Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  As always, when Le Corbusier was happy about his work, he was thrilled by everything.

  4

  Only one source of anxiety threatened Le Corbusier’s ebullient state: his mother was to visit Yvonne in Paris during his absence. He wrote Marie Jeanneret, “I’m sure she’s delighted to have you there, after a life of 30 years spent with me in the most total harmony, her role having been never to have smothered me. Praise to her for that!”18 He was determined that his mother respect his uneducated wife for having so perfectly adjusted to his needs.

  He tried to mastermind Marie Jeanneret’s visit from afar. He warned his mother that the door latch to the bedroom balcony was difficult to operate, instructed her to look carefully when crossing the street, and cautioned her to rest a lot. He advised that Yvonne should invite Brigitte Trouin and Germaine Ducret to visit.

  Le Corbusier also told his mother that he had had to scrap a poor plan made by “an American imbued with his own culture…. But Corbu, inventor of the Radiant City and of 3-dimensional urbanism, triumphs utterly when, in such a theme, the terrain is totally free—a limitless plain reaching to hills and the Himalayas in the distance. We delivered a knockout blow to the American.”19 And now the authorities were trying to schedule a discussion between him and “le pandit” Nehru. How proud Marie Jeanneret should be of her Edouard—designing a new city in concord with the highest powers of the land.

  5

  On March 19, Le Corbusier left New Delhi to fly to Ahmedabad, a large city in the region of Gujarat, which for the last thousand years had been one of the most important textile centers in India. India was according him one victory after another: he was there for discussions with new clients about what were to become two masterpieces, the Millowners’ Building and a villa for a wealthy widow, Manorama Sarabhai.

  On the tropical subcontinent, in unimaginable heat, in a society of rare spirituality, with problems and charms totally new to him, the child of La Chaux-de-Fonds had found a support system and salubrious working conditions beyond his wildest hopes. He was determined to give to that new world buildings of equivalent greatness.

  THE INDIAN ARCHITECT Balkrishna Doshi, who had joined Le Corbusier’s office the previous year, accompanied him on that trip. Doshi had decided to apply to work in the office on rue de Sèvres, even though he had been warned that Le Corbusier was a difficult person. It was required that the application be filled out by hand—a quirk of Le Corbusier’s that no one dared question. He was known for his eccentricities—like always having a heavy Brazilian coin in his pants pocket and treating it as an icon, although it regularly tore holes, which a furious Yvonne then had to sew up.

  The first time Doshi entered the office, Le Corbusier was seated in a room that was an exact square, 226 centimeters on a side. Everything was painted black. There were only two lights; one was beamed on a sculpture, the other was on top of the master’s worktable. The arrangement revealed an individual who had definite ideas about details, brooked no compromise, and treated light and mathematics as both scientific and spiritual.

  For his first eight months there, Doshi did not get paid, but at least he regularly got invited to 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli for free meals. At one of his first dinners, he began to eat his soup, and as he raised the spoon to his mouth, drops of the hot liquid cascaded onto the table and his lap rather than into his mouth. Yvonne had played one of her favorite practical jokes, which was to encase the bowl of the spoon tightly with plastic wrap. She also used fake sugar cubes that floated in the coffee rather than dissolved.

  Once they were in India together, both in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, Doshi observed Le Corbusier’s work habits with fascination. The architect often went off to think in solitude. He would forgo lunch in order to meditate. He told Doshi that defeat was a regular part of his life but that he had a method for dealing with it. “The one thing I’ve learned in life is to take revenge from defeat by working twice as hard,” Le Corbusier explained.20

  He weathered challenges on his own terms. Years later, when the mill owners who had commissioned Le Corbusier to design their headquarters complained that the doors to the toilets were only seventy centimeters wide, the architect replied, “Gentlemen, you will realize that a pregnant woman with two suitcases walks easily along the corridor of a railway wagon which is never wider than 70 cm; so I’m very sure that this door is not too small for you, fat though you are.”21

  ON THAT FIRST TRIP to India, Le Corbusier remarked to Doshi: “I’m surprised at your Indian cows—they have such beautiful eyes and horns, yet they’re so gentle. When you go to America those cows have no horns at all, but they’re very fierce and ugly.”22 The local cows, as Le Corbusier saw them, had the attributes of the local people: strong but mild mannered and gentle.

