The architect also had, yet again, a problem with the realities of the climate. His mother’s and Hélène de Mandrot’s leaking roofs and windows represented a difficulty that was endemic to his work. At Chandigarh, the beating rain during the season of heavy showers made it necessary to build an arcade in the High Court that had nothing to do with Le Corbusier’s original plans. His accommodation to the rain at the Millowners’ Building had been a rarity.
The roof constructions and the arcades were not the only instances of Le Corbusier’s idealism and aesthetics obliterating practicality or a full concern for the client’s needs. Doshi also witnessed the judges’ displeasure because, in spite of the architect’s intention to work with the local culture and Nehru’s praise of him for having done so, the High Court did not function according to Indian tradition: the courtrooms were too public. It was “a building that doesn’t work.”7 Modifications were necessary.
But Balkrishna Doshi still thought it was “magnificent.” The High Court had two sides, just as Le Corbusier did. The building design turned its back to certain truths and was wide-open to others.
5
Balkrishna Doshi was one of Le Corbusier’s favorite young architects and was accorded the exceptional treatment that went with that position. He was invited to lunch when others were not, and he and Le Corbusier took long walks together, during which the older man liked to tell stories. Le Corbusier sent his young colleague to a doctor when he needed one and helped him get a fellowship from the Graham Foundation.
When Le Corbusier gave Doshi and his bride a drawing as a wedding present and Doshi did not look sufficiently pleased, Le Corbusier immediately took it back. That evening, he went to Doshi’s house for dinner. In addition to another drawing, he gave the young man five hundred rupees. On the envelope, Le Corbusier wrote, “This is a small token to add grease to the wheels of life. I’m sure you will break many dishes on each other’s heads but you’ll survive all that with joy and pleasure.”8
Le Corbusier interacted with people according to his own terms. Doshi was present at a party in Chandigarh at which Le Corbusier conspicuously refused to shake hands with the judges and said, “You don’t dispense proper justice.”9 Sometimes he acceded to his whims; at other moments, he strategized. He cautioned Doshi never to send all the photos of a building model to a client; one was enough. It would give the client some idea of the proposal but would help avoid sources of disagreement. Similarly, Le Corbusier advised Doshi to let the client pick a single color to be used in a house but then to save the other choices for himself. That way, the client would feel he had made a decision and would thus be kept happy, but the architect would maintain control of the quality.
THE YOUNGER MAN was as impressed by Le Corbusier’s adaptability as by his craftiness. Le Corbusier also had a remarkable ability to improvise. If, in India, contractors had only two of the three sizes of stone that he had designated, he would have them cut one of the two existing sizes to make the third—all corresponding to the Modulor—and then, with characteristic frugality, would use the residue in floors or window panels or sunscreens.
6
Balkrishna Doshi also saw Le Corbusier at his most humane: “He gave the ordinary man dignity. It was as if he were looking at men and God together—no human being was really ordinary. Since he was not involved in politics or economics, he tried to give man dignity through his dwelling.” Le Corbusier used scale so that “no man felt less than a king in his house.”10
Photo Insert Two
15. Self-portrait as a crow delivering Christmas presents, in a letter to Yvonne, December 1953
16. Sketch in a letter to his mother and Albert, August 31, 1955
17. Entrance facade of the Millowners’ Building (1951–1956), Ahmedabad
18. Ronchamp, interior, view from the altar
19. Ronchamp, interior, wall of painted glass windows
20. Interior of chapel at La Tourette
21. The light cannons at La Tourette as seen from above
22. The Assembly Building in Chandigarh, late 1950s
23. Josephine Baker, watercolor, 1929
24. Josephine Baker, watercolor
25. Josephine Baker, watercolor
26. Sketch of Yvonne’s tomb in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in a letter to his mother, June 17, 1958
Doshi was struck by Le Corbusier’s fascination with steamship cabins, train berths, and the shacks that poor people lived in. These small-scale spaces reflected very different economic means but had in common that they were composed of tight, shipshape units. When Doshi took the Swiss to see old six-foot-wide shacks in the slums of Ahmedabad, rather than recoil in horror Le Corbusier stretched out his arms in admiration. “My God, look how these people can live,” he declared, more with respect for their ingenuity in dire circumstances than sadness at their paucity of resources.11
Le Corbusier was so interested in sensuous experience in India that when eating meat he put big pieces of salt on some of the food and none on other pieces. “It seemed as though he always wanted two dimensions—thin and thick, tall and low, rough and smooth, light and shade. There was always this kind of counterbalance,” wrote Doshi.12 Such attention to the details of life and the will to alter its components were part of the refinement of his vision.
