It was the height of Le Corbusier’s career: Chandigarh was proceeding at a clip, applause was still reverberating for Marseille, Ronchamp was nearly complete, and there were projects galore in the office. Yet lying there in his fever delirium, he was still determined to achieve one further victory: the dethroning of Albert.
7
On October 7, 1953, Chandigarh was to have its opening ceremony. Two and a half weeks prior to that event, Le Corbusier prepared a letter in English for Nehru.
Your Excellency and Friend,
I think you should be acquainted on the day of the Opening Ceremony of Chandigarh—a halcyon day full of lightheartedness—of the sad financial plight of your Architect, your Town Planner, Le Corbusier, the animating spirit of the town. He is in debt of several millions because:
1°) the Punjab Government had not yet payed [sic] him,
2°) his wealthy Ahmedabad clients (the Municipal Corporation, the Millowners’ Association and several private and very rich clients) have not yet payed [sic] him.
Since two years and ten months I have devoted nearly the whole of my activity to India thereby neglecting to undertake more profitable surveys. Despite all my efforts I have not yet succeeded in being paid. Who is the real responsible? Since June last, my Creditors have become exacting and I have been obliged to leave off paying my draftmen in my architectural office. At 66 [sic] years of age I have never been in such a desperate financial plight.
Meanwhile, all over the world, the public opinion praises Chandigarh, India and the Indians.
I will say no more. My grief is immeasurable. I hope this letter will be handed over to you on October 7th.
I remain,
ever your most truly,
LE CORBUSIER
P.S. Repeatedly Chandigarh has asked me to send innumerable plans for the Governor’s House, the Assembly, the Capitol Park and the National Park, the Monument, etc. How am I supposed to pay my draftmen?23
WHEN THE CITY of Chandigarh was inaugurated on the day after Le Corbusier’s birthday, the press called it “The hour of Le Corbusier,” but the architect himself was not present.24 He probably could not have paid the airfare.
There were other reasons as well not to travel. Le Corbusier was suffering from rheumatism in both ankles, especially the left one, because of decalcification. He enjoyed the cure—eating masses of meat—but there was no clear course of action for Yvonne, whose right knee was terribly swollen. Her diagnoses included decalcification worse than his own, fluid retention, and other causes, with the doctors still submitting her to endless X-rays and testing. Of course, the main problem was that she kept falling down drunk.
In addition, she was anorexic. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “She can’t eat because of some obsession or psychysm or other.” Deeply upset as he tried to figure out how to get nourishment into her, he admitted to Marie Jeanneret, “It’s extremely depressing to see this splendid girl chained to the unknown.”25
His mother, on the other hand, was his solace, the equal of the greatest force in the universe. “You’re my sun,” he wrote her.26
8
A month after the inauguration of Chandigarh, Prime Minister Nehru laid the foundation stone of the new Secretariat. Again Le Corbusier was absent from an event he should have attended.
Nonetheless, the prime minister’s presence gave incomparable glory to the architectural milestone. Nehru landed at 8:30 a.m. by jet at the Ambala airfield, near the new city. Some twenty-five thousand people greeted him. At the ceremony, Nehru emphasized the need for peace between India and Pakistan. Lamenting a recent incident in Calcutta when “some unknown person foolishly…fired at the building of the office of the Deputy High Commission of Pakistan,” he declared the future Secretariat a symbol of peace and unity.27
The prime minister was also determined to counter the strong criticism uttered in many precincts about Le Corbusier’s architecture: “A city without a soul would be a heap of mud and mortar…. A city built must have a soul and provide a spirit to its inhabitants based on our old traditions.” Attacking “the few cities built by the British Rulers in their days for their own convenience,” Nehru urged the public to be open to a new style, admirable because of its lack of reference to European tradition, and to recognize that the residential bungalows to which they had become accustomed had been designed to suit the colonialists rather than the Indians.
It was as if the absent Le Corbusier had written the prime minister’s lines. Nehru continued, “Probably one who is accustomed to looking at ugly things is not accustomed to objects of beauty.” It was the spirit of L’Esprit Nouveau come to life. At last a person of far-reaching power echoed the precepts of Ruskin and disparaged weak traditionalism as vociferously as Le Corbusier: “The houses built by a particular type of rich people…were more marked by their vulgarity than by anything of taste.” By contrast, “the foreign architects” who had designed Chandigarh “get full praise from the Prime Minister.” He told the audience that, for the first time, the foreign press, especially in Europe and America, was heaping compliments on modern architecture in India, saying that Chandigarh should be a model for cities all over the world. It was a great source of pride—the opposite of Calcutta and Kanpur with their huge skyscrapers overpowering “the hovels in which the poor laborers live there.”
This architecture in which everyone was to be housed decently was part of a new social order. Its ultimate goal was the disappearance of the caste system, under which the servant class had previously been relegated to inadequate accommodations. The prime minister assured his audience that this new Secretariat, planned so that it would take only forty-five seconds to go to the highest story in spite of the enormousness of the structure, would be the symbol and embodiment of this revolutionary equality.
