Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret, who was born in 1860, would, it was said, turn ninety. Only nine years earlier, she had turned eighty. With his passion for round numbers and his impatience to have his mother reach one hundred, Le Corbusier had moved the clock ahead. There is no sign that she argued with the idea.

  The architect drew a schema to suggest the perfect divisions of his mother’s life as she reached the harmonious sum of decades. It was a vertical figure poised on a horizontal line. Two ascending lines curve upward in opposite directions, crisscrossing at the thirty-year mark, then diverging again, meeting a second time at sixty, then veering away again, and joining up for a third occasion at ninety. The ninety is a summit, a moment of harmony and union.

  The loyal son explained the drawing in a letter sent on September 7, 1949: “Now three cycles of life have ended, each as complete and pure as the next: nothing has failed. A splendid ascent. All my respect, all my admiration. It is the third one that you have achieved ahead of any of us. It seems to me that in our family one grows young.”10

  On the previous Sunday Le Corbusier had been with the seventy-nine-year-old Henri Matisse, “pink-faced, entirely white hair.” The architect was deeply impressed by the way Matisse, “nailed to his bed for ten years,” was using a three-meter stick with a charcoal at the end to design the interior of the chapel at Vence and managed to cut forms out of colored paper and arrange them rhythmically. “He has found the key,” Le Corbusier wrote about this artist he failed to understand as a young man. For two hours, Matisse regaled the architect with “a whole heap of stories, all of them gay and playful.”11

  Le Corbusier added that nearby, in Golfe Juan, the sixty-seven-year-old Picasso had just had a baby girl. Le Corbusier, too, was feeling revitalized, thanks to the role model to whom he was writing: “And following the example of his mother, at sixty-two [sic], at a time when all other comrades are falling out of the race, Le Corbusier begins a new thirty-year cycle.”12 On September 11, she would, he reminded her, begin her fourth cycle; she must live to be 120.

  He would not actually attend the birthday celebration—Marseille beckoned; work had its priority—but he enclosed a newspaper article as a reminder that “the younger son has finally taken his worthy place on the track.”13

  4

  In late October, Le Corbusier told his mother that he had been filmed for two days on the construction site at Marseille “as a kind of ‘star’ with Jean-Pierre Aumont” and that the building there was beginning to take shape; the skeleton of the fifty-six-meter-high structure was in place even if the walls and the rest of the superstructure still had to be added. A new “association for a synthesis of the fine arts” had been created that year of which he had been appointed the first vice president, “which is to say, the man in charge,” and he was planning a show at the Porte Maillot devoted to this coming together of the visual arts. He had also just finished the factory at Saint-Dié, where he had manifested that unity of the arts by incorporating his own painting and sculpture within his architecture. But then he observed to Marie Jeanneret and Albert, “My dears, here I am again chattering of egoistic matters,” and went on to discuss the new automatic heating system he had installed in the house in Vevey as if it were the most important thing of all; his mother had not yet mastered it, and must do so before the onset of cold weather.14

  Le Corbusier closed by telling Marie that he would be writing to Marguerite Tjader Harris, for she had remembered his birthday a few weeks earlier.

  AS THE WINTER of 1949–1950 approached, the man who was working with state-of-the-art engineers to develop climate controls to combat extreme heat and cold in vast apartment complexes now set out to accomplish the more difficult task of teaching his own mother how to work her furnace. He was determined that she master the new system both for its effectiveness and for the attitude to life its radical technology represented. He concluded his instructions and encouragement, of which every sentence had an exclamation point: “Moral: seize the happy hours as they pass and close your eyes to the others!”15

  Not that Le Corbusier followed that advice himself. He did not dissemble about his rage over recent events in America, where President Truman had laid the cornerstone of the UN without in any way citing Le Corbusier as the source of its design. “It’s amazing! That skyscraper is mine,” he wrote his mother. The architect was now constantly barraging Trygve Lie, the UN secretary-general, about the injustice: “Indeed this is an historic event in the history of architecture. I am not letting up. I have all the trumps in my hand. They have robbed me, there must come a day when they admit as much and pay. In what coin? I couldn’t care less!”16

