Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  A couple of days later, Yvonne stumbled and hurt her knee. It became so swollen that to walk up the steps from the shoemaker’s to the shack was hard for her, but Le Corbusier, in a humor where nothing could damage his sense of the beauty of life, simply profited from their immobility by reading Henri Mondor’s life of Mallarmé. The architect fit Mallarmé’s life into a numeric scheme, concluding that, while Mallarmé had been the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, in 1900 the change of century turned him into a madman. This was one of Le Corbusier’s greatest stretches ever, since Mallarmé had, in fact, died in 1898.

  Refreshed by good nights and by days of reading, swimming, and eating fresh seafood, in the middle of August Le Corbusier was off to Marseille before returning on the twentieth to Paris, where most of his office crew was still on vacation. Then, on the twenty-sixth, he would fly on to New York for a two-day stopover en route to Bogotá.

  From New York, Le Corbusier used his mother’s impending birthday to write her, saying that, since she liked compliments now that she was getting older, he wanted her to know that she fascinated all his friends. But then he let loose. The architect informed her that she had always been ferocious and readily cruel—either from genius or from ignorance—because of the way she had been raised. He credited her for his having the heredity of a lion, although, unlike her, he was not a lion but a bird.

  “A 91 ans Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret Perret règne sur le soleil, la lune, les monts, le lac et le foyer entourée de l’admiration affectueuse de ses enfants. 10 septembre 1951.”

  Le Corbusier said he owed her almost everything—which, since he was often in life-threatening danger, included the fortitude to survive events and circumstances that would have killed others. He attributed that strength to a mutual bullheadedness, pointing out that the four Jeannerets were all alike, especially in their unwillingness to open themselves to other points of view.33 In this uncensored explosion allegedly written as a birthday congratulation, there was no distinction between mother and son.

  DURING THAT STOPOVER in New York, Le Corbusier was even more horrified than before at the fate of the UN. He poured out his anguish to Yvonne: “The architectural spirit in even the slightest details = a grim, dim and insipid flop. Such icy, heartless work leaves us cold.”34

  He also emphasized the need for Yvonne to gain weight, telling her what a marvelous surprise it would be on his return if she could become “round as a ball.”35 From Bogotá, he continued his counsel by writing, “Smoke and don’t eat, for my sake,” as if the sarcasm might yield results.36 However, when he advised her that if she needed money for tobacco, she should ask Paul Ducret, his perpetually helpful office manager, he was being perfectly straightforward. After all, Yvonne gave away even more cigarettes than she smoked.

  When a woman in Colombia had asked for news of Yvonne and he reported some of her problems, the woman had been dismayed that Yvonne did not take vitamins. Le Corbusier quoted the subsequent dialogue to his wife: “‘Unfortunately, Madame,’ I replied, ‘my wife doesn’t believe in doctors, nor in what I advise her to do; she doesn’t want to take care of herself.’”37 But, six thousand miles away, he was racking his brain to find the right way to cajole her to health, short of being at her side or moving her to where she might have been happier.

  Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne every four or five days on that trip. He found some new pills for her that had been recommended by an Australian who took them every day and was in great health; these would be her salvation. When he learned from one of the watchdogs in his office assigned to look in on Yvonne that her health was improving, he was euphoric, writing, “I hope you’ve grown fat as a pork sausage.”38 Meanwhile, he was pleased to have trimmed down a bit; back in New York after Bogotá, he wrote, “You can see in the photo that I’ve grown thinner. The stomach still makes a little hump, but on the other hand, if I go hunting the rabbits can easily escape between my knees! And I used to be so proud of the weight it took me 60 years to gain!”39

  He went on to instruct his wife to have Luan, the Annamite houseboy, cut up raw carrots. They would give vitality—the energy and verve essential, equally, to people and buildings and missing in the UN, he explained in one of his soliloquies where the human physique and the nature of a building were inextricably linked.40

  11

  In October, after he returned to Europe, Le Corbusier was again seeing Hedwig Lauber. The woman whom he had instructed to cease writing to him was now allowed to do so as long as she sent the letters to the office and marked them “personal” Le Corbusier alerted Lauber to his secretary’s habit of opening his mail otherwise.

