Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  15

  At Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, four miles from her birthplace, Yvonne could spend her time joking with the Rebutatos or bantering with the local fishermen, who also spoke with her rough Monegasque accent. She enjoyed the rougets, dorades, and the inevitable sea urchins that had been the greatest luxury of her youth.

  Yvonne became famous in the region for her eccentric generosity. She and Le Corbusier periodically dined at one of the nearby seafood restaurants, more upmarket than l’Etoile de Mer, where she invariably doled out packets of cigarettes to the uniformed busboys and waitresses and the maître d’hôtel; this was her trademark quirk wherever she went. Back in her element, she gave signs of her former colorful self. Compared to his frugal, pious mother and Aunt Pauline, Yvonne, with her heart-shaped lips and jet-black hair, her Monegasque swagger, her bawdy jokes and flirtatious quips, and her insistent need to make gifts, was as exotic as the hibiscus in their garden.

  LE CORBUSIER developed certain routines during that first summer in the cabanon that he was to follow for the rest of his life. From time to time, he went into the bustling principality of Monaco—often in the company of a visitor, like his new admirer Jean Petit. Le Corbusier did most of the talking, holding forth on his history as an architect, and then interrupting himself to savor the beauty of one or another old yacht in the harbor. He and Yvonne and their visitors periodically spent afternoons in Roquebrune, at the base of Mont Agel, and walked around the grounds of the historic château where Le Corbusier particularly admired the large roots of an ancient olive tree: “Le Corbusier was interested in everything,” he wrote of himself. “He kept observing, always seeking some wonder of Nature, which would constantly leave on his path a lovely rock, a root, or else, on the beach, a pebble different from any other pebble.”47

  On one occasion, when Jean Petit accompanied him to the post office, they had to wait for an urgent piece of mail that was late in arriving from Paris. Le Corbusier sat down and began to chat; on holiday, he was far more relaxed than when confronted with similar tardiness in Paris. He began to observe everything: the people coming in and out of the post office, the details of the architecture. He turned to Petit: “Look: on the floor of this little hall there’s a medley of all kinds of stones that just delights me. The mason who made this was an artist: the pattern of the stones changes in every direction. To make such things we must return to the sources of the Mind (and of play), regardless of the artifices of professional artists who usually reveal the trappings of pretension or affectation.”48

  He preferred this, of course, to any hint of the academy or stifled bourgeois taste.

  16

  The photographer Brassaï visited Le Corbusier during his first summer in the cabanon. Twenty years earlier, Brassaï had called on Le Corbusier and Yvonne on the rue Jacob. On that occasion, Brassaï had “expected to find an ultramodern apartment with huge expanses of window and bare, brightly lit walls, an apartment similar to the ones he had designed for the millionaire Charles de Beistegui, the painter Ozenfant, the sculptor Lipchitz, and many others. Imagine my surprise when I entered a fairly messy apartment crammed with odd pieces of furniture and a weird collection of bric-abrac.”49 Now that he was entering the cabanon, Brassaï mentally reviewed the history of Le Corbusier and Yvonne and their homes.

  The photographer remembered Yvonne with tears in her eyes explaining why they were leaving that cluttered love nest: “Corbu has finally had enough of all the sarcastic remarks people make about it…. [H]e wants to live in a Le Corbusier building.” After seeing the rue Nungesser-et-Coli apartment for the first time, even before moving there, she had lamented to Brassaï, “You can’t imagine what it’s like! A hospital, a dissecting lab! I’ll never get used to it.”50

  Now, even though Yvonne was surrounded by marvelous trees in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin—aloes, acanthus, mimosas, eucalyptus—and living in what Le Corbusier hoped would be her paradise, she still groused. The moment their old friend arrived, Yvonne greeted him by exclaiming, “Brassaï, you’re a witness, just look at the cell my husband keeps me in…just look! He makes me sleep on the floor in a bathroom next to the washbasin…. I wonder how I’ve managed to live for twenty years with this fanatic and put up with all his crazy notions.”51

  Le Corbusier, on the other hand, was as proud of the prefabricated wooden building as of Chandigarh or l’Unité d’Habitation. He quickly told Brassaï that he had taken out a patent on it. He had, he said, first had the idea for it on a steamship, where he had had a cabin of the same dimensions. He had replicated the two beds, the folding furniture, and the utilities.

