Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Then, on December 19, Le Corbusier walked through the gardens of the Indian embassy in Paris—not far from his old workplace for the Perret brothers—and entered its elegant offices, where he signed the final agreement for Chandigarh.

  TWO DAYS AFTER that ceremony, he wrote his mother that—in between trips to New York, Bogotá, and India—he would send her detailed drawings for a new facade that would fix the problem of water getting into La Petite Maison. She and Albert must be sure to specify the same sheet metal that was on the side facing the water. This would finally stop the leak.

  Following this, Le Corbusier declared the contract with the Indians “a triumphant business.”6 He enclosed a translation of part of it—spelling out his role of “architectural advisor.” It meant that he was to design the city, determine the overall style, and lay out the main road, squares, public gardens, and water system.

  He also enclosed numerous press clippings and let his mother know that, by the end of the year, there would be major coverage on him in newsreels that would be shown in cinemas all over France. The French and American press was requesting interviews as well. He was so busy—with Ronchamp, Marseille, Nantes, and now Bordeaux—that he had neglected to listen to a half-hour broadcast about himself on national radio.

  Le Corbusier asked for assurance that his mother and Albert had eaten their roast chicken for Christmas. He also told his elderly parent that he had had such a bad headache that he had the doctor come. The cause was only fatigue and was not dangerous, and she should know that it was not preventing him from dealing with her roof and the south facade, for even in his exhaustion he would not forget what mattered most to her.

  4

  Chandigarh was the summons of a lifetime. All of Le Corbusier’s ideals might at last become the everyday reality of a city built for five hundred thousand people—and that in less than half a century would house well over a million. Through design, he could give daily existence the qualities of rightness and morality he held sacred. He could apply the ideas of urbanism he had developed but not been given the chance to execute in Paris, Algiers, Bogotá, Stockholm, and a range of other cities. Here, Le Corbusier would fulfill his dream of subdividing a city into regions for business, administration, and housing. He could lay out a transportation network, erect individual buildings of monumental value, and redesign the life of everyone from the highest government official to the poorest worker.

  “I realize the enormous responsibility I’ve taken on, from the technical as well as the architectural point of view. Esthetic and ethical responsibilities equally dominate,” he wrote.7 The man who had demonstrated that his only political philosophy was opportunism had, as the objective of his wish for any government, a consistent goal: the greatest good for the greatest number. In keeping with the principles that had swayed Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Ruskin’s “Lamp of Truth,” his favorite of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, at Chandigarh Le Corbusier was to evince an honesty in materials, clarity about form and ornament, and a respect for nature that gave harmony and hope to human existence.

  5

  While Yvonne stayed cheerful by feeding her forty sparrows—the number had grown—on the balcony at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli, Le Corbusier began to plan a trip to Punjab. He was also in a frenzy of publishing. His Poetry on Algiers, which had been written in 1942 but could not come out during the occupation, now appeared.8 He brought out a volume on La Petite Maison, with fifty photos.9 Even if he was still trying to resolve its leaks, at least he could present it as a beautiful building.

  But the leaks were not his only problem. Bogotá had now been put unexpectedly on hold. Even more painfully, a book called Le Corbusier, essentially a diatribe against his proposals for Algiers, was published in Florence by Electa. It was written by Alazard d’Alger, an art critic from the south of France who specialized in Italian Renaissance art and was also a curator at the Museum of Algiers. Le Corbusier wrote his mother that d’Alger was “the latest of the treacherous bastards to sling some mud at us.”10

  In mid-January, after hearing a song about a nurse, Le Corbusier wrote his mother urgently requesting details of his own birth. Had he been sent right away to the country to a farmer’s house, without having been given mother’s milk? He asked Marie Jeanneret to let him know exactly how long he had taken cow’s milk.11 He wanted precise answers, which, he said, were for his private and personal use. He was preoccupied with issues of physical health and resilience; to Albert, who was turning sixty-five, he wrote, “Dear chaps: we’re on the other side of the fence now! Courage and Optimism!”12 In an effort to stave off age as best he could, on most mornings Le Corbusier jogged the few blocks from home to Roland Garros Stadium, where he ran laps.

