Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Le Corbusier’s view of what had happened was that, having come up with the initial building concept and then fine-tuned it with others in New York and Paris, and having been confident at the start of 1947 that his design would be used as he intended, while he was back in Paris for his ten-day junket in March, he had been fundamentally betrayed.65 This was the occasion when Oscar Niemeyer, having only just arrived in New York, worked on an independent proposal at the request of Wallace Harrison. Even then, Le Corbusier claimed to remain amenable to a degree of give-and-take, the architectural teamwork he had discussed publicly. In that vein, at the end of August he wrote Wallace Harrison a letter, which began, “The first round is won, the round of modern architecture.” He assured Harrison, “I have no personal ambition but to continue as strong as we knew [sic] in the spring.” But the letter included a startling diagram indicating what the work process should be from then on. Le Corbusier now gave Harrison the role of “‘architect en chef,’ responsible for relations with the U.S., New York City, and the banks, and for supervision of construction and financial matters,” while naming himself as “chef d’atelier—mandate par l’U.N.” and stating that the task of doing the final drawings would be his.66 This was not an allocation of power to which others would agree.

  Once Harrison did not consent to have him do the final drawings, Le Corbusier realized that he was losing control of the building. Soon it was changed beyond recognition. Harrison, José Luis Sert, and Max Abramovitz, Harrison’s architectural partner, were among the many people who always credited Le Corbusier with major aspects of the initial concept, but it would not be long before most of the world would largely forget that he had anything to do with the UN.

  15

  Because of a meeting of CIAM in London in September 1947, Le Corbusier knew he would be unable to go to Vevey for his mother’s eighty-seventh birthday. He made clear to her, however, that even while he was trying to rebuild the world and was working in Paris that August because he was too busy to take a holiday, he had not neglected his family.

  In New York he had actively pursued the idea of Albert conducting and recording a children’s orchestra. His brother’s indifference to his efforts infuriated him. Le Corbusier wrote their mother and Albert jointly: “He is obscure as well as laconic. Observation of the younger brother: I believe that when one writes one takes the trouble to focus one’s attention for 15 minutes on the person being addressed…. A little precision, Albert, some effort of realism, out of pity for others!” He was also enraged that his mother had not taken his advice about the length of her summer holiday: “I deplore the fact she has not extended her stay. 10 days hardly count.”67 The denial of both her pleasure and his authority was intolerable.

  He stopped his grousing, however, for birthday greetings: “All my affection, all my admiration, all my encouragements. Good holidays, happy holidays your Ed,” he wrote, with Yvonne adding, “Dear Maman, a big kiss for you on the occasion of your birthday. Bravo, dear Maman. Edouard had tears in his eyes when he told me you were as happy as a lark. At your age it’s magnificent.”68 Even if Yvonne still used the formal “vous” for her mother-in-law, Le Corbusier was pleased at their civility. But by November, he was again in a state of “rage and upset.” Winter was coming; the latest round of strikes in Paris irritated him; above all, “In New York apparent kidnapping of the Le Corbusier UN project by USA gangster Harrison. Yes New York 1947 imitates, with variations on certain aspects, the scandal in Geneva 1927.”69 To the beat of time, a neat two decades later, evil in the hands of the powerful was again prevailing over truth and virtue.

  Enemies could be conquered, though; at last the cornerstone had been laid at Marseille. In the two and a half years since the project had been launched, he had, he told his mother, “traversed five ministries and escaped six torpedoings,” but now work had actually begun. The usual list of successes followed, but his anguish over the UN managed to cast a pall over everything in his life. Le Corbusier had visited the Villa La Roche; the house had survived the war, “but frigidaire and co. in the dining room; the soul was missing. The USA banal types hang out there.” Since 1939, Raoul La Roche, under the domination of a nasty housekeeper, had only used the living room, turning the rest of the space over to Americans—those heathens who had stolen the United Nations from his clutches. All this made 1947 the “ninth year of war.”70

