Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  4

  At the opening ceremonies, Eugène Claudius-Petit, the government minister who had made this possible, gave a speech, as did the architect. Le Corbusier felt impelled to justify his creation. He might have, for a brief moment, simply allowed himself to relish what he had done. But this was not his style; he resorted, as always, to a fusillade of words.

  The architect insisted that those attending the inauguration ceremony on that bright October day see the building rising before their eyes not merely as a celebration of positive forces but as the end result of a prolonged battle against opposition and oppression. He characterized himself, as usual, as the workhorse, the beaten beast of burden. If Le Corbusier had simply contemplated his achievement and said nothing at all, he might have recognized that at last he had united people with the seminal elements of the universe and have enjoyed himself in silence. For the building placed its inhabitants, in their everyday living, in direct harmony with the sea and the mountains and in as straight a connection as possible with the sky and the sun, the source of all life.

  Instead Le Corbusier talked: “I want to thank the workers and contractors who have collaborated with me; my gratitude to all those who have helped us and not to those who have behaved badly. The work is here: ‘Unité d’habitation of appropriate size’ built without regulations—against disastrous regulations, and made for men, made on the human scale.”11 Like a rebellious child, he wanted the world to know that he had broken the rules.

  As Apollinaire said of Parade, that pioneering ballet of which he had attended the premiere thirty-five years earlier, this was truly “l’esprit nouveau.” Le Corbusier had married imagination and discipline, and, with a beat as sure as Satie’s and a mastery of materials as absolute as Diaghilev’s dancers’ control of their limbs, he had broken all boundaries.

  5

  From a distance, l’Unité reads like bits and pieces of bright-hued laundry hung out in a strong wind. While irrefutably stable, it thus resembles the monastery of Lavras that Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had viewed on Mount Athos more than forty years earlier.

  Then, as one approaches, one sees, to the side of the facade, Modulor figures with their raised arms stacked one on top of another. Even the person uninitiated in the thinking of Le Corbusier and unable to understand their precise meaning realizes that the main intent of all this reinforced concrete is to honor human beings.

  Le Corbusier wanted people to enjoy daily pleasures; every detail of this vast apartment complex was planned with that objective. L’Unité provided families of low income with magnificent views, splendidly workable kitchens, graceful accommodations for congregating and sleeping, even a school and playground on the roof. It also used architecture to impart joy; Le Corbusier’s belief in the wonder of earthly existence is palpable as one stands before the pilotis. The regular beat of those noble legs, their flawless geometry and scale echoing columns at the Parthenon, and the vibrant colors animating the neutral, whitish color of the basic shell, all in the brilliant sunlight of Marseille, are a celebration of life.

  AFTER THE OPENING CEREMONY, the five hundred people present ascended the fifty-six meters to the roof in a mere thirteen minutes total. The roof is in every sense the crowning touch. Its chimneylike forms resemble gigantic exclamation points and express the unadulterated pleasure of drumrolls and leaping dancers.

  Once on the roof, one walks out into the fresh sea breeze, under a sun that seems nearer and stronger than in many other places in the world. Gulls soar around your head and swoop beneath you, toward the sea. In that salubrious setting, there is an amphitheatre for theatre performances or concerts and a wading pool, surrounded by a gently curving structure of tiles decorated with anthropomorphic forms, that is an idyllic setting for children to frolic. Stairs go everywhere on this roof—the way they do in paintings by that other liberated Swiss, Paul Klee—inviting the pleasures of ascent and descent without particular purpose.

  A curving sculptural chimney has wavy sides that grow wider as they ascend, with an esplanade of tiny square windows underneath its lively cap. It looks as if it has just belched an explosion of smoke.

  The center tower of the roof comprises concrete units that resemble wooden logs with deeply incised graining. They by no means imitate such logs—that would have violated every principle of Ruskin’s. Rather, they create a new variation of concrete. The kindergarten is composed mainly of shapes that appear like sea stones, also formed from concrete. Elsewhere, there are plain, bold, structural concrete blocks. Bright-red banisters and elevator doors and vibrant yellow water pipes animate this otherwise plaster-colored universe.