  Then, two days after he accompanied twenty journalists via train to the construction site in Marseille, the cinema news, radio, and newspapers all began fulminating against his radical design for the new apartment building. The main problem, he asserted, was that the negative voices had reached his mother and she was upset. He encouraged her to realize it was only the old problem of journalists: “Etc. etc., gazette, late news, press press press!!!”17

  She should know that he was walking 1,500 meters every morning, and even though Yvonne was too unwell to write, she was sewing. He advised yet again that one must look on the bright side.

  5

  One of the press photographers assigned to take shots of Le Corbusier in that time period was Lucien Hervé. The moment the architect saw the younger man’s pictures, he told him, “You have the soul of an architect.”18

  Hervé, who worked with Le Corbusier for the next fifteen years, was not impervious to the architect’s cantankerousness, even brutality, but also saw the generosity. At their first meeting, Hervé had extolled the mixture of abstraction and realism in one of Le Corbusier’s paintings. Three years later, the doorbell of Hervé’s Paris studio rang at precisely 8:00 a.m. He knew it had to be Le Corbusier—his only acquaintance who ever came precisely at the hour, never a minute earlier or later, and never having telephoned in advance. Le Corbusier handed the large canvas to Hervé as a gift, saying he knew the photographer had always liked it.

  There was only a single exception to the 8:00 a.m. rule. One day, Le Corbusier telephoned Hervé far earlier in the morning and demanded that the photographer come immediately to the rue Nungesser-et-Coli. After hearing Yvonne’s usual complaints about being so far from the center of Paris, Hervé learned what was on Le Corbusier’s mind. The architect was consumed by anguish over news of the proposed exploration of outer space. “He could not understand the interest in space when there was so much misery on the earth.”19 At that early hour, he talked about human values gone astray, the idea that by the year 2000 it would be impossible to drive or park in Paris, and his own determination to help its poor population, who he felt were underserved. He told them that Einstein had said the Modulor could prevent evil from occurring in the world, a goal far more urgent than what the astronauts were doing.

  6

  As the war-torn decade drew to a close, people eagerly anticipated New Year’s Day 1950. Le Corbusier, however, was, as usual, doing his best to avoid the holidays; he reminded his mother to leave Christmas to children. Besides, Marie Jeanneret had more important things to worry about: she had fallen and broken a bone. The architect begged her to hire an aide, for whom he would gladly pay, but once again she resisted the idea of the domestic help Le Corbusier considered one of life’s necessities.

  He then raised the issue of her Christmas present. He had given each of his draftsmen a proof of an engraving he had recently made and had also found presents for their children, but he could not settle on a gift that he was certain would please his mother: “For dear Maman doesn’t like her younger son’s works of art, she thinks it’s ugly, she once declared ‘I’ll never have such painting in my house’!! Andalusian temperament!”20

  Worse still, she had no end of admiration for his brother’s music. Le Corbusier ended this pre-Christmas letter to the alleged nonagenari
an, “And then, both of you, go listen to those cantatas, the works of Albert the Great. Then happy holidays to you both, and to dear Maman a good year.”21

  His conclusion for a Christmas present was to give her The Modulor. It was, he assured her, the latest rage, even though the ink was not yet dry. But he let her know he held scant hope that reading it would afford her comparable pleasure to listening to Albert’s music.

  7

  On December 30, Jean Badovici wrote Le Corbusier that the architect’s “vanity” concerning the murals in E. 1027 had inflicted great pain and that the pure and functional architecture of his villa had called for a complete absence of paintings: “With your worldwide authority, you have been lacking in generosity toward me. A correction by you seems necessary to me, otherwise I shall be forced to make it myself and thus to reestablish the original spirit of the house by the sea.”22 Badovici then reiterated his love for Le Corbusier, recalling their long history and expressing his hope for a resolution of their problems and wishing the architect and Yvonne happiness in the new year.