The Ambala Sunday Tribune reported that, accompanied by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, “the Prime Minister was in a very bright and jovial mood throughout.” A group of girls from a local school sang the “Jana Gana Mana.” After laying the cornerstone, which was positioned by electrical machinery, “he jumped up to the dais to take back the baton which he had forgotten to carry with him when he went to press the electric button which lowered down the simple and sober bronze plaque bearing Pt. Nehru’s name in the socket below.” With the Punjab governor, Indira Gandhi, and Varma, the great leader toured the new city in an open truck and “ascended to the top of the club building in Sector twenty-two to have a clearer view of the houses built around.”
In Paris, Le Corbusier read the newspaper account eagerly. On his carefully cut-and-pasted clipping, he circled one key sentence: “‘The old methods do not suit the new age of Democracy,’ said the Prime Minister.”28 At last, Le Corbusier was understood.
9
The opening of Le Corbusier’s major exhibition of his work at Le Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris, in the eastern wing of the Palais de Tokyo, in November 1953 was for him one of the most significant moments of his life. The Palais de Tokyo was only a few blocks from the Perret brothers’ offices, where Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had shown up forty-five years earlier as a hesitant young man with the portfolio of Italian sketches that landed him his first job. It had models and photos and plans of Le Corbusier’s architecture, as well as drawings, paintings, sculpture, books, houses, and urban plans. It presented the full body of Le Corbusier’s work as a unified entity.
Le Corbusier believed this presentation demonstrated “a single and constant created manifestation devoted to various forms of the visual phenomenon.”29 The initial reaction was, however, a stinging disappointment. The architect’s own account of the opening took to a dramatic peak the pain he invariably felt when snubbed. Now more than ever, he saw himself as an exile and castaway—and the people in power as evil incarnate. He wrote in his diary, “November 17th, 1953. Paris: Opening of the Le Corbusier Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. 11 o’clock, official visits. 3 o’clock, journalists. 9 o’clock, invited guests…11:45, 11:30, 12…Minister o
f Education and Minister of Fine Arts, Secretary of State for Fine Arts, Director-General of Arts and Letters, Director-General of Architecture…all absent. When telephoned, one is busy with the budget, another can’t make it, the others the same. These are the four leaders of the arts in France. The Le Corbusier exhibition is an important event, properly scheduled. I sent out invitations to the dinner myself. They don’t come. I’m not the loser. The game was played correctly. According to the rules. If they’re satisfied, so are we—even more so.”30
His mother and brother also had failed to show up for the opening events. Le Corbusier wrote them to emphasize only what they missed, not the other absences. Between two and three thousand people had attended the opening, he told them. It had become necessary to organize, on the spot, a system whereby the crowd went through the show in an orderly progression. It was so mobbed that it was impossible to see the art.
“Enthusiasm and anger,” Le Corbusier wrote his family about the public response.31 The critics had unanimously tried to outdo each other in nastiness, while the attendance broke records. Three hundred and fifty visitors had gone through on the first Saturday, 620 the next day. During a recent Léger show at the same museum, there had been 1,700 in all, 1,200 at a Klee exhibition; his totals would be far larger, and 12,000 visitors had walked through an exhibition of his work in Stockholm. The officials and his family had ignored him; the journalists had slammed him; but the numbers were on his side.
10
The continual financial problems in India and the boycotting of his Paris opening were not all that was plaguing Le Corbusier. Yvonne had become so difficult that he could no longer resist confiding to his mother and Albert. At the end of November, he wrote them, “Yvonne wavers between confidence and rebellion. She has a damn hard little head. But she obeys—secretly—all our orders and suggestions.”32 Le Corbusier went on his own to Vevey for Christmas with “M. et Mme. Jeanneret.” Then he doubled back to Paris to take Yvonne to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin for New Year’s.
The weather was bitter cold, and Le Corbusier had a relapse of his pneumonia, requiring penicillin. Then Yvonne broke her right leg in another drinking binge. The injury was complicated, with fractures in three places, including a broken tibia. She was put in a cumbersome cast that made the return to Paris exceptionally difficult. When the architect went back to Chandigarh at the end of January, his own energy was depleted. He wrote his mother, “My health suddenly improves and I gain weight in just a few days, then everything collapses with the heavy burden of events.”33
Le Corbusier arrived in Delhi in a storm, with heavy rain and surprising cold. On his first few days in Chandigarh, he suffered repeated nightmares. But his spirits quickly revived. He was impressed with what Pierre had achieved, both architecturally and diplomatically, and was delighted with the quality of the concrete used in his various buildings. Le Corbusier also enjoyed the feeling of being “respected and considered and accommodated”—words he delighted in spelling out to his mother.34 He spent an hour with Nehru in New Delhi and felt that the meeting served to make the governor of Punjab that much more amenable to his ideas. There was no further reference to his fee.