  Le Corbusier immersed himself in Indian art, especially the miniatures, and when he worked on his own painting there, he proceeded with a new spontaneity. India let him embrace his instincts, to be receptive rather than to premeditate. When the architectural historian Sigfried Gideon wrote asking Le Corbusier how he could build in the heat so far from his beloved San Marco, he replied by saying he was making architecture for the mountains.

  At the same time, he exercised control over everyone in his orbit. When Balkrishna Doshi, anticipating conflict, commented on the mediocre quality of Fry’s and Drew’s design sense compared to Le Corbusier’s, Le Corbusier replied, “Don’t worry. I’m going to create hills here so that we will not notice them.”23 He actually constructed mounds of earth, odd clumps that mimic the shapes of the distant mountains and blocked out the English pair’s designs.

  There could, after all, be no question of who was at the helm. Le Corbusier flew from Ahmedabad to Bombay, where he met with Bhabha Tata, a steel magnate and a major shareholder in Air India, who he felt might entrust him with even more major commissions. Then he circled back up to New Delhi, where he was received in the presidential palace on March 25. He then made the rugged trip to Chandigarh and returned once more to Delhi. The moment he was back in Paris, on April 2, he set out to orchestrate his new cast of characters as carefully as he planned a city. He declared, “I believe Fry is a good man, but he’s an islander, and his lyricism is of a different kind. He too likes to be in command. Bravo!” As for the staff in Paris: “The team is of the highest quality, but each man projects his own universe with such egoism that the place becomes a psychiatric clinic. Life is hard.”24

  With Telly Tata in Bombay, mid-1950s

  To Pierre, who had remained in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier instructed, “My dear Pierre, write a little, a matter of relaxing, deflating, not business letters but letters of free friendship. Don’t stiffen up in your sublime but dangerous isolation. Tell yourself that the priests invented confession to save people morally and physically!”25 Even to someone who had needed to be coaxed back into the fold, Le Corbusier had no qualms about dispensing advice on how to conduct his life.

  THERE REMAINED one situation he could not master, however. The aluminum siding and other repairs had not done the trick at La Petite Maison. His mother now had her own ideas on how to deal with rainwater and melting snow, which naturally offended him. At the start of May, Le Corbusier wrote her: “When it rains, everything softens, and in the desert they call that a benediction. If you want to extend the spout to 25 centimeters it’s all right with me. I’m amazed by such finicky preoccupations!!!!”26

  At age sixty-three, Le Corbusier then resorted to the child’s device of diverting a parent from anger. He tried to get her sympathy. He wanted to return to the United States, but it appeared that the Americans were not going to grant him a visa because of his stance on the UN. Persecuted by a powerful government, he counted on Marie Jeanneret to know it was finally time to let up.

  6

  Contrary to Le Corbusier’s expectations, the visa came through so promptly that four days later he was on his way back to New York, en route to Bogotá. He was ecstatic in the anticipation of triumph in Colombia—so
should be his mother. Avoiding the subject of the leak, he wrote her from New York, “The cherry-tree is in bloom, the house is brilliant…. Dear Maman, take advantage of this lovely spring…. Observe, appreciate.”27

  Then, when he was in Bogotá, the new government, under President Laureano Gomez, conservative and authoritarian, rescinded the approval of his pilot plan. The chambermaid in Le Corbusier’s hotel told him, “The people are furious. They would kill you if they caught you!” And yet the idea that he considered “the fruit of the Radiant City which is human and in the service of the people” was focused on the poor!28 Le Corbusier was attacked by the people in power for failing to accommodate the rich; at the same time, the press, like the general population, laced into him for being an aristocrat too focused on the rich.

