The pull in every direction was, however, Le Corbusier’s intoxicant. Now designing tapestries to be made at Aubusson, he reveled in the foray into another medium. As he created oversized images of robust figures composed with woven thread, he felt a new burst of creativity. He would make large wall hangings for many of his major buildings of the next decade; in their nonstop rhythm, these colorful tapestries add vitality and exuberance to his interiors, even if they lack the subtlety and refinement of his architecture.
6
In the fall of 1948, there was another official attempt to put a halt to l’Unité d’Habitation, this time from the Council on Hygiene. Le Corbusier was convinced that the council was a part of a cabal and was using hygienic problems as an excuse; the real reason for their demanding the cessation of work was the style of his building.
Yet his ideas were finding wider acceptance. In 1948, he published the first volume of The Modulor. Le Corbusier’s standard in it is the six-foot-tall man he had observed in America: he calculates that, with his left arm fully extended upward, the distance from the man’s navel to the soles of his feet is 113 centimeters, from his navel to the top of his head an additional seventy centimeters, from the top of his head to the fingertips of his raised left hand a further forty-three—adhering to the anthropomorphic principles developed by Matila Ghyka in 1931. These measurements are, he explains, to be applied to all of architecture and in particular to l’Unité d’Habitation.
The focal points of the human body chosen by Le Corbusier suited his personal hierarchy. The essential element was the navel: the link of nourishment between the embryo and the mother, a perpetual reminder of the attachment to the female parent. The top of the head suggests the greatest achievements of the human mind. The bottoms of the feet represent the physical basis of our positioning on the earth. As for the fingertips, with one’s arm shooting upward, these are as close as one can get to the sun, linking Le Corbusier’s universal creature to the miraculous core of the solar system that is the primary source of human energy and growth.
The book was the result of more than four years of collaborative effort, with some of the participants having worked full-time, but Le Corbusier published the book in his name alone.
IN HIS FIFTH VOLUME of The Complete Work, which covered the years 1946 to 1952, Le Corbusier proudly wrote about the findings of the Congress on Divine Proportion, an assembly of mathematicians, artists, and architects held at the Milan Triennale in September 1951. The names under discussion included Vitruvius, Dürer, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, and, with no one in the void of the four intervening centuries, Le Corbusier. The architect was elected president of a new organization that grew out of the conference and was called the Provisional International Committee of Studies of Proportion. Le Corbusier summed up his achievement by declaring, “At a given moment in the threat of disorder, certain ideas may reach the level of a principle.”21
Over the years, the many images Le Corbusier painted and sculpted of the Modulor make clear that his objective was to ennoble man, to make him strong and broad shouldered, standing erect on muscular and sturdy legs with his arm raised in a gesture of victory. His illustrations divide the figure into a bold red and a light-infused blue that convey pure vitality. For Le Corbusier, who struggled for optimism even when feeling defeated, the Modulor fixed man forever in a state of confidence and empowerment.
7
In December 1948, a session of the United Nations took place in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot. Le Corbusier invited the delegates, as well as selected journalists, to a cocktail party at 35 rue de Sèvres. The architect had violated his own role of keeping the atelier off-limits so that he could publicly give his version of the history of the UN project and his own seminal role.
Le Corbusier showed his audience photographs of a maquette he had constructed to demonstrate his original scheme for the complex in New York. It was, he explained, a natural outgrowth of projects he had done in Geneva, Moscow, and elsewhere over the previous twenty years. He also distributed to his guests a sheet of paper, printed front and back, that presented the UN building complex as he had initially designed it—elevations and bird’s-eye views—with a text explaining that these drawings were evidence of the role he had played designing the building now attributed to Wallace Harrison and Oscar Niemeyer.
For the rest of his life, Le Corbusier believed that the origins of the UN as it was built could be traced back as far as his 1922 City for Three Million, which he had subsequently improved in other projects. But the crux of his anguish was not the lack of credit; it was the absence of aesthetic quality and life force in the end result.