  So long as he had battles to wage, it made no difference to Le Corbusier that the world was enjoying overall peace: “You need the endurance of a plow horse, the tenacity of steel, and a lot of good humor. Shit is everywhere, but the sun is ready to shine on a lovely civilization.”71

  At least, on the first page of an important magazine in Bogotá, he was named among the most influential people of recent times—the equal of Marx, Freud, Einstein, and Picasso. He quoted the precise text to his mother and brother: “‘The old master’ has entered his final stages, he’s joined the trinity of the ‘young.’ Picasso, Matisse, Le Corbusier, a youth which adds up to over two hundred years.” At sixty, Le Corbusier was the youngest. Picasso was then sixty-six, and Matisse seventy-eight. But what mattered the most was that, unlike the other two, the architect still had a living parent. With a mother who was the paragon of youth, he had a different perspective than the other geniuses, he assured Marie Jeanneret. “I’ve not yet concluded my studies and feeling as if I were taking my first steps in life,” he wrote her.72

  XL

  In my architectural exegesis, I speak only of music. I don’t know the notes, but architecture, like music, is time and space, an art of successive sensations brought into a symphony.

  —LE CORBUSIER TO HIS MOTHER

  1

  A photo of the journalist Hedwig Lauber alongside Le Corbusier shows a young, vibrant professional with a radiant smile. She was the same physical type as Marguerite Tjader Harris: broad shouldered and sturdy but not stocky. Wearing smart black-and-white sandals with two-inch heels, the fit and healthy woman is nearly Le Corbusier’s height. She looks blissfully happy in her career-woman suit, her gloves in her hand, a portfolio under her arm, while Le Corbusier, in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, his bow tie unusually askew, has the mischievous look of a little boy up to no good.

  Besides photos, the evidence of what went on between them is found in a few letters. While staying at the Grosvenor House in London in May 1947, Le Corbusier addressed a letter to an architect in Lima referring to “Mlle. Hedwig Lauber, a very good friend of mine and a talented journalist” and asking his colleague to help her with her research on an upcoming trip to Peru.1 Two months later, Le Corbusier wrote Lauber—addressing her as “Chère Mademoiselle”—instructing her never to write him—the demand is underlined—saying that he has a phobia of letters, that he prefers to have memories in his head only. He alerts her that writing things down might prove “fatal.” He goes on to say that he had instructed their mutual friend Justine Fuller to write her; if she insists on writing, she could do so to 35 rue de Sèvres but to no other address. His final instruction is “Don’t be angry with me. I have great esteem for you” the word “amicalement” is inscribed below his signature.2

  But, having tried to distance himself, Le Corbusier could not let go of the bright and good-looking Lauber any more than he could accept defeat in an architectural project. Lauber periodically reappeared in his life. As Yvonne, increasingly emaciated and crippled, became more difficult and bitter, the journalist gave Le Corbusier the unequivocal admiration he craved, even if he had to work to keep it secret.

  With Hedwig Lauber in the mid-1950s

  2

  In 1945, in Marseille, Le Corbusier had met Edouard Trouin. Trouin, ten years his junior, owned one million square meters of land in rocky terrain near the Mediterranean in Sainte-Baume, about halfway between Marseille and Toulon. Trouin was Le Corbusier’s sort of character: “descended from Saint-Malo sailors and pirates and from Provençal peasants.” A beefy man who sported a beret, Trouin spoke with a Marseille ac
cent and had, according to Le Corbusier, “a vitality of ‘God’s thunder.’”3

  Trouin was determined to save the countryside from development and had resisted repeated offers for his land from builders of holiday houses. He wanted instead a structure for meditation and worship that would do justice to the natural setting. He decided that Le Corbusier had the enthusiasm, originality, and eye that made him, without question, better qualified than anyone else for the task.