  The architect arranged to see her in Zurich. He planned the evening carefully, opting for a quiet dinner in her flat: “I should like to speak to you in peace and quiet. I want no one else to be present, especially intellectuals. No one. And I do not wish such a meeting to take place in a Swiss restaurant.”41 He said that he would pay for the wine and sausage and slices of ham and would ring at 8:00 p.m.

  The bright and attractive journalist was another person who made Le Corbusier happy to be who he was. In his letters to her he described himself as “la bête noire des conformistes”—the autodidact who left school at thirteen, never went to architecture school, never received a diploma, and led “a dog’s life”—whom she put at ease.42 Throughout the fifties, the two saw each other when they could. Their plans often suffered from missed opportunities, however. He could not get her to India when he tried to; she went to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin when he was not there. They had a number of happy meetings, though. Lauber was blond—her hair color an obsession for Le Corbusier, who had spoken about it to Paul Wiener in Bogotá—and she was spirited and happy. She called him “mon cher petit grand Corbu”: small and large, human and great, at the same time—exactly as he wanted to be.43

  THAT AUTUMN, there were problems not only with leaks in Vevey but also with the roof of the apartment on rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Le Corbusier was determined that his mother recognize that, even if her villa had rainwater coming in and so did his and Yvonne’s penthouse, he had been asked to build for the world. He was doing an urban scheme surrounding l’Unité in Marseille; plans were under way for a second Unité d’Habitation, in Nantes; he had also been asked to design a chapel in a small mountain village. Le Corbusier continued the litany: in addition, he was working on a hotel in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and on a different project for Sainte-Baume—this time a building with two arches to suggest the form of a boat for the arrival of Mary Magdalene. He was entering the second phase of the Bogotá plan. His new title was “architectural government advisor…. And that’s only apart of it,” he boasted at the end of November. She must, therefore, accept the leak: “I repeat: All over the world there’s an outbreak of physical disasters (storms and hurricanes) and moral and political catastrophes. To some degree inescapable! Be happy as the Seraphim!”44

  Her response was further complaints about her roof. The man who was housing hundreds of families in Marseille could not stand it: “I hope that the moral catastrophe of the leak has evaporated from dear Maman’s heart. When you see what water can do the world over, this year…. And the other elements into the bargain.”45 The only solution left for him was moral superiority.

  12

  Le Corbusier was determined to use the exposition scheduled for 1952 at the Porte Maillot, on the periphery of Paris, to realize the dream that had preoccupied Ruskin, William Morris, the founders of the Bauhaus, and all the other aesthetic pantheists who had tried to marry painting and architecture and design.

  He designed a pavilion that would present the latest contemporary painting, sculpture, and architecture in combination. A bold concept, it was open to the elements on the sides, with a roof that looked like oversized beach umbrellas. The contents were equally audacious: in theory, the pavilion was intended for work by other artists, but in fact it had nothing but Le Corbusier’s own painting and sculpture. It was his ultimate fantasy: a solo Le Corbu
sier museum displaying his achievement in all the arts, at the bustling entranceway to Paris, visible from his perch on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli.

  The project never got past the drawing boards, but the architect was about to realize his urbanism, his building designs, his tapestries, and his sculptures on the scale of which he had long dreamed.

  XLII

  1

  One morning in the summer of 1950, a letter arrived at 35 rue de Sèvres from the government of the Indian region of Punjab. The brief document announced plans for a mission, in which two men of rank were to visit Europe in search of a team of architects for a completely new capital city.

  India, a British territory since the second half of the seventeenth century, had gained its independence from England in 1947. With the partition that year of the former British colony into India and Pakistan, Punjab, a province in the north, was divided: its eastern part remained in India, while its western part became West Pakistan. (Part of the old province of Bengal became East Pakistan, which in 1971 became Bangladesh.) Since Lahore, the historic capital of Punjab, was now in West Pakistan, the Indian section needed a government headquarters of its own.

