn’t bother him because he felt good about his ascetic self compared to the Americans all around him, stuffing themselves and becoming as fat as pigs. But his wife had to realize that he did not have things too good. While she had a new maid in Paris, he was leading “a dog’s life” on the other side of the Atlantic and in pain because he had to leave her alone.
Le Corbusier also told her he was now furious at Pierre for disagreeing with Bodiansky. Disloyalty to the rule of Le Corbusier was bad enough from the outside; from the inner camp, it was not to be tolerated.
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Geoffrey Hellman had written a two-part profile of Le Corbusier for The New Yorker, with the second installment appearing on May 3. Someone else might simply have been pleased to enter the inner circles of American culture—The New Yorker had unequaled cachet at the time—but Le Corbusier was enraged at this biography he could not control. In October 1946, the Biographical Encyclopedia of the World had decided to include Le Corbusier in its “Who’s Important in Government” section rather than “Who’s Important in Art.” This was the level of respect he liked—as opposed to The New Yorker’s irreverence.
Each part of the magazine profile had a witty sketch of the architect. The first, by A. Birnbaum, emphasizes Le Corbusier’s perfectly round eyeglasses with their thick dark frames—as boldly geometric as his architecture—along with his furrowed brow, slicked-back hair, and trademark bow tie. A cruciform skyscraper and a bold grid pattern appear across his chest, suggesting both the crux of his urbanism and a dapper tattersall shirt. The second portrait was by Saul Steinberg. It shows Le Corbusier in profile, with the eyeglasses and grim cast of his face again dominant. Here Le Corbusier personifies the American concept of stylish French living; although he is clearly at work—besuited and with pencil in hand—he is sitting at a table with a bowl of fruit, a wine bottle, and an espresso cup.
The New Yorker writer calls Le Corbusier “one of the most revolutionary, controversial, and vociferously influential architects and city planners in the world” but devalues that assessment by saying, “Except, perhaps, for Frank Lloyd Wright, no living architect has been more widely discussed, by others or by himself.” While crediting Le Corbusier’s significance as a founder of the International Style, Hellman continues the subtle mockery, pointing out that the architect “has, as far as he is concerned, no first name.” He adds that “this unusual circumstance has bewildered or misled a number of persons, including the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, who list him as ‘Le Corbusier, M.’ possibly for Monsieur.” Hellman says the architect was called “Charles Edouard” until he could no longer put up with it. Such trivializing rankled Le Corbusier. So did Hellman’s description of his “boulevard
ier air,…egg-shaped head…[and] heavy-framed spectacles that make him look like an owl.”54
After explaining L’Esprit Nouveau, Hellman describes Le Corbusier’s feud with Ozenfant and the various editions of Toward a New Architecture. According to Hellman, Le Corbusier had boasted, “The fellow thanked me for the dedication. He didn’t realize that by printing it I had prevented anyone from thinking he’d written the book.”55 Hellman also cites Ozenfant as claiming that the original authorship had made people think that he, Ozenfant, had a mistress named Le Corbusier.
Hellman peppers his text with half-truths and innuendo that make not only Le Corbusier but other family members seem ridiculous. He says that Georges Jeanneret took up mountain climbing because his flute playing was not of the same level as Marie’s piano. He claims that young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had started manufacturing bricks because so few clients could walk up to his seventh-story office in Paris, and reports that Le Corbusier made plans for rebuilding Algiers, Paris, Stockholm, and other cities “more for the hell of it than in the expectation that anything practical would come of them.” He also informs his readers, “Le Corbusier’s Calvinistic censoriousness and his relentless air of martyrdom have not endeared him to his critics, and this may account for a certain amount of their censure of him.”56
Hellman also tells in detail a reported incident concerning the architect’s desperation to be photographed when he arrived in America in 1935. And he reports that, during the same trip, although his host had picked him up in plenty of time to give a lecture at Columbia University, Le Corbusier had insisted on stopping at a delicatessen on the way, making himself half an hour late for the lecture and still eating a baguette as he mounted the podium. Given Le Corbusier’s punctiliousness, the story is unlikely.
On the other hand, Hellman serves Le Corbusier’s purposes by completely leaving out the two years in Vichy and giving the impression that Le Corbusier had simply toughed out the war as best he could.
HELLMAN does accurately evoke what Le Corbusier sounded like. When speaking to his colleagues on the UN project, “His voice is low, gentle, insistent, and musical.” In lectures and conversations, Le Corbusier is characterized as having “a fluent, incisive, mordant, staccato, rhetorical, Gallic literary style.”57 There is a tender moment with the architect reporting his admiration for the structure of melons.
Le Corbusier’s direct statements to the writer have the ring of authenticity: “This is a funny country. Your hospitality is Draconian, and your convictions are too tied up with finance. Money is ferocious here…. But the country…is alive, and everything is possible in it.”58 To Hellman, Le Corbusier laments the lack of cafés where friends could chat in a leisurely way over aperitifs. Instead, the architect points out, America has only anonymous cafeterias. He goes on to say that even in Paris he was not among those who had time for those same cafés he missed in New York. It is accurately Corbusean: to purport to know what humanity in general needs and then to distinguish himself as different.
Le Corbusier tells Hellman, “I’m the only man here who climbs stairs two at a time.” He says escalators are “undignified.” Le Corbusier also remarks that the light of New York is “red…the color of blood and life. Everything in it arouses both enthusiasm and disgust; it reflects God and the Devil.”59 The architect emerges as he was: robust, intoxicated with human energy, thinking only in extremes.