  Loping around that track on the outskirts of Paris, the architect decided that if there was going to be a third world war, as he feared, it was because the Americans did not know what it was to suffer. The excessive and intolerable buildup of arms and military force was, he was convinced, occurring because, to save its postwar economy, the United States was selling arms to the world. Le Corbusier believed the Russians, too, had become imperialists, but at least they were “bearers of the principle of the just distribution of consumer goods.”13

  While railing against America’s economic motivations for warmongering and its willful ignorance of human suffering, did Le Corbusier have so much as a fleeting thought that this stadium where he was jogging had, less than a decade earlier, been used by the Germans as a makeshift prison for dissidents—“we called ourselves the cave dwellers, about 600 of us who lived beneath the stairways of the stadium,” recalled Arthur Koestler—while he was in a hotel room in Vichy?14

  6

  Before leaving for India, Le Corbusier again set out to resolve the problems of La Petite Maison. Now he decided that for the siding they would use aluminum, rather than the originally planned sheet metal, to halt the leaks; the price difference would be negligible. On February 12, he went to Vevey to check on the work being done and to say good-bye to his mother; then, after returning to Paris on Monday, February 19, with Pierre Jeanneret, he took the train to Geneva so that the following morning he could begin his first journey to India.

  On the Sunday before his departure, the architect looked at a recent photo of his mother that he was taking along. He wrote a farewell letter:

  How touching your image is, with those huge pupils shining through your glasses, your eyes so vivacious and actually laughing. You are gay, and I’d be your worthy son in gaiety if the profession didn’t turn me into a howling dog. Your cheeks are like no one else’s (all that country health mounting guard around a solid nose).

  No pessimism. I believe in a noncatastrophic outcome to this stage of evolution, of revolution throughout the world.15

  XLIII

  1

  When the Jeanneret cousins left Geneva that Tuesday morning, they flew first to Cairo. From there, they took an Air India Constellation to Bombay, continuing on to Delhi, where they arrived in the middle of the day on Wednesday.

  Le Corbusier was transformed. “I’ve never been so tranquil and solitary, absorbed by the poetry of natural things and by poetry itself,” he wrote Yvonne after reaching the site where the new capital was to be constructed. “We’re on the terrain of our city, under a splendid sky, in the midst of an eternal landscape.”1

  The villages he had gone through on the road from Delhi were so old that no one knew when they had begun; he felt himself linked to the origins of the world. It was a terrestrial paradise in perfect accord with the entire cosmos; he marveled at the way myriad forms of life were intertwined, with men, women, children, donkeys, cows, buffalos, dogs, all functioning with a kind of unity: “Everything is calm, slow, harmonious, lovable—everyone addresses you in low, modulated tones.”2

  Moreover, everyone was on his side. Varma, a Hindu and the son of a peasant, was an easy collaborator. Le Corbusier raved to Yvonne that he and Pierre were at last working “without pedants.”3 Driving
in a jeep over rough terrain where there were no roads, tackling the concept of the new city, living at first in a tent, getting little sleep, he was exhausted—but hardships only contributed to his exhilaration. Besides, there were lots of servants to help out, and the food was great. As in Bogotá, Le Corbusier drank only water and was perfectly happy without wine or liquor—or so he told his alcoholic wife.

  In his tent, Le Corbusier marveled at a life where there were no locks on the doors, where everything and everyone had a true openness. He would plan and build, and earthly existence was beautiful. He wrote Yvonne, “I think I’ve been very lucky to have a wife like you. You’ve protected my soul from banality.”4 Le Corbusier was in his most euphoric state yet.