  It was decided that Simla, the former summer capital of the British regime, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling, was too isolated and too close to the new border to assume this function. The site chosen instead was slightly south of that Victorian city. Two hundred and forty-one miles north of New Delhi, in view of the Himalayas, it was on a vast plateau between two wide rivers that were dry for all but two months of the year. The highway that linked it to New Delhi was a two-lane road that, to this day, feels, along the entire route, like the main street of a crowded and dusty village, flanked by tin huts, fruit and vegetable stands, and ramshackle shops. Making the journey, one stops constantly for hordes of people or cattle crossing.

  The name of the new capital, Chandigarh, came from one of the seventeen preexisting villages on the site, where there was a temple dedicated to Chandi, the goddess of power. Chandi is one of the forms assumed by the Hindu Shakti—a symbol, always female, of energetic transformation and a presence required for all important events. It was the perfect avatar for Le Corbusier.

  BY THE TIME Le Corbusier was approached, the new project already had a cumbersome history. Initially, an American, Albert Mayer, had been selected to be the overall planner of Chandigarh. Mayer, an MIT graduate, was a civil engineer who had been stationed in India for the U.S. Army during World War II. The Siberia-born Matthew Nowicki was to be responsible for the architectural design. Both men had visited the site, and Mayer had worked out a plan to do most of the design work in the United States and be paid in American dollars. Mayer proposed that Indian government officials travel to Europe and America to get ideas for the look of the buildings—a suggestion that quickly upset people in a country trying to escape the shackles of western imperialism.

  Then, on August 31, 1950, Nowicki was returning from Chandigarh when his TWA Constellation crashed near Cairo. It was a moment when the exchange rate between rupees and American dollars was particularly unfavorable to the Indians. Looking for an excuse to drop Mayer, the government used Nowicki’s death as a reason to consider changing teams. This was when P. M. Thapar, the administrative head of the capital project, and P. L. Varma, the chief engineer of Punjab, were dispatched on the four-week trip to the United Kingdom, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, and Paris.

  The Indian delegates were seeking a new architect willing to move to India for three years and accept an annual salary of not more than three thousand pounds, or about $50,000 today. Eugène Claudius-Petit, the French minister of reconstruction and urbanization, whom Le Corbusier had met while crossing to America in 1946, had recommended the architect—in spite of his notoriously difficult personality and the unlikelihood that he would agree to their terms.

  IT WAS A COLD and gray November day when Thapar and Varma, both nurtured on warm sunshine, entered the offices at 35 rue de Sèvres. The sixty-three-year-old Le Corbusier did not greet them enthusiastically.

  The dapper architect immediately told the two emissaries that he would not consider relocating and that their new city would have to be designed in the heart of the very old city of Paris. Even before coming face-to-face with Le Corbusier’s imperiousness, Thapar and Varma had other reasons to be skeptical about Claudius-Petit’s recommendation; they had already visited l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and doubted the value of its underlying ideas for India. Now they were even less inclined to hire the Swiss. They traveled on.

  In London, the two officials met the husband-and-wife team of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Beverly Drew, both members of CIAM. They asked Fry and Drew to take on the task of implementing Mayer’s basic ideas. However, Thapar and Varma, for all their trepidation and misgivings, had also seen the fantastic potential of Le Corbusier’s inventive design sense and groundbreaking urbanism for their project. They asked Fry how he would feel about working with Le Corbusier and making it a team effort. The Englishman replied, “Honour and glory for you, and an unpredictable portion of misery for me.”1 Like Thapar and Varma, however, he was one of the rare people willing to endure the misery to achieve the possible rewards.

  On December 8, Claudius-Petit spent two hours at 35 rue de Sèvres. The minister continued his attempt to persuade Le Corbusier to undertake the project that he had initially treated with such skepticism. Two days later, Fry and Drew joined Thapar and Varma in Paris for a meeting with Le Corbusier, who then signed a preliminary contract. That momentous event occurred at 9:30 in the morning on a Sunday—a fact Le Corbusier relished; he loved India in part because, unlike France, it was a country where one worked seven days a week.