  Le Corbusier did not bother with any such sentiments in the response he wrote on New Year’s Day. He simply demanded “formally” that the murals be photographed before being destroyed and then accused Badovici of being incomprehensible, which was to be expected since he had never in his life succeeded in writing in a way that others could understand.

  Badovici supplied the photos; Le Corbusier’s answer, in its entirety, was “My dear Bado, received your photos of my paintings. Your photographer is a donkey who knows neither values nor cropping nor filters. Couldn’t be worse. I hope he’s not ruining your finances. Best to you, Le Corbusier.”23

  He could be as devoted as he could be furious. In 1949, when the Galerie Charpentier, one of the most important in Paris, mounted a large exhibition of André Bauchant’s work, Le Corbusier showered praise with a reach of enthusiasm that was his alone. He wrote the painter, “The soul of the Parisian is in you, consisting of the original soils of each of us and of the fundamental aspirations of the complete man: the love of nature, the forest, the fields, the streams, the need of history, which is the foundation of existence and the love of legends, and your work is full of goddesses, of heroes and sirens, and of God as well. You are a peasant, but in your veins flows aristocratic blood, the miracle of France, where the nobles and gentlemen knew the shepherdesses.”24

  His own building in Marseille was to be the architectural equivalent of Bauchant’s paintings: a sylvan ideal that would allow the worship of a sacred landscape. And he was determined that a sense of mythology and pagan worship should course through the bold and colorful structure.

  Le Corbusier identified with Bauchant: “You have worked hard, like a man possessed: from dawn to dark.” Bauchant had endured a “heroic struggle in solitude and the mockery of those around you.”25 Even the champions of Henri Rousseau had initially considered Bauchant one step too primitive. That changed only when the dealer Jeanne Bucher saw the Bauchants in Le Corbusier’s apartment, after which she organized exhibitions in her gallery and sold the work to museums worldwide.

  The sheer animal naturalness and kindness Bauchant and his work embodied provided relief from the tumultuous disorder of the architect’s own mind. Le Corbusier delighted in being someone else’s savior.

  8

  The drawings Le Corbusier made for the civic center of Bogotá emanate energy and efficiency. The lithe slabs that would have made up the center of that South American city befit elegant Latin government officials running the affairs of state with verve and élan.

  The two main buildings, set perpendicular to each other, are the ultimate exemplar of the right angle, an homage to the sheer panache of two straight lines juxtaposed at ninety degrees. One is basically a calm, horizontal, rectangular block, resting with tapered vertical rectangles at either end; the other is a skyscraper. Yet strong as the architecture is, it is impressively modest in relationship to the landscape; it does not impose itself but respects the mountainous setting, being above all a vehicle for looking out at the earth.

  When Le Corbusier flew to South America to try to advance this project, he made it his routine to go via New York. On a stopover there in February 1950, he was incensed by the latest developments. After arriving in Bogotá, he wrote his mother and Albert that he had visited “my skyscraper, very far along but giving every evidence of Harrisson’s [sic] ignorance and lack of imagination. There are horrifying mistakes.” The sight of his great conception—its authorship stolen, its quality compromised disastrously—rendered him almost senseless. He continued, “I’ve touched on so many facts and circumstances…that I’ve conceived a tome (yes, unfortunately!) that will be powerful: ‘The end of a world,’ ‘deliverance.’”26

  The “tome” to which he referred was a treatise he had written in his own defense. Published in 1947 by the Reinhold Publishing Corporation, it was called U.N. Headquarters. In the course of its rampage against Americans in general, he mocked the trend for building shelters against nuclear fallout.