LE CORBUSIER wrote Geoffrey Hellman ten days after the second piece was published. The letter is an exemplar of how he dealt with conflict. He starts out laudatorily, saying that the articles are well written and amusing and will interest a range of readers; the writer’s lighthearted attitude toward issues of major importance has a certain charm. Still, he is shocked, as are his friends, by the “lies, virtually calumnies.”60
Knowing that the pieces might eventually be republished in an anthology, Le Corbusier demands that the story about his having begged to be photographed on the Normandie be either removed or given a footnote rectifying it. He also insists that changes be made in the text about Ozenfant and the authorship of L’Esprit Nouveau. If Hellman did not do as requested, Le Corbusier would take action through his lawyer.
He then puts his velvet gloves back on: “I must thank you for the friendly attention you accorded my own person in this affair. I say ‘friendly,’ for I’m convinced that your lines testify to sympathy and not the contrary. And I’d like to report the pleasure I took in your style, which has a true journalistic flavor. I’ll always be a partisan of what we call ‘la petite histoire’ as produced by writers of talent like you, on condition information is exact and not contrary to the reality of facts or to psychological reality.”61 Like everything else about Le Corbusier, his condescension was quintessential.
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The avant-garde French composer Edgard Varèse was then living in New York; he invited Le Corbusier to hear part of a new work. The architect wrote his mother that the combination of choir and “batterie” was “absolutely remarkable, powerful, a grand style sung, spoken, cadenced, pounded out, sometimes overwhelming.” He also considered American brass bands “amazing, so rhythmic, so intense, so new.”62
He had hoped that with music he could awaken his mother to his existence, but, in the first week of May, he wrote Marie Jeanneret on United Nations stationery to say that he was intensely irritable because neither she nor Albert had written him in a long time. In spite of being an architect of inestimable importance, he had been trying to help her with her house issues; how could she be so patently ungrateful? She had such an easy life, surrounded by flowers in springtime, while he was locked inside an office on the twenty-seventh floor of an air-conditioned skyscraper; couldn’t she have found the time to send a single word?
“I am engaged in a considerable project, which may become the cornerstone of modern architectural evolution,” he informed her. The workload was so oppressive that he would start a letter and put it down, then take it up again five days later; every day was a matter of “doing battle and never leaving the line of fire.”63
He told her that on those rare occasions when he did escape the office, he was a celebrity. Restaurant waiters treated him deferentially. Strangers in the street said hello to him. Everyone admired him, he explained—except for the one person to whom he had to wave the flag of his success.
WHILE LE CORBUSIER was long-winded and often prickly at the meetings of the UN Board of Design, which at the start of May were practically daily events, he and Bodiansky and Niemeyer were all essentially in, agreement on the overall scheme for the complex. The main differences to be sorted out were the precise shape of the General Assembly and the means by which it would connect to the Secretariat, as well as questions of spacing and scale. Nonetheless, in letters home, Le Corbusier presented their vision as if it was his alone, and he calculated that one third of the other architects on the commission were hostile even if the rest were distinctly favorable. By mid-May, he was sensing serious jealousy from Wallace Harrison. After being confident less than two months earlier of “a sure thing,” he was rapidly losing faith that the new UN would be his creation.
Having assured Yvonne he would fly back to Paris quickly, Le Corbusier now let her know that he could not yet return. He was optimistic, however, that things would be resolved by June 9, when they would end their work with “a banquet Rockefeller,” and then he would come home.
Yvonne had fallen again. She described the event in vivid detail to Marie Jeanneret. She was bending to pick up the dog’s cushion and thought the window behind it was open. The glass was so clean, Yvonne explained, that light didn’t reflect in it. Bending down, she banged herself hard against it and landed flat. At least the glass was solid, she added.
The heat in Paris was so bad that Yvonne slept on the lower terrace, miserable in her solitude. Suffering the aftereffects of the fall, she could not get out easily; she felt completely isolated on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli. But she accepted her situation. For “Edouard” had hi
s battles to fight and could only be admired for his strength.
Le Corbusier wrote his wife that he longed to be alone with her in the countryside, to escape his “dog’s life” in muggy New York. He did not mention, of course, that he had ample respite on the Connecticut coast.
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Those who want to assist the people and their affairs and who help faithfully are thanked as the world is accustomed: it kicks them and wipes its shoes on them…. Therefore learn to recognize the world; you will not make it different; it will not direct itself according to you; above all other things learn and know that the world is ungrateful.
—THE LUTHERAN BIBLE, passage underlined by Johann Sebastian Bach in his personal copy
LE CORBUSIER returned to Paris during the second week of July. One of the first things he did was write his mother about how esteemed he felt in France. At an exposition at the Grand Palais, the president of the republic had visited a stand devoted to his Marseille building. Yet another radio broadcast about him was scheduled. He instructed Marie to benefit from his prosperity and spend his money more easily. Le Corbusier also told his mother that on his return he had found Yvonne virtually incapable of leaving the apartment, although he gave no reason why and was not particularly upset by the fact. “Paris is so magnificently human! After the catastrophe of New York!”64
He had used the word “catastrophe” because the UN situation was now deteriorating. Again a project that had felt like the dawning of a new era was turning into sand sifting through his fingers. The injury was a mixture of what Le Corbusier believed to be deliberate misattribution and plagiarism followed by debasement. His initial idea was not merely stolen but transformed into something criminally devoid of heart and soul.
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