  THE COMPLETE SOCIETAL and historical change that underlay the new project now thrilled Le Corbusier. More than six million Muslims had left India to move to Pakistan, while some seven and a half million Hindus and Sikhs had moved across the new borders into India. Ever since Punjab had lost the beautiful, romantic Lahore to Pakistan, the new capital was urgently needed to administer a state that, from the start, had a major problem deriving from the influx of refugees. Those tensions and necessities required him to build a brave new world. Architecture had to fulfill a burning human purpose well beyond the basics of housing.

  2

  An entirely fresh start requiring an unprecedented solution was the Corbusean ideal. When Chandigarh was selected in March 1948, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had said the site was “free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and old traditions. Let it be the first large expression of our creative genius flowering on our newly earned freedom.”2

  Equally befitting the Corbusean vision, the location had been chosen by airplane reconnaissance. The two seasonal rivers, Sukhna Cho and Patiala Rao, and abundant underground water nourished its 8,500 fertile acres sufficiently that there were groves of mango trees. The chosen terrain was close to sources for sand, cement, and stone. At an altitude varying from 304 to 365 meters above sea level, Chandigarh had two rainy seasons, one from June to August, the other in January and February. Temperatures ranged from freezing to forty-five degrees Celsius.

  Le Corbusier informed Thapar and Varma that Pierre Jeanneret’s involvement was a further requisite to his taking on Chandigarh. His clients agreed, as they did to Le Corbusier’s laying out the new city, planning its neighborhoods, and designing its main official buildings in the heart of old Paris. An agreement was drawn up for Fry, Drew, and Pierre to become senior architects on the project, spending most of their time on-site, for which each would earn three thousand pounds per year. Le Corbusier was to be the architectural advisor, with a salary of two thousand pounds plus transportation and thirty-five pounds per day for expenses while he was in India, as well as a fee of 4 percent of the cost of any building he designed in Chandigarh.

  The financial rewards were not commensurate with what any of them would otherwise have earned; Fry was giving up a lucrative practice of forty thousa
nd pounds a year. But the idealism and commitment of Thapar and Varma moved the westerners. After his hesitant start, Le Corbusier announced that he would give himself over with all his heart and soul to the new project.

  Le Corbusier then told the others that once they had all gone to India, they would have to change Mayer’s plan and “begin from the beginning.”3 Unlike the American, the Swiss intended to honor Indian culture—the way of life practiced by the peasants for the past thousand years, as well as the geometric beauty of the Hindu temples constructed in carved stone. When Nehru got word of Le Corbusier’s intentions, he was delighted. The architect’s wish to make architecture that was “neither English, nor French, nor American, but ‘Indian,’ of the second half of the twentieth-century” was exactly as the prime minister had hoped.4

  3

  It was one of Le Corbusier’s moments of apotheosis. On November 29, 1950, the ecclesiastical authorities had given their final approval to his design for the new chapel he had been discussing in the little village of Ronchamp in the Haute Saône, in the Franche-Comté region. The archbishop of Dijon signed the contract on December 8—the very day that Claudius-Petit had persuaded Le Corbusier to undertake Chandigarh.

  In reporting all this to his mother and describing events at the Indian embassy, Le Corbusier, as always, listed his latest triumphs. He had signed books in a bookstore. He had been on television; she would have seen the programs were it not for her unwillingness to bother to meet people in Vevey who got TV reception from Paris. Le Corbusier implored his mother that, while he was so busy and upbeat, she should stop continuing to fuss over the leak into her living room—which he still hoped to resolve. After pages in which he reiterated his importance and quoted the people of rank who regarded him so highly, he wrote, “And dear Maman? Those gutters, those workmen, those dead leaves, etc., etc.: I hope that the danger is past and that calm has been restored. Be sensible; what the hell can it matter if the water occasionally leaks somewhere? Aside from that, doesn’t the house manage to perform a certain function?”5 He and Yvonne had also had the painters in their apartment for a month, he reminded her. These things happened.