  Mary Magdalene had allegedly lived on Trouin’s property, in a cave halfway up the vertical sweep of a spectacular rock face opposite Mont Sainte Victoire. The entrance to the cave was a black hole in the jagged cliff. Le Corbusier believed, or said he believed, that “every morning the angels came for her in front of the cave, and carried her two hundred meters to the top of the mountain known as Le Pilon, where she would pray.” There was, nearby, a basilica, “where they keep in a golden tabernacle the skull of Mary Magdalene, extremely beautiful.”4

  In 1948, Le Corbusier designed, at Trouin’s request, an invisible basilica to be built entirely within the rock. The subterranean structure was to run from north to south, through the mountainous ridge, from the entrance of Mary Magdalene’s cave to the other side of the rocky cliff, “opening suddenly onto the brilliant light of a limitless horizon toward the sea to the south.”5

  This was the Corbusean ideal: a feat of engineering that allowed the worship of the sun, the sea, and the distant horizon in all their glory. The cave-like basilica was to be flooded with light, incorporeal and uplifting. Pouring through its northern and southern exposures, sunshine would also radiate through wells cut into the rock. There would also have been electric light.

  Had the meditation hall been built, it would have been one of the architect’s most extraordinary achievements. Le Corbusier’s imagination, his true religiosity that extended beyond any concept of traditional religion, in combination with his knowledge of materials that enabled him to make radical concepts into plastic reality, had led him to conceive of a physical space unprecedented in its form and emotional power.

  But, again, one of Le Corbusier’s greatest projects was not to be. The officials of the Catholic Church responsible for that jurisdiction rejected it unanimously. They must have known with whom they were dealing; they even specified in advance that no appeals would be considered.

  3

  The failures were now tempered by successes. At the start of 1948, Le Corbusier informed his mother, with the words underlined, that he was on the National Economic Council, to which he been named by a decree of the president of the Council of Ministers, and that his title was “representative of French thought.”6 As contemptuous as he was of government authority, he became excited the moment he was officially anointed, and he boasted to his mother about a dinner of the council at which he had been seated next to Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a famous scientist married to the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. He also told her that the council’s esteemed members were paid almost as much as parliamentary deputies: “the National Assembly, the Council of the Republic + us.”7

  Beyond that, he had begun work on a new book, The Poem of the Right Angle—a luxurious volume for the great publisher Tériade that gave him a chance to combine his euphoric sense of language, painting, and architecture. And there was a new book about him in which he was praised by none other than “the Americans.” These people who gave him so much trouble now credited his painting and architecture with having given birth to “a new notion of space in which calm, limpidity, and clarity prevail, affording a certain contrast with the spikiness of Fauvism and Cubism, and the decompositions of post-war Surrealism and Expressionism.”8 If that analysis was beyond Marie Jeanneret’s grasp, he still quoted it to her verbatim.

  HE NEEDED SUCH BOOSTS, for he had embarked, yet again, on “the battle for the United Nations. The Americans behave like gangsters: ambush in the woods, murder and pillage of the victim. However I manage to reply with sang-froid and considerable strength.”9

  What gave Le Corbusier that will to fight was his belief that the French government was intervening on his behalf. The backing of the country where by choice he had become a citizen was pivotal. He needed nothing less to counteract the way America was trying to push its own architects. “‘The nation of the timid’ takes its revenge and seeks to dominate the world. Today: superiority complex.”10

  4

  In contrast to the moral corruption and greed of human beings, Le Corbusier’s pets offered immense solace. They were also the mutual terrain of his relationships to his mother and Yvonne. He reported to his mother that his new dog, Laky, would go for a thirty-minute walk and, only after returning to the apartment, would scratch to be let out on the balcony to “piss and shit” at long last; Le Corbusier was more amused than annoyed.

  Le Corbusier counted thirty sparrows who depended on Yvonne to feed them three times a day. It was Yvonne’s instinct to be generous in illogical, eccentric ways that Le Corbusier proudly reported to his mother. Whenever anyone showed up at the penthouse apartment, be it a delivery person or someone to make a repair, she offered the stranger cigarettes and, depending on the hour, a glass of wine or an aperitif. And then there was Le Corbusier’s and Yvonne’s adopted fly. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “During December and the first days of January, Yvonne has raised and fed Titine, the only fly to have survived; dying of hunger and thirst, she visited our plates at every meal. We gave her powdered sugar and poured out a little lake of water onto the table. At every meal Titine is there, but she must have split lately through the balcony door.”11

  LE CORBUSIER now told Marie Jeanneret that architecture was like music. His profession depended on timing and weight and rhythm, much as hers and Albert’s did. She should realize that he was the equal if not the better of his brother in having taken after her professionally, even if Albert was the one living with her.