  Le Corbusier was especially pleased with the handsome washbasin in the middle of the room and the toilet arrangement. He pointed out to Brassaï that there were vents on opposite sides to evacuate odors. He demonstrated how the mirror next to the washbasin opened to a long vertical slit of glassless window, a further way of letting out bathroom smells.

  After Le Corbusier showed Brassaï around the tiny house, the two walked down the path to the shore so they could take a swim together. Afterward, they sat on the rocks, chatting to the sound of the pounding waves. The sixty-four-year-old Le Corbusier was proud of his good health. He told Brassaï that a few weeks earlier he had run one hundred meters in twenty seconds. Le Corbusier was delighted that, when he had boasted of this to his doctor, the doctor had told him he was mad.

  The doctor had reminded Le Corbusier that his arteries were not the same as when he was eighteen. Le Corbusier quoted the medical professional saying, “If you strain them, you’ll explode. You have to come to terms with your age.”52 Le Corbusier believed, on the other hand, that, like his mother, he was different from other people. They were both heartier and unaffected by the vicissitudes of time.

  Then, in a change of humor, the architect told Brassaï he would face reality. He would treat his arteries like water pipes in a building, as part of the machinery that had to be maintained. Out of respect for that machinery, he had now given up all other sports except for swimming, which he confined to half an hour per day.

  Le Corbusier was scribbling while speaking. On sheets of paper that Brassaï treasured ever after, the architect noted the key events of his life, giving prime importance to his visit to Ema in 1907. He termed the Italian monastery “a harmonious synthesis of individual and group.” Le Corbusier also used the occasion to qualify his myths. He told Brassaï that the expression “machine for living” had become “somewhat distorted. What did I mean by ‘a machine for living’? Simple: the optimum return in terms of function and furnishings.”53 Even as he moved full speed ahead, Le Corbusier was determined to sum up and edit his past.

  RELAXING ON THE ROCKS, Le Corbusier was in a reflective mood: “You asked me if I was a contented man,” he said. “Yes, I have managed to make some of the ideas I most valued into reality, but think of all my plans that have never been realized. All my life, I have had to struggle very hard. Often, I was literally crushed! Even now, almost every one of my plans arouses some violent reaction. I’m insulted, I’m treated like a barbarian, a madman, a dreamer, a man without heart, an iconoclast, an antichrist. I am denounced either as a tool of Lenin or a capitalist lackey. In either case, I’m a destroyer.”54

  Le Corbusier told Brassaï that architects were the most competitive and rivalrous people on earth, worse than all other professionals: “You’ve no idea of the intrigues, the baseness, the outright cruelty. They’d strangle you with their bare hands to get a commission. Because it always entails a great deal of money. I know what I’m talking about!”55 Le Corbusier was more convinced than ever that the greed for financial gain was the source of much of the evil in the world.

  This led him to the issue of the UN: “The Americans did everything they could to exclude me from its actual construction so that they themselves could derive all the moral satisfaction and material benefits from its construction…today world public opinion attributes my plan to the American architect Wallace K. Harrison.”
56

  Then, as the sun began to set behind the rock known as the “Tête de chien,” above Monte Carlo, and a cool breeze wafted in from Corsica, Le Corbusier and Brassaï walked back up to the cabanon. Le Corbusier ended the conversation by saying, “I’m so comfortable in my cabanon that I’ll probably end my days here.”57 It was one plan no one else could foil.