  The bold, rectangular nursery is raised above the roof on especially narrow pilotis and is faced in a Byzantine pattern of vibrant mosaics. The hut-like exercise room resembles a sort of prehistoric dinosaur. There are graciously curved, seemingly organic benches scattered about, as well as free-form sculptural masses with holes punched in them; melted Bronze Age–style megaliths, they serve no purpose other than the one Claudius-Petit had pointed out in his speech: musical luxuriance.

  The roof is like a wild tropical garden where, in keeping with Le Corbusier’s horticultural advice to his mother, nothing has been weeded out. Everything, however unusual or unexpected, has been allowed to thrive. The myriad elements perpetually combine, move apart, and recombine to provide a sublime sense of well-being.

  In reinforced concrete, a material that endures and withstands all change, Le Corbusier had evoked the glorious and otherwise fleeting aliveness of youth—and he had provided vitality and sheer fun for the inhabitants of the great and singular city below.

  On the first floor of the building, there was a so-called commercial street, with a coiffeur, sauna, a small grocery shop, a butcher shop, a bakery, and a pastry shop. On the upper floors, along the corridors, which Le Corbusier also called “streets,” the apartment doors and mailboxes are painted in vibrant primary yellows and blues and orangey reds, accented in bold dark greens, with no predictable pattern; what could be ordinary is intensely animated. Beside each door there is a box for milk, bread, and the daily newspaper; rather than sitting weightily on the ground, this simple vessel for morning deliveries is cantilevered off the wall, opening on the other side directly into the apartment. Le Corbusier has imbued the details of daily existence with charm and cheerfulness of unprecedented form.

  6

  It is from the residents that one best understands, today, the value of Le Corbusier’s building in Marseille. The effect it actually has had on the lives of its inhabitants and the sense of personal connection many of them feel with its creator, more than half a century after he designed their homes, testify to its success.

  Gisèle Gambu-Moreau, who was born at l’Unité just after it opened, grew up with the knowledge that Le Corbusier had volunteered to be the godfather of the first baby born there. Since she was that baby, he was part of her legacy—although they maintained no direct connection, and Le Corbusier told his mother that Gambu-Moreau’s mother, the wife of a military pilot, had asked him to assume the honor, not the other way around. Regardless, in the summer of 1965, when, at age twelve, she was on the roof, running around the wading pool in her bathing suit and playing with her friends, and she heard the news of Le Corbusier’s death, she was as devastated as if he had been a family member.

  When her parents moved in, the building was officially a “habitation à loyer modéré”—a low-rent building for people with moderate salaries. It instantly provided them with living spaces that were far more capacious than they had dared dream. Their apartment was unimaginably splendid, as were the building’s facilities. The children in l’Unité were perpetually in the youth club, playing Ping-Pong and basketball. People like Gambu-Moreau’s parents were regulars at the cinema club. They often attended events in the large hall that was available to residents for big parties and weddings, and they used the small hotel on the lower floors of the complex as accommodations for visiting relatives. It wa
s miraculous to have all of this accessible under one roof.

  By the time Gambu-Moreau was a young adult, the building had changed and become more of a midprice-range building. In better economic circumstances herself, she decided the setting was so ideal that she would bring up her own children there. In turn, one of her daughters took an apartment in l’Unité at the time of her marriage. Shortly thereafter, the daughter gave birth to the first of the building’s fourth-generation residents.