  But the battles he was forced to fight required his being constantly on the run. The official architects of the French Academy—those who had a diploma awarded by the “Beaux-Arts”—had tried to put a complete stop to all activity on the new building in Marseille. They were convinced the design would destroy the Marseille skyline; for similar reasons, his old mentor and friend Auguste Perret had “declared LC public enemy number one.”12 His foes were everywhere: “America über alles, your money or your life!!—or: your life or your money!”13 Marie needed to understand that this was why he was so frantic and could not spend more time at her side.

  On June 11, he flew to and from Marseille in the same day to be on the construction site of his new building; during the few hours he spent there, he sent his mother a postcard: “I’m very proud, and received like a lord.”14 In mid-August, when most Parisians were on their annual summer holiday and Le Corbusier was still in the office, he wrote her, “All the humans here are like ants, very busy—or imagining they are! For me, life is pitiless and I drink deep.” While most people were scurrying around to no good purpose, he was changing the world: “It’s an enterprise which, in principle, is linked to the Middle Ages, a vast and rigorous Cartesian enterprise each detail of which is an ineluctable part of the whole.”15 Having conceived the Marseille project, he now had to consider every detail down to the door handles.

  His able crew was working so hard on the large apartment house in order for 1,600 people in the south of France to look at the mountains in one direction and the sea in another. Their new dwellings would enable these lower-middle-class people to live, like Yvonne feeding birds on the terrace, with access to the cosmos. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “Already from the first apartments, extraordinary landscapes appear, animating each room. This will be a great, magisterial work. We are laboring here, 30 technicians in the rue de Sèvres, with complete faith.”16 She of all people should understand the symphonic effort to give access to views that recalled the mountaintop outings of a mother and father and two little boys.

  Le Corbusier followed this encomium by saying, “Fr
om the exterior, the Academy, the Society of Architects, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts are attacking with a violence that is quite simply scandalous, shameless. They are in their death agony, we are on our way to victory. But what an atmosphere of continuous contention!”17 Opposition was, of course, a requisite in the life of a martyr.

  5

  “Every day Yvonne is exhausted, overcome,” Le Corbusier wrote his mother that August. In the absence of a maid, she struggled to clean and do errands, and her “dragging foot” bothered her even more in the brutal heat. Le Corbusier then hired an Annamite to help at home, telling his mother these Indochinese were “serious people.”18 He also let his mother know that he was having de Montmollin send her extra money so that she could hire the best possible maid for herself as well.

  His wife’s and mother’s everyday chores obsessed him. “It is absolutely essential that women be freed from the domestic drama (which involves so much discomfort for men)…. But Marseilles is the solution of modern life,” he wrote Marie Jeanneret.19 In his design for l’Unité d’Habitation, housekeeping tasks would be simplified and streamlined. Women—it did not occur to Le Corbusier that married men might cook—would be able to prepare food in the presence of their families, with a minimal number of steps required to serve it. The open kitchen he designed has become so universal today that it is hard to recognize how innovative it was then.

  FOR NEARLY TEN YEARS, Le Corbusier had been sporadically consulting with authorities in the ancient Greek city of Smyrna—now in Turkey and called Izmir—about an urbanization plan. He finally went there in October 1948. Officially, it was the realization of a long-held dream; in private, it was a hardship.

  On October 7, from what he called Smyrna, he wrote to Marguerite Tjader Harris, “How stupid life is and how hard!”20 On Tjader Harris’s last stopover in Paris, they had had only ten minutes together. Now she was again in France, but because he was in Turkey he was missing her completely. He recognized this as the price of success, but it stung.