  The double-barreled fusillade threw Le Corbusier back into doldrums. So did the idea that this plan, which had been legally ratified, could now be stopped. The weather only made things worse; he wrote his mother about the “austere and persistent rain over a grim and grave countryside.” He stooped to tawdry sarcasm: “It’s politics. The newspapers accuse me of being an aristocrat and a conservative! Everything’s fine!”29

  When the world was beyond his control, one of the solutions to which he had long resorted was to focus on the details he could handle. From Bogotá, he wrote his mother to ask her if she would like a high-fidelity sound system. Just as he had tried to educate her on the new heating system, he explained that this was an arrangement of a gramophone and a radio, connected, where one could put one disk on top of another. Determined to give her the machinery that would enable her to hear long-playing records, he described these miraculous vinyl disks where, for example, ten Debussy preludes were all on a single side.

  AS ALWAYS, Le Corbusier fought to the bitter end. He spent two hours with the president of Colombia explaining yet another notion of new government buildings and a palace of justice that would be in harmony with the old cathedral and the existing capitol. But this was to be his last trip to Bogotá. The Colombian capital was, after all those years of effort, the scene of nothing more than another near success in Le Corbusier’s life.

  Like a lover who cannot quite accept the end of an affair, he continued to maintain glimmers of hope—still thinking, months later, that the commission for a new presidential palace might come through, believing that he and Sert and Wiener might somehow prevail with the urban scheme on which they had worked so diligently for so many years. But Bogotá had now definitely joined the League of Nations, Algiers, Saint-Dié, and the United Nations as another of Le Corbusier’s great unrealized fantasies.

  7

  By June, Le Corbusier had roughly conceived the main buildings of Chandigarh. The High Court, the most important structure in the capital complex, was to be massive and noble, with an entrance as dignified as that of the Parthenon—the totality a simple and powerful presence against the profile of the mountains.

  An enormous blocklike form, the court was to stand assuredly on flat ground, doubling its apparent size through its reflection in the adjacent lake. Its effect was of force and ethereality at the same time. The scale and grandeur of the entrance columns—while simpler than the pillars of the Parthenon, they were equally suggestive of godlike strength—gave the building, even when it was only a simple pen-and-ink drawing, a glorious voice. The idea of justice, the rule of law, and the possibilities of human wisdom deserved nothing less.

  Le Corbusier always included distant peaks in his Chandigarh sketches. The relationship of the building to its natural setting was an imperative; this was as true in India as it had been on the coast of Uruguay, the outskirts of Paris, or the shores of the Mediterranean. As he planned structures to be constructed on the plateau facing the Himalayas, he focused on the crests and dips of the ever-present mountain ridge.

  The Secretariat was to be a skyscraper, lined up with the highest of all the nearby mountain peaks and echoing its form. The General Assembly, the Governor’s Palace, and a large sculpture of an open hand were to be carefully spaced between it and the High Court. Over the next few years, Le Corbusier and his team were to develop all the details of these structures; those that would be completed within the coming decade would alter the possibilities of architecture worldwide.

  Delighted with all that was sent to him on-site, Pierre Jeanneret began to tinker with the High Court and other structures to accommodate them to their actual location. And on the rue de Sèvres, the joy of creativity and collaboration induced such optimism in Le Corbusier that he even convinced himself that confirmation was soon to come for the presidential palace in Bogotá.

  Then, in a letter to his mother, he launched into the diatribe against Americans quoted at the start of this book. Something about Albert Mayer’s lifeless scheme for Chandigarh, even though he had been able to defuse it, rekindled his rage over how the main United Nations skyscraper had turned out. Not only had he been hoodwinked out of a project that should have been his—a violation of decent human behavior—but the finished building, a travesty of architecture, was possessed of the same evils as the people who had built it. He wrote his mother,

  Comparing his model and the final result for the UN headquarters in the early 1950s

  At the UN in New York, the skyscraper is an event in the sky. The annexes (great hall + committee rooms) = soap box! I’ve concluded:

  No head

  No heart = Harrison

  No balls = American

  This amazing country is a machine out of control, gigantic, titanic: a runaway horse. Dangerous.30

  Immediately following “dangerous,” Le Corbusier wrote, “This word to wish you: a good calm summer of repose. You only live once! Special affections to dear Maman, who will think up her comment while mending 50-year-old sheets, with love, respect and patience.”31

  8

  From Paris, Le Corbusier was directly in touch with Nehru on a regular basis. The implementation of his decision to scrap Albert Mayer’s original concept required diplomacy, and he incrementally sent the prime minister sketches of his ideas. Then negotiations over the changed design came to a head on June 15, 1951. Mayer met Fry, Jeanneret, Varma, and Thapar in Simla. The others bluntly explained to the American the deficiencies of his concept and the reasons for replacing it.