On future trips to New York, whenever Le Corbusier looked at what he called “my skyscraper,” he felt palpably violated. Yet within the next decade, he was to succeed, on the other side of the world, in making a spectacular “General Assembly” and “Secretariat” exactly according to his own design. The martyr was to find his pulpit.
XLI
1
In February 1949, during a brief stopover in New York on his way to Colombia, Le Corbusier wrote Marguerite Tjader Harris, asking her to organize a meal in a good restaurant. His instructions were specific. The event should be planned by her, but he would pay, and he did not care what it cost. The restaurant could be Italian, French, or Spanish. The following women should attend: herself, Helena (for whom he gave two addresses but no last name), Barbara Joseph, and Mitzi Solomon. He had, he explained to Tjader Harris, met them all in 1946 and 1947.
Anticipating the event, he explained: “Life and hell and paradise are the walls in which there are sometimes doors, keyholes, openings, and sometimes the door itself opens…. So in the difficult life I lead, the entrance to consolation may open to me.”1
He told Tjader Harris that while the UN had thrown him into despair, she and these other women represented “the great New York I love.”2 His haremlike rendezvous should occur at the start of March, when he would be stopping in Manhattan on his return to Paris from Bogotá.
Le Corbusier was ebullient because he had signed a contract with the Colombian authorities for a pilot plan for Bogotá, then in a period of rapid growth with its population jumping from half a million to one million people. He planned to divide the Colombian capital into distinct sectors, fulfilling his dream of designing an entire city with a unifying, modular element as its basis. He was more the product of La Chaux-de-Fonds than he acknowledged. Having grown up in a grid of neat blocks, he was now trying to impose its rationalism and systematization on a more exuberant metropolis. Importing European civilization into a distant territory, he had the mentality of a conqueror.
Le Corbusier commuted to Bogotá until April 1951, when the completed plan was officially accepted. That victory sent him into one of his upward swings. With Bogotá on top of Marseille, he became convinced that, finally, his patience had paid off. This time he declared that the duration of his waiting period had been forty years. He also felt he was making strides in his painting.
The only area in which victory still eluded him concerned his mother and Albert. He urged them to spend ten days in the mountains—he would pay—but they refused. Offering gratuitous advice to a stubborn eighty-eight-year-old, he again instructed Marie Jeanneret to enjoy herself more and reminded her that life would pass quickly. Then on July 18, the architect wrote his recalcitrant mother and brother on the official letterhead of the Conseil Economique—for which the sole address line was “REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE LIBERTE EGALITE FRATERNITE.” His tone was huffy. He had written them ten days previously, to say he would be in Bergamo—in northern Italy, not so far from the Swiss border—between the twenty-second and the thirtieth, and he wanted to visit them for a couple of days. They had not, however, had the simple courtesy to respond.
Le Corbusier told them he was enraged by their silence. If they did not signal that he was welcome, they would miss their chance to see him for a long time, since during his summer holiday
on the Côte d’Azur, he would be meeting with Sert and Wiener about Bogotá and would not possibly have time to break away to Vevey. “Answer. I am in the grip of a very active life. A simple word, if you please.”3
THERE WAS AN ENCLOSURE with the vituperative letter. It was a copy of a translation of a letter from Pedro Curutchet. Curutchet, a doctor who lived in La Plata, Argentina, had commissioned Le Corbusier to build him a private house. It had been a long time since Le Corbusier had worked on a luxury villa, and he wanted his mother and brother to know what was being said about the plans he had made.
Curutchet admired “the graceful and transparent structure” and “the harmonious continuity everywhere.” The aesthetic perfection of the spaces was not all the doctor praised.
But after this first impression I look more closely and in each detail I discover a new interest, a new mirror of intellectual beauty. Henceforth I realize I’ll be living a new life, and later on I hope to assimilate completely the artistic substance of this architectural gem you have created.