  Gambu-Moreau talks animatedly about the wonder of “people living together…. It was and is paradise for children because they feel safe and the parents feel safe.”12 As a child, she felt sorry for friends with wonderful villas elsewhere in Marseille because they needed permission to go out. “We could get together all the time,” she recalls. At night, if two couples wanted to play cards, rather than hire a babysitter, they would take their children along and have them fall asleep in their friends’ apartment, knowing that, whatever the weather, it was only a short walk home indoors with the sleeping children. “When two old ladies became widows, they did not feel lonely as they might in some other place; for people of every age, this was the utopian ideal of community living,” she said.

  LIKE ALL THE APARTMENTS in l’Unité, Gambu-Moreau’s home is a duplex. In hers, the downstairs is oriented to the west and faces the mountains, while the upstairs faces east, toward the sea. With Le Corbusier’s design of interlocking spaces, the reverse is true in half of the apartments. Both landscapes feel near, not as views but more as if they are joined to the interior through the glass walls protected by brises-soleil.

  The floors of the apartment are all oak, the walls white, the trim, in keeping with Le Corbusier’s original scheme, varied and bright. Gambu-Moreau is pleased with all the details. Every apartment has a diaper-changing station; there are two sinks in the children’s bedrooms; sliding doors between the bedrooms have blackboards on them. The storage units under the sink basins and other details of the kitchen, all designed by Charlotte Perriand, have a rare charm.

  Gambu-Moreau does not gloss over problems. She is aware that many of the subcontractors were skeptical about “Le Fada”’s building. In the fifties, especially, many people considered it ugly because of its stilts and quibbled about problems like the interior surfaces of the double-glazed windows, where there was dust that could never be cleaned. But for Gambu-Moreau’s extended family, the apartments, with light coming in from both directions and everyday needs beautifully accommodated, have provided inestimable well-being.

  7

  This, anyway, was the view from within l’Unité. The reputation of the building abroad was less laudatory.

  Americans had followed the development of the pioneering residential skyscraper through the mainstream press, especially Time magazine. In 1948, Time had reported that the French government had lifted rationing on concrete and steel for the seventeen-story structure because the building was to be a national model. Although the magazine said the building would be a “happy hive,” much in the article makes Le Corbusier sound crazy. He is quoted as saying, “Men are so stupid, I’m glad I’m going to die.” “Should we burn down the Louvre?” Roman architecture was “the damnation of the half educated.” “Skyscrapers are veritable prisons. They suffocate their inmates, deprive them of sun and air.” He allegedly claimed, “There will be no quarrels between neighbors and no divorces in my house.”13

  Two years later, when the magazine gave an update now that there was a furnished apartment at l’Unité, it called the apartment “cramped” and echoed a Marseille paper in reporting that the building for just over three hundred families was to cost more than what it would have taken to construct six hundred “nice little private houses.” Le Corbusier sounds like a complete crackpot discussing the everyday existences of the residents of the three-million-dollar project: “Why do you want sunshine in the bathroom when you are in it only in the morning and at night?…What’s wrong with the smell of food if the cooking is good?”14

  Le Corbusier is cited as having motives of which few readers would have grasped the significance. “My mother was the slave of the little house,” he said. His new apartment type was its alternative, fulfilling his wish “to make life as luxurious as a first-class cabin on an ocean liner.” No reader of Time in 1950 would have realized that in essence what the architect wanted was to have his mother in the setting he had shared with Josephine Baker.

  Seven months later, in yet another article on the building, Time took to mocking French living in general. The cramped quarters and prevalent cooking smells are emphasized, the windowless kitchens deemed a problem for housewives who, according to the magazine, had the habit of throwing their garbage onto the streets. And the lack of wine cellars in the apartments is cited as “the most serious flaw of all.”15 On this subject, Le Corbusier is quoted as saying that the tenants had a grocery where they could buy their wines each day; he proposes that if they were dissatisfied, they could “go and live elsewhere.”16

  Such was the general perception, at least in America, of l’Unité d’Habitation: an unlivable, too costly folly built by an arrogant despot for people in a decadent, unruly civilization. It was pretty much what Le Corbusier had come to expect from the out-of-control country on the other side of the Atlantic.