  “Looked at Harrison’s skyscraper,” he reported to Yvonne. “Poor fools. To massacre such an enormous thing!…N-York is a terrible city. Everyone is quite crack-brained! They’re all abominably scared of being bombed. It’s revolting to see such a strong people showing themselves to be so crazy.”27

  But Colombia was different. The port city of Barranquilla, on the Caribbean, asked him to execute a design similar to what he had done for Bogotá, with Sert and Wiener again collaborating. It was a working relationship Le Corbusier prized. Sert and Wiener were “two perfect teammates. We work together to an astonishing degree.” His mother and Albert, to whom he wrote this, knew how rare such a felicitous collaboration was.

  “The exactitude of these transcontinental journeys is of a magical order,” he also wrote to those family members who well understood the merits of clockwork. And Bogotá had a lot that New York lacked. “I am regarded as a Gentleman!” he declared to his mother, while describing his thrill at seeing, so far from Switzerland, portraits by Victor Darjou—the same painter who had immortalized his ancestor Lecorbesier at age eighty. “Life strikes me as either magnificent or stupid,” Le Corbusier concluded.28

  Yvonne, however, needed to know that he was not having fun. “What a dog’s life! At my age!”29 He complained that the altitude in Bogotá made him feel tired and caused him to have terrible headaches and bizarre dreams. If she thought she was suffering in her solitude and isolation in Paris, she must realize that he was working from 8:30 in the morning until late at night, speaking Spanish, English, and French in a combination that exhausted him. He spent the whole day visiting cities and factories; the workload was without respite. There were good moments—he had had a meeting with the president of the republic and had also enjoyed dinner next to two toreadors, excited that each of those little men with notably small hands had killed two bulls—but he hardly had a moment to himself.

  But for both women he had the same rallying cry. Each must find a good maid. This was Le Corbusier’s solution to women’s woes.

  9

  Yvonne was in better form that spring once Le Corbusier returned from Colombia. Albert came to stay with them on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli, and the three occasionally dined in restaurants with old friends like Léger, Pierre, Charlotte Perriand, and Winter. In spite of Le Corbusier’s professed objection to socializing, there was a cocktail party at 35 rue de Sèvres, where the young staff sang folk songs. Albert wrote to La Petite Maman, “Yvonne makes very funny remarks when she’s in company, and everyone loves her.”30

  In mid-May, Le Corbusier made arrangements for Marie to go to Marseille. The trip was possible now that the elevator, which would allow her to reach the roof, was working. Albert was to accompany her. Le Corbusier had organized their travel arrangements in meticulous detail: tickets for the sleeping car on the train from Geneva to Marseille, use of an apartment there for two days, a visit to the construction site. With the aid of his
office staff, he had planned every meal, right down to the coffee ice cream that was his mother’s passion.

  Then it all had to be scratched, because construction work at l’Unité was behind schedule. Le Corbusier switched the departure date from the end of May to the end of June and reengineered the identical journey. His instructions were explicit: his mother need only take along something to sleep in—“No suitcases, no change of clothes.”31

  Then Marie Jeanneret fell from a ladder and gashed her face above her eye. She was not able to travel; Le Corbusier wrote urging her to “give up climbing ladders…out of consideration for her progeny” and put off the trip until she was fully recovered, while stressing that nothing was to stand in the way of her seeing his greatest achievement to date.32

  10

  At the beginning of August, Le Corbusier and Yvonne took a holiday in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. They rented a bedroom in a shoemaker’s house under olive trees down below l’Etoile de Mer. The hot, sultry days and all his swimming helped Le Corbusier sleep better than he had all year. In high spirits, in a single day he painted a lively mural on a wooden panel along the front of the bar at l’Etoile de Mer. Called Saint André des Oursins, that colorful testimony to the pleasure of summer is a tableau of underwater life, dominated by a smiling sea urchin surrounded by eels, langoustines, flat-fish, and starfish, with a self-portrait of the artist as a jaunty sea bass with a pipe coming out of his mouth and a little bowler hat on top of his head. It fit easily into the setting, with assorted glasses and bottles of pastis and whiskey and wine sitting above it.