Often comparing his work to a fugue by Bach, Le Corbusier understood that change and difference, jumps in scale inside and outside, alteration of thick and thin lines, and variables of rhythm and balance are what make things work.
AFTER A WHILE, Doshi felt so resented by others as the master’s pet in Chandigarh that he got himself sent to Ahmedabad, where he replaced Jean Véret, one of the main architects in the Paris office, as Le Corbusier’s chief site architect.
There, Doshi saw Le Corbusier’s musical sense of composition at work as they were detailing the private house that Le Corbusier made for Surottam Hutheesing. Le Corbusier was displeased because he felt that the pattern was too rigid. Doshi proposed using rectangular columns instead of round ones: squared-off columns could serve as walls and storage spaces as well. Le Corbusier liked the idea and ran with it: “Within two hours he had made a miracle out of the sections by just adding a little beam here and a slab across and putting a circle there to open it up.”13 He had interjected the rhythm that brought it to life.
This exquisite villa—which Hutheesing sold to another mill owner, Shyamubhai Shodhan, before it was completed—demonstrates the results of Le Corbusier’s flexibility. A wonderful rough concrete shell with multiple openings and terraces, it includes a spectacular hanging garden. Inside, with its surprising juxtapositions of scale and unpredictable twists and turns, complete with staircases that seem to float in midair, it looks like a composition by Piranesi. Outside, the Villa Shodhan is a particularly luxurious Corbusean statement, with its ambient rough concrete punctuated by boldly painted, sparkling yellow and green panels, and its large, round swimming pool, with bright-orange ladders around the concrete perimeter, blending industrial toughness with a euphoric approach to color.
BEFORE HE LEFT INDIA for the last time, Le Corbusier invited Doshi to select another drawing for himself. The young acolyte made his selection, and Le Corbusier told him that he had picked the right one, so now he should pick another, and the process went on until he was given four in all.
That generosity was in the same proportion as Le Corbusier’s acidic toughness. Doshi accepted the apparent contradictions or inconsistencies as balanced sides of the same person. Once, when Le Corbusier was going to travel by car from Chandigarh to New Delhi and Doshi asked him for a ride, the older man gruffly replied, “No. No. No.” He then immediately said that if Doshi really wanted to go along, he could of course do so, if he was punctual. They were leaving at 6:30 the following morning. Doshi was there at the appointed hour, and Le Corbusier treated him as a cherished traveling companion for the next several days.
First, he insisted that they stop en route in the village that had his favorite r
estaurant for Tandoori chicken. Le Corbusier emphasized that he loved it because this was a true “mountain chicken,” tough muscled, more flavorful and full of character than a city chicken. In Delhi itself, Le Corbusier was equally definitive about everything he saw. He spent a lot of time studying Indian miniatures in the museums; he loved their intertwined figures. On the other hand, he thought Edwin Lutyens’s much-touted British colonial architecture was merely “okay.”
“The sense of eternity was very important to him,” wrote Doshi. “Counterbalance. Uncertainties. Conflicts. The dialogue that goes on within one’s self. The battle between one’s self and black paper. Some force is coming—the light. The idea of a pact with nature. A building and nature must merge.”14
L
1
Hutheesing’s house was not the only villa for a rich client living in seclusion and luxury in Ahmedabad. On his trips to the great textile city, where he was building a local museum, Le Corbusier took on the task of creating a private, modern palace in a lush tropical garden for Manorama Sarabhai. For all the modesty of his taste in his own dwelling and the egalitarianism of his housing complexes, the architect relished the task of building her an exquisite and opulent retreat.