  XLV

  You can gather together all the words in the world, all the pretty colors and dappled lights, all the finest and fittest people, every good and noble intention, and you can place this assemblage on a page or a stage, but that is technical, that is craftsmanship. I need the introduction of the heart; I need to see and to feel some blood; I need to rub against some warm flesh. In the name of God, touch my heart. At that point, there is art.

  —LE CORBUSIER AS PARAPHRASED BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 1

  1

  As Le Corbusier’s mother approached her supposed ninety-third birthday on September 11, 1952, her younger son assured her that even if she and he barked at each other, in the end they loved each other. In early October, just prior to his own sixty-fifth birthday, he told her that when he recently went to Venice for the first international arts conference organized by UNESCO, thirty people greeted him at the train station, and the auditorium was packed when he gave a lecture. Afterward, he returned to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where Yvonne was in the “miraculous cabanon.”2 Life was perfect.

  The crowning glory would be to have his mother and brother in Marseille for the official opening of l’Unité. Marie Jeanneret had never gotten there after falling off the ladder, and Le Corbusier anticipated the opening as one of the ultimate moments not just of his life but of hers, as if she was personally responsible for the new apartment building. He wrote, “Maman and Albert: I’ll be proud to show you around Marseille, but this will be above all a testimony to our loving solidarity, a proof of our mutual effort in life.”3

  The official invitation was addressed to Albert and his mother as “Monsieur et Madame Jeanneret”—as if they were a couple. Yet even if Edouard was the outsider, what a joy it would be to have them with him in the spotlight.

  2

  Le Corbusier’s idea of the ideal human habitation was centered on the idea that women were responsible for food, and food was the essence of a family’s existence. He had made a design in which food preparation, cooking, and washing up could be done within a space measuring two meters by two meters, so that “the housewife’s legs, at the end of the day, will not be swollen with fatigue.” He conceived of the home as a haven in which that kitchen was central: “One has come in from the world outside…to find the ancient ‘fire,’ the ‘hearth’ of all traditions. The housewife is at her oven preparing the food: the family surrounds her, father and children. All of them are around the ‘fire’ spending that time of day which consecrates the very institution of the family: mealtime.”4

  His ideal also called for a living-room space open to the outside and filled with sunlight. This would be possible thanks to his brises-soleil… “this portico, this loggia, this sun-screen.” He linked its design to Socrates, crediting it with “connecting the most modern architecture to the most ancient traditions” and permitting “the inhabitants of the house to enjoy the pleasures the Good Lord dispenses to mankind…coolness in summer, warmth in winter.”5 Everyday domestic spaces were to be chapels to facilitate the connection with nature.

  L’Unité d’Habitation was to be but one example of this housing type that Le Corbusier termed a “Virgilian dream.” He believed its application was universal. Since it fulfilled basic human needs—“sociability, mutual assistance, protection, security, economy”—it could serve almost any location.6

  To illustrate how his ideal housing units would be connected, Le Corbusier sketched a pair of six-story buildings on pilotis. There are trees in the foreground, foliage on the roof, birds flying above, mountain profiles behind, and the sun smiling on the assemblage. He wrote that whereas post-war housing had already become “the monstrosity of tentacular concentrations represented today by the cities of machine civilization,” this “vertical commune” created the alternative possibility of a “village” built according to human scale.7 Roads would be for cars only; there would be other paths solely for pedestrians.

  Le Corbusier’s vision was romantic and utopian. With “the friendly soil…[b]ody and mind…will flourish in the sun, in space and in greenery.” The new network for transportation and walking was “a system of blood vessels, a lymphatic system, a respiratory system.”8 He amplified in detail his notion of walkways and highways, streets with shops, and multiple vertical villages linked by roads, which he compared to the routes that connected villages in ancient times.

  The new homes concurrently proliferating in American suburbs were, by contrast, “that great extravagance of modern times.” Le Corbusier believed that the American model burdened housewives twenty-four hours per day, requiring excessive driving and causing a “great diffusion of panic.”9 The architect credited his own concept with bringing people together and providing a physically close community, while at the same time establishing a vital link to the natural world.