People I have shown the plans to have been enchanted. I know this work will remain a kind of lesson of contemporary art, of your avant-garde mind, and of your original creative spirit. My duty will be to see that everyone makes use of this lesson to the benefit of his own culture and in gratitude to the great master.4
The house for Dr. Curutchet is one of Le Corbusier’s most spectacular luxury residences. To build a private palace out of reinforced concrete was audacious; so was the lively and irregular plan. The house is an exciting jungle of terraces, interior gardens, courtyards, large rooms, and great cantilevered roofs, with brises-soleil and pilotis at every level.
Curutchet, another of Le Corbusier’s ideal clients, was, in his own field, as independent as the architect was in his. A doctor who performed home surgery in a rural region nearly four hundred miles from La Plata and Buenos Aires, he was obsessed with the idea that a surgeon’s hands needed to be in their most comfortable and functional position for a successful procedure. To this goal, he developed special instruments for what he named the “aximanual” technique—in comparison to the “crucimanual” technique, in which the doctor’s hands were cramped in order to cope with awkward, old-fashioned tools. Not only did Curutchet have in common with Le Corbusier an abiding interest in the human hand, one of the greatest of all mechanical devices, and a wish to use modern technology in new and unexpected ways, but the erudite doctor wrote long books to explain his theories with references to people ranging from Bach and Delacroix to Stravinsky and Valéry.
Wishing to move back to La Plata to live in a combination of house and surgical clinic, Curutchet had acquired a small building site opposite a park. Once he decided that Le Corbusier should design it, he had his sister, Leonor, and their mother meet with the architect in Paris. Following that meeting in September 1948, Le Corbusier came up with a design for a 531-square-meter house to be built for about $32,000. With Amancio Williams as the site architect, the house was completed in 1954, and although Le Corbusier never actually saw his own creation or met his client, the project had served a wonderful purpose by providing the adulation that he could forward to his mother.
2
Le Corbusier’s mother and brother failed to encourage him to visit from Bergamo. He let his mother know that, therefore, instead of going to Vevey at the start of August after attending CIAM, he made the short trip across northern Italy “in order not to see any more architects and to get a whiff of that great, real-life poetry which is in Venice.”5
On August 1, from his albergo near the Piazza San Marco, he also wrote Yvonne, who was alone in Paris. Le Corbusier wanted her to understand that he was away on this date when most French husbands started their family vacation only because of the obligations of his work. But even the glories of Venice did not distract him from his highest of all personal priorities:
The true site of my happiness is my home, which you illuminate and make so beneficial by your presence. Guardian of the hearth. Your magnificent gift of remaining young and beautiful by means of the profound character within you.
Everyone says of you the best that can be said and of 24 N-C that it is a unique site.6
Sitting near the spot where, when he was twenty years old, the sunshine following seven inclement days had suddenly opened his eyes to the miracles of architecture, the sixty-one-year-old had another moment of revelation: “My life often transports me into glories to which I am indifferent and into the realm of imbecilities that drive me mad and wound me. When I return to 24 N-C, I return chez moi, chez nous.”7
Le Corbusier assured his wife that, if she had been at CIAM with him, she would have been loved by his colleagues. But the trials and tribulations of the trip would have been untenable for her. Consoling her, he reminded her that they were about to spend a month in her home territory in the south of France.
AFTER ONE NIGHT in Vézelay and the next in Avignon, Le Corbusier and Yvonne reached Menton—not far from Nice—where they stayed at the Majestic Hotel. Almost as soon as “M. et Mme. Le Corbusier” checked in to their grand hotel at the seaside, Sert and Wiener arrived, and Le Corbusier began to work day and night on plans for Bogotá. He did, however, manage to swim twice every day, once at noon and again at 6:30 p.m. Then, after Sert and Wiener left on August 22, Le Corbusier started to restore the murals that had so upset Eileen Gray in E. 1027 in nearby Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The murals had been damaged during the war by the occupying army, and Le Corbusier worked on them for the next nine days.