  Le Corbusier succeeded in making his plan the one that would be used. Its most radical elements included the complete separation of locations for living, working, and recreation; the subdivision of an equally isolated communications system, which allowed for different forms of traffic; and the inclusion of sun, space, and greenery in urban life. These were ideas Le Corbusier had been developing for more than a quarter of a century but had never before realized.

  There would be, in his ideal Chandigarh, one roadway for buses alone. Other, separate roads would exist for private vehicles. A great avenue, one hundred meters wide, would rise to the magnificent complex of capitol buildings he had already sketched. The new design also allowed for a number of sectors, each of which functioned as a small and independent village. These sectors mixed—and here Le Corbusier and his cohorts departed completely from Indian tradition—the poorest people and those with the most money, “proposing social contacts which can only be educational.”32 Each sector, 800 by 1200 meters, contained everything necessary to daily life and would house between five thousand and twenty-five thousand people. To this day, when one meets residents of Chandigarh, they tend to declare their sector number as if naming a village—with pride in the particular community.

  In addition to a “Green City,” there were to be open green spaces, markets, and a “Valley of Leisure Activities.” In that open space, Le Corbusier was determined for others to enjoy a relaxed interaction and relief in their routines that were alien to him personally, except for his occasional walk or jog. Even as he remained the outsider to most people’s notions of leisure time, he cherished recreation as an essential component of human existence. By changing the course of the existing riv
er, he would create a low ground—below the level of most of the town—that would accommodate “all the sites and localities necessary and useful for leisure activities, such as: improvised theater, public speaking, dancing, open-air cinema, pedestrian promenades in the cool of the evening. It is here that everyone can meet in those friendly and numerous contacts the Indians adore when they create those grand morning and evening promenades in their villages.”33

  The closest that Le Corbusier had come in his own experience to equivalent promenades was in the old spa of Vichy. But he did not make that comparison now that he was pursuing his romantic vision of human happiness on the Indian subcontinent. He had observed and valued village life ever since he and Auguste Klipstein had traveled through the rural reaches of the Balkans. In South America, he focused on how large groups of people lived with their markets, festivals, and daily rites. In Moscow in the 1930s, he had been fascinated by the prospect of combining work and pleasure and the integration of physical exercise with healthy human existence. He had been formulating his ideal community for a long time.

  Le Corbusier was now determined to provide the possibility of a rich and balanced everyday life for the masses in Chandigarh. While respecting the different factors that came with the locality, referring to himself in the third person, he wrote, “The responsibility is Le Corbusier’s. Here began a great architectural adventure with means of extreme poverty, a labor force unaccustomed to modern technology, a climate which in itself is a considerable adversary, and a native population whose ideas and needs must be satisfied rather than imposing western ideas and ethics. The problem is also expanded by other givens: the sun is the imperative or imperial factor in these regions. It is with the sun that a new Indian society must deal in its modern economy; for the sun is so violent that, hitherto, the habits of repose, of siesta, and of indolence were virtually obligatory under local architectural conditions, which permitted no work of any kind to be performed at certain seasons and certain hours. The rainy season also raised a series of problems extremely difficult to solve. In the general imbroglio of information gathered by Le Corbusier, the latter could hope to make progress only on condition that he create, here, too, a ‘Climatic Grid’ applicable to extreme conditions and permitting the problem to be posed for each of the cases envisaged. The ‘Climatic Grid’ has been created at Studio 35 [his nickname for 35 rue de Sèvres]…. Thanks to this grid, it is possible for the first time to spread out on the drafting table the complexity of the real conditions imposed by a climate which is difficult, imperative, and constantly changing during the twelve months of the year.”34