From India, Le Corbusier wrote his mother that he had decided that his wife’s main problem was malnutrition. She was “completely decalcified”—to such an extent that he used his most gruesome adjective yet: “Buchenwaldized.”35 But he also reminded his mother of why he had married Yvonne to begin with. Her good spirit, intrepidity, and simple kindness were what had lured him, and they counted still.
He begged his mother to recognize that he had done everything possible to help his wife—even if he had failed. “So I scolded, organized gastronomic events, and exerted moral pressure at every moment, on this child that she is, who ended by ‘psychologizing’ herself in reverse.”36 It was another battle Le Corbusier could not win.
11
After two weeks in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier went south to Bombay for three days. While he was there, the largest Bombay newspaper published a piece by a reporter who had visited his site at Marseille. The residents had said that because of the sunscreens they froze in the winter and died of the heat in the summer. The journalist predicted that the use of the brises-soleil in Chandigarh would be a disaster.
By now, Le Corbusier was accustomed to this sort of criticism. This time, though, a head of state was on his side. The money problems about which he had written Nehru did not matter as much as the prime minister’s strength in dispelling the usual forces arrayed against him. Le Corbusier had found his place in the world.
The journey back to Paris at the end of February took twenty-six-and-a-half hours, but it was comfortable. “Nothing is more ideal than the airplane. I usually get a real joy from flying,” he wrote his mother and brother.37
Yvonne’s state upon his return was worrisome, though. She was not able to greet him at the airport as usual. The day after his arrival, he wrote his mother and Albert, “She is a lot thinner, living like a recluse far from daylight, fresh air, and sunshine. Her husband, as you know, is the man who discovered SUN, SPACE, GREENERY, the raw materials of urbanism.”38
With Pierre Jeanneret in Chandigarh, shortly after they were reunited following the schism that occurred between them during and following World War II
WHEN AUGUSTE PERRET died just after his return, Le Corbusier was asked to speak at his former mentor’s funeral. In public, he was appropriate; to his mother, he was blunt about yet another of the people he had once deified but had come to loathe: “Perret was a violent adversary, neither pleasant nor correct. I tore him out of my heart long ago.”39
Le Corbusier’s personal worries were mounting. Yvonne was out of her cast but now required an apparatus to keep her leg straight. That spring, his mother had bronchitis and needed to stay in a nursing home. He assumed all the costs, but, given her age, her condition was a real concern.
Professionally, however, he was at a high. Le Corbusier was completing one major project after another. He was very pleased with the quality of construction in Nantes and with the helpful role of Claudius-Petit. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry left India in the middle of the year, leaving Pierre in charge, which suited Le Corbusier; it enabled him and Pierre to work, unencumbered, toward the opening of the High Court in November. Even if India was now three years in arrears on his architectural fees, he had come a long way from the errant son who depleted his parents’ life savings.
XLVII
1
For the first time in thirty years, most of what Le Corbusier was designing was getting built. Girders were rising in two cities in India, at Ronchamp, and at La Tourette.
But, just as the League of Nations headquarters and the United Nations buildings had tortured him, so did his bridesmaid’s role in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where, having been ruled out to design it, he was now on the selection committee. While Le Corbusier had envisioned a building of concrete and glass that would use brises-soleil to optimal advantage, a very different structure went up, designed jointly by the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer, the Paris-based Bernard Zehrfuss, and the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi. Le Corbusier was among those to ratify that choice, but was still furious not to have been the architect of this important building not far from his office doorstep.
Meeting with Balkrishna Doshi on the site of the Millowners’ Building in Ahmedabad, ca. 1955
A continent away, however, Le Corbusier’s architecture was triumphant. The Millowners’ Building opened in Ahmedabad.
The Millowners, an association of owners of cotton mills, was the sort of upper-echelon client Le Corbusier adored. Rich and distinguished, its members belonged to one of the highest castes in Indian society and were reputed for their generosity and public-spiritedness. They totally respected Le Corbusier.
Ahmedabad had a population of about one million people. Mahatma Gandhi, who had had a modest compound on the riverbank on the city’s outskirts between 1915 and 1930, had been instrumental in establishing
a connection between the cotton mill owners and their workers. Now their organization, which consciously strived for a spirit of goodwill and mutual betterment, wanted a place to assemble that would echo the human harmony they advocated. Desiring a natural setting for their meetings, they had acquired a site overlooking a river. In March 1951, the president of the association, Surottam Hutheesing, had commissioned Le Corbusier to design their headquarters.
From the start, Le Corbusier conceived of a structure with the aura of a private palace. But rather than house royalty and facilitate pomp, this streamlined equivalent of Versailles was to be a place from which people could savor “the highly picturesque spectacle of the dyers washing their cottons and drying them on the sand, accompanied by herons, cows, buffaloes and donkeys half submerged to keep cool.”1 The building was intended as a platform for viewing; its external appearance was a secondary consideration. Le Corbusier designed the main elements of each floor as frameworks for the panorama. Architecture would organize and compose the myriad elements of the vista and create glassless picture windows for the benefit of the building’s staff as much as for the distinguished mill owners, who would periodically meet there.
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