The heat was terrible in the south of France that August, but Yvonne was happier than Le Corbusier had seen her in ages. At lunch and dinner, the couple ate without fail “in a casse-croute 15 yards from the villa, a pleasant new building run by a good sort, patronized by campers and hitchhikers etc…. a simple and honest and humorous humanity, a friendly intimacy and a real match between Panam and Midigue [slang for Paris and the south of France]. Hilarious contests, sometimes lasting hours. This couldn’t be better for us. And from this shed an extraordinary view of Monaco, night and day.”8 The term “casse-croute” meant a simple shack or lunch stop where people ate straightforward local food, which Le Corbusier described with relish to his mother and brother. He advised that they, too, take advantage of the time of year at the edge of a vast and beautiful body of water.
LE CORBUSIER was portraying the very spot that was to be his definition of earthly paradise for the remaining sixteen years of his life. The restaurant was l’Etoile de Mer. The “good sort” was Thomas Rebutato, who with his wife and son were to be the saviors of Le Corbusier’s and Yvonne’s later years. That lunch stop would be the place where Yvonne would get her six dozen sea urchins a day, where the two would drink their pastis together and look over the sea toward the land of her birth.
THOMAS REBUTATO, who had been a plumber in Nice, had bought a parcel of land near E. 1027 in 1948. Where he had opened his simple restaurant, mainly to serve grilled local fish to students, he also built a couple of modest cabanons for vacationers.
One day, when Rebutato was sitting on the terrace at l’Etoile de Mer, a man came up the hill from E. 1027 and asked the restaurateur if he could provide lunch for twenty people. If the lunch went well, he said, he would ask Rebutato to do the same on various occasions in the upcoming days. After the repast, a great success, the man identified himself as Le Corbusier.
At lunch with Yvonne and others at l’Etoile de Mer, late 1950s
The former plumber, his wife, and their twelve-year-old son, Robert, were among the rare people who could get along equally well with Le Corbusier and Yvonne. Rebutato spoke with the thick southern accent of the villages that dot the Mediterranean coast. He stood for hours each day behind the bar of his little restaurant in the summer heat, one hand often placed firmly on the wooden counter, the sleeves of his baggy white shirt rolled up to reveal his darkly suntanned arms, his shirt buttons open to the navel. He sported a beret at jaunty angle even in the warmest weather. Invariably
he had a cigarette clenched between his teeth, with an ash dangerously close to falling. His personal style made Le Corbusier and Yvonne totally comfortable.
Le Corbusier soon gave Robert a model of the Modulor and began discussions with the boy. Within a couple of years, Robert decided to be an architect; a decade later, he wound up working in Le Corbusier’s office. Yvonne was very maternal with him; she loved to tell Robert stories, and he sang to her.
In time, Le Corbusier and Yvonne lived on this hillside in a structure that resembled a mountain hut—or one of the single monastic dwellings located in the wilderness on Mount Athos. It had everything the architect wanted—the bare necessities for living and working, and a large window opened to the vast horizon. This was where, until Yvonne’s death, they slept at right angles in their single beds, hers elevated on a base that contained storage bins, his only a mattress, with a low square table, also providing storage space, in the void between them. Le Corbusier stayed on, summer after summer after Yvonne died, and he moved to her bed.
Writing his euphoric letter from the modest seaside restaurant in 1949, Le Corbusier was also within view of the spot where he would ultimately join himself to the sea and the universe. But there was still much to do—and a chance to impress his mother.
3
José Luis Sert let Le Corbusier know that Picasso wanted to visit the construction site in Marseille. Le Corbusier wrote the Spanish painter, “With pleasure: you give the orders. The sooner the better, as I’m always at the mercy of unexpected problems.”9 He asked Picasso to send a letter or telegram in care of l’Etoile de Mer because there was no telephone, and advised Picasso to meet him at the Roquebrune-Cap-Martin train station on any morning he proposed, as early as 7:00 a.m. This was the sort of scheduling of which he had once dreamed.
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