  8

  The morning after the ceremonies in Marseille, Le Corbusier and Yvonne returned to Paris.

  Le Corbusier was not yet falling into the blues that beset him after each pinnacle. The depression was to come later, once the critics had a go at him. For now, he needed to make sure his mother, after not making the journey, at least understood her seminal role in his triumph.

  In an almost perfunctory way, Le Corbusier wrote, “Returned this morning to Paris. Yesterday a great day. We missed you terribly. It was very beautiful.” That telegraphic opening style led him to proclaim with characteristic frenzy that the building was, quite simply, “one of the great works of architecture (of any period)—moving by day and magical by night.”17

  Le Corbusier went on to describe the ceremony. For once, a public event was everything for which one might have hoped: “perfect, noble, affecting, stirred by emotion and sensibility, pride and dignity.” The minister had made a beautiful speech. What mattered above all was that “in his very first words he told me that the origins of my art were revealed by the dedication of the ‘White Cathedrals’: ‘to my mother.’ It is Mme. Jeanneret-Perret’s music which accounts for the art of L-C.”18

  Albert and Marie Jeanneret playing music together at the Villa Le Lac in the late 1950s

  To Le Corbusier, the word “music” meant not just the qualities of mathematical orderliness and rhythm and melodic charm. Beyond that, in her piano teaching and playing, Marie had demonstrated the ability of sensory and aesthetic experience to impart profound pleasure. Greater still, his mother’s “music” was the act of having brought him into the world. All that was needed now was for Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret herself to enjoy both her son’s success and this public acknowledgment.

  Le Corbusier painted a vivid picture for his mother of the festivities that followed the speeches, the rush of compliments, and congratulatory telegrams from all over the world: “When the festive wines flowed, one woman after the next came to embrace me: the tenants of the building. I went with them to see how things were going several times, it was amazing; the men all bless me saying they’re in paradise.”19

  The building looked spectacular lit up at night. The park on the roof was splendid, the gardens sublime. But the joy of the people living in it was what thrilled Le Corbusier above all: “Evenings and all through the night the house is magical: down below, up above, on the walls, with three windows lit. It is absolutely prodigious. The park has the splendor of noble times. And human beings are living in it as if in a mirage. The silence is complete…. Already the children have understood this future life under the sign of gaiety, of warm hearts.”20

  He wanted his mother and
Albert to take a sleeping car from Switzerland and come see the building when conditions were calmer. Meanwhile, she could see it on the French news.

  At the same time, he continued to defend his uneducated wife to his puritanical mother. “Yvonne managed to be wonderful with everyone, but especially with the workers!—a fine tribute.”21

  9

  While Le Corbusier was contemplating his second, larger Unité d’Habitation in Rezé, on the outskirts of Nantes, Claudius-Petit, having given up his position as minister for reconstruction and town planning and been elected mayor of Firminy, had now commissioned a third Unité for two hundred inhabitants. All of these plans were put in jeopardy on December 15, two months and a day after the opening in Marseille, when the Seventh Correctional Tribunal of Marseille tried a case initiated by the Society for Overall Aesthetics in France.22 Le Corbusier and the people who had hired him were accused of not having respected the most elementary rules of building construction: they had not even had a correct building permit and had violated the regulations for hygiene.

  The usual rage and despair followed. However, for once, the opposition lost. The tribunal ruled against the litigious society. During the same time period, Le Corbusier was elevated to the position of commander of the Legion of Honor, and accepted.23 Now even his enemies could not stop him.

  XLVI

  1

  By the time Le Corbusier got the news of his victory in the lawsuit in Marseille, he was in India. He had returned to Chandigarh following the inauguration of l’Unité.

  Yet again, this meant a long separation from Yvonne, who remained sequestered in their apartment. They had by now been together for more than thirty years, married for twenty-two of them; in all that time, the event in Marseille had been the only occasion of her going with him when he traveled for work.