  DURING ONE of his visits to the site in Marseille, as he put the finishing touches on, the engineers told him that the design for the roof of the gymnasium was flawed and that it would develop cracks. The architect replied, “What would have happened if God had done this and the cracks appeared?” He explained that if there were cracks, they could conceal them with paint; “things will always go wrong some place, but we can always find alternatives. If you have an idea, you must pursue it.” Of his ideal housing types, he explained, “It is God who has brought them into the world.”10

  3

  Marie and Albert Jeanneret did not make the trip to Marseille, but one of Yvonne’s few public appearances was for the opening of l’Unité d’Habitation. The long-awaited event took place on October 14, 1952. Le Corbusier’s sixty-fifth birthday, eight days before, had been an easier passage than usual for him, because of the impending occasion.

  The invitation to the official ceremonies was as pioneering in its graphics as the building was in its architecture. A swirling, tiptoed abstract form—an amalgam of a Modulor drawing and the interlocking ovals Le Corbusier had drawn for the start of his mother’s fourth decade—dominates the card. Its ascending, steamlike twisting ribbons give a sense of the future being born. The text is set in a light, contemporary typeface—a squared-off sans serif—arranged on the page as imaginatively as bookshelves in a Le Corbusier house or the balcony railings he made for Ozenfant, similarly using only a few simple elements to create a lively, delightful rhythm. It also organizes visual information so that it drives home its message. The date—and nothing else—is in bold type, declaring the day a major historical event.

  L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, ca. 1952

  At the appointed time, five hundred guests assembled at street level. Many came from Paris; arriving in the city that opposed Henri IV and infuriated Louis XIV for its “impulses of independence” and knowing Le Corbusier’s daring, they expected the act of rebellion they would find. All of Le Corbusier’s office staff was there to observe the results of their years of labor.

  What appeared on the boulevard Michelet that Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. was a turning point in the history of how human beings live. The triumphant building was unlike anything that had ever existed before. Its north and south facades were as complex as the moment when every instrument is heard simultaneously in Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s beloved Tchaikovsky symphonies, the mix of notes creating a harmony and force that pushes aside reason and intellect and reduces the listener to a state of sensuous absorption. The great horizontal mass of concrete, with its staccato march of vertical supports, its seemingly infinite openings of varying sizes, and its complex visual sequences, is as alive as anything that has ever been created out of a so-called inert material (see color plate 11).

  It was, in some ways, the natural de
scendant of the facade of 25 bis rue Franklin—the Perret brothers’ marvelous 1902–1904 testimony to the stunning variety that could be achieved with reinforced concrete. But the energy of l’Unité and its sheer size put it in a completely different league. It is distinguished by the absolute modernism of its appearance, derived entirely from functional and structural elements. Except for engraved images of the Modulor, there is not an iota of naturalistic ornament or decoration—at the same time that there is a total connection to nature itself. Why imitate or offer a facsimile of what is at the core of a building’s being?

  The pilotis at l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille

  For all of its mass, the apartment building in Marseille stands easily and lightly on its graceful legs. The pilotis elevate it with acrobatic skill. One becomes aware of air circulating not just above and around the great structure but also beneath it. Le Corbusier had created the quality of one of those ocean liners that had intoxicated him as a young man. L’Unité is a self-contained floating city that appears as if it has just arrived and could take off instantly.

  Le Corbusier had experienced physical love most ecstatically surrounded by sea and sky—not tethered to the earth in the confines of a city. The shack in Darien, the Lutétia, and the aeries that he had initially known with Yvonne—atop 20 rue Jacob or overlooking Paris on rue Nungesser-et-Coli—were the settings of his own peaks of aliveness. These were places where gravity was briefly transcended. The haunting passage of time seemed momentarily to halt; sensuous pleasure subsumed all other feelings. This was why music remains the perfect metaphor for Le Corbusier’s work: weightless, charged, and orgasmic.