  Visiting Punjab in India in the early 1950s

  NOT THAT the architect could suspend awareness of a lashing defeat simultaneous with this wonderful leap. The Sainte-Baume project was definitely rejected by municipal and church authorities, who claimed it did not adhere to irrefutable guidelines. Le Corbusier wrote Claudius-Petit that what would have been “the work of a man of action and a poet”—he was referring to his patron, Edouard Trouin—had required “nothing of the public powers but a waiver of the most idiotic and criminal regulations…. Truly we are, with horrifying insistence, under the rule of boors.”5 Again comparing himself to a beast of burden, Le Corbusier said he felt “muzzled.” But in India, he would achieve poetry in the sunshine—at last without the impediment of the interfering and blind bourgeoisie.

  2

  During his first week on the subcontinent, Le Corbusier completely redesigned Chandigarh. Now he was certain that Albert Mayer’s plan was as much of a mistake as he had initially suspected. On Tuesday, February 27, the new scheme was completed. Le Corbusier had filled thirty-two pages of a large sketchbook with the main concepts, while the other three architects—Pierre, Fry, and Drew—hashed out the details. The objective was clear: “The last touches have been put to the plan of what will become a city unique in the world, to be realized here in simplicity and the joy of living. To do such a thing, we had to come to India!”6 He wrote this to Yvonne, whom he still imagined as the person who would understand his dreams.

  VARMA, who completely backed Le Corbusier’s ideas, was the perfect intermediary to the local people. And for their realization, Pierre Jeanneret was the ideal second in command. Pierre shared Le Corbusier’s “horror of the past, horror of the bourgeoisie.”7 At the same time, Pierre recognized that his own self-doubt limited him, and he willingly ceded to his more confident, domineering cousin—rather than struggle for an equality that would have been impossible.

  In work as in marriage, a collaboration without a hierarchy was impossible for Le Corbusier; anyone who wanted to maintain a connection with him had to accept the self-anointed martyr’s position of superiority. The only person who remained close to him without allowing him to dominate was his mother, but anyone else knew that to challenge him meant rejection. Pierre recognized whom he was dealing with: “Our collaboration became possible because I remained very flexible with Le Corbusier who conceived himself as the absolute master.”8

  Le Corbusier put more of a spin on his relationship with Pierre, while carefully skirting the issue of Vichy: “Between myself and Pierre Jeanneret there has always been an unlimited, total confidence, despite the difficulties of life, despite the inevitable divergences. If our characters, over the years, have taken different directions, our friendship remained. My architectural work exists only because a certain teamwork has existed between us. It is work shared, until the moment when the circumstances of life (and of good friends) have separated us…. Pierre Jeanneret has been my best friend. His modesty and perhaps the grumpy side of ‘Père Le Corbusier’ have occasionally kept us from communicating more closely. Pierre was a comrade…. He knew how to reassure me. We have been closely united. That is what friendship is. And it is friendship that matters in life.”9

  IN FACT, Pierre Jeanneret’s survival technique was based on conscious gamesmanship: “My position with regard to him necessarily involving a constant hypocrisy, I feigned submission, the sort that naturally suited his personality, but ironically my doubts remained all the stronger in every case.”10

  Charlotte Perriand credited herself as the intermediary who got Pierre to make that trip to India in spite of those uncertainties. According to her account, when Le Corbusier initially asked his former partner to go to Chandigarh, Pierre refused. Even the intervention of Claudius-Petit could not persuade the gentler cousin to work with the man who had tried to prevail in Vichy. Le Corbusier phoned Perriand to say that he could not understand what Pierre had to do that was more interesting in his life than this. Pierre would have unprecedented freedom in his new job and would be in charge of 150 people.

  Pierre had told Perriand he was too busy with other projects in Paris and that, furthermore, Florence Knoll, head of a major new design company, had invited him to New York to work on furniture. He did not want to take on the difficulties of working with Le Corbusier and moving to India; nor did he want to give up the life he was enjoying in Le Corbusier’s old apartment on the rue Jacob. Perriand replied that to work with Le Corbusier in India was the opportunity of a lifetime—and that he could keep the apartment for return trips. It was with this coaxing that he finally consented.

  In India, Le Corbusier and Pierre would collaborate more harmoniously and effectively than ever before. Pierre had the craft to take his more inventive and dynamic cousin’s ideas, where the obstacles to their execution were “almost insurmountable in the technical and ethnic context of the country,” and make them succeed.11

  THE DAY BEFORE he completed the plan for his new city, Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne, “I’m telling you, Von, I’m making here, at last, the crowning work of my life, among these Indians who are extraordinarily civilized people.” Everything was colluding toward his feeling possessed. The sky was “extraordinarily gentle,” and the temperature was “delicious.”12 The flowers were beautiful, especially in the gardens of the maharajah of Patiala, which he and his amiable colleagues had visited one evening. He was now full of admiration for the same Pierre who had previously infuriated him, and credited his own wisdom in taking him to India, for Pierre’s demeanor reminded him of the good things his father had said about Pierre’s father.

  In his ebullience, Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne that a yellow towel she had packed among his toiletries had a red stain on it, “difficult to identify, for a man alien to the secrets of an intimate toilette, to my minister, my chief engineer and to the ten servants who preside over my private life night and day, from emptying my toilet to changing the little bouquet of pansies and maidenhair fern for my buttonhole, as well as serving my breakfast, luncheon, dinner, etc.”13 This and all of his letters, he instructed, should be sent to his mother.

  Le Corbusier had organized the Ducrets and Wogensckys to take care of all Yvonne’s needs in his absence and to keep a watchful eye. He assured his wife that he would be back in Paris in time for Easter: “My dear Maman will be there, and my big brother, and you can shed your light on your kingdom, seated on your throne.”14

  3

  The Jeanneret cousins went from Chandigarh to Simla, which was functioning temporarily as government headquarters. The lovely old colonial town with its rambling Victorian buildings is at the foothills of the Himalayas. The dramatic zigzag ride there from the plain of Chandigarh had exhausted Le Corbusier, but he was happy to be in the cool mountain air, at an altitude almost equal to Bogotá’s. Less than two weeks since his arrival on the subcontinent, he and his colleagues were now ready to present their new urban plan to the governor of Punjab and his cabinet.

  Yvonne shunned most discussions of architecture, but Le Corbusier counted on her to understand the human element of his work: “For, dearest Von, in eight days, we have created a complete, prodigious plan of urbanism which rediscovers the great Asian traditions and which will provide the most beautiful architectural solutions. We
have wiped out the American who would have imported to India the American ideas I condemn.” She would also understand his joy over both the bounteous nature and efficient, docile staff: “Never have I worked under such favorable conditions and in an atmosphere so propitious: calm, solitude, mute servants, etc., etc.”15

  ANSWERING A LETTER from Yvonne, Le Corbusier wrote back, “Received yesterday your excellent letter of March 2”—it being only the seventh, he was delighted as always by the power of air mail—“the handwriting perfect, optimism in every line, a permanent freshness and youth in every word.”16 The encomiums continued; he was convinced that she was thriving and surrounded by friends. Thapar was proud of their work; the governor of Punjab was content.

  In the cold air of Simla, though, “it would have been a fine occasion to provide more than the shorts and briefs, which barely conceal my charms.”17 In the mountain town, crowds of monkeys were always jumping around and embracing one another along the roadsides; Le Corbusier deduced that the grilles on the windows were protection against them, since, he claimed, one night an old Englishwoman had been raped by a curious monkey. He was obsessed with monkey life. To his wife he described the monkeys’ red rectums, characterized one of them as a Don Juan, and imagined scenes of jealousy and recrimination. He also drew splendid pictures of himself in the bathtub and self-portraits in which he was skipping around like the monkeys—nude except for his trademark glasses.