The Sarabhais were a prosperous textile family—cultivated, intellectually avid, and international, while remaining grounded in their local culture. Prominent in the Millowners’ organization, they had been instrumental in bringing Le Corbusier to Ahmedabad initially. For generations, they had had a family compound, called the Retreat. While geographically near the center of the bustling metropolis, this lush garden with family mansions offers the privacy and seclusion of a private park.
Manorama Sarabhai’s husband, one of the heirs to the family fortune, had recently died. Her brother, Chinubhai Chimanbhai, was the mayor of the city. This woman, connected to two important dynasties, was faced with the daunting task of bringing up her children on her own. She had definite theories about the house in which she would do so. She and her husband were both Jains, a sect whose belief system is based on respect for the natural world and the wish to leave it undisturbed. Sarabhai wanted a new residence that would maintain a strong connection to its environment; she also intended it to reflect western modernism. Completely atypical for her generation, this sophisticated young widow had taken her children to New York for two years, where she installed them at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel; with equal audacity, she was now hiring a Parisian architect.
In the enchanted garden of the family compound, Le Corbusier placed her villa in such a way that the structure is scarcely visible through the trees that surround it. The ground floor is open to the outdoors, the only semblance of walls being wooden-slat rolling blinds controlled by ropes. The large-scale living spaces and many terraces provide the rustic luxury of an expensive safari camp. The architecture recedes, completely subservient to the natural setting, providing luxuriousness but not flaunting it.
While Le Corbusier was working on the house, he became close to the Sarabhais’ young son Anand, then about ten years old. Ever eager to swim, the architect borrowed Anand’s school shorts to wear as swim trunks in the pool of the family’s old mansion. Anand Sarabhai had a favorite book, Fattypuffs and Thinifers—about fat people and thin people. Its author, André Maurois, gave the skinnier creatures beds that extended and catapulted them through holes in the floor into their bathtubs every morning. It became a fantasy of Anand’s to do the same, and Le Corbusier decided to realize the boy’s dream. He built a marvelous slide that goes from the bedroom floor of the villa directly into the swimming pool one story below. Water flowed down the slide; Anand could start his days with a refreshing dip. This device was also a means of air-conditioning for the house; the water on the slide was recirculated from the cooling system.
The main units of the Villa Sarabhai are in the style of Catalonian vaults, an architectural form Le Corbusier had come to admire in Barcelona. Half cylinders of rough concrete, they are covered on their tops by earth to form a lawn and roof garden. Unlike normal roofing materials, that sod serves to cool the inside of the house, even when the Indian heat rises to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The insides of these vaults, meanwhile, seem like capacious caves; the barrel-shaped enclosures make the innermost chambers of the house dark and deeply romantic.
However cavelike within, these bays are completely open at the front and back. This has its hazards when it is raining, rendering the villa “very nice to live in, although impractical in many ways.”1 But the house accommodated the client’s wishes for a direct proximity to nature and also for flexibility of space; Le Corbusier designed a structure that could change as Sarabhai’s use of the place did. In keeping with her request, any wall in the middle could be removed.
Even if a bit of rain gets in through the ends of the bays, the villa coheres in such a relaxed way to its natural surroundings that when you see, on a downspout, a cobweb with a blossoming weed coming through it or a chipmunk running down the pool slide, they become part of the integrity of the experience, not intrusions. This villa built with constant awareness of water and the sun has wide-mouthed downspouts that evacuate the rain. They are big enough for torrential tropical downpours. The sod roof also accommodates rather than fights nature. Le Corbusier was delighted to build for the rich, but what he gave them, while immensely comfortable, was completely lacking in the sort of artifice so often associated with financial wealth. Rather, open to its tropical surroundings, working in concord with the sun, it is reverential of wonders that money cannot buy.
2
Once the villa was complete, Manorama Sarabhai found her new home equally suited for sumptuous family get-togethers or quiet moments reading in a corner. For affluent people in the tropics, Le Corbusier had achieved much the same thing as at the modest house in Vevey by making the exterior and interior interact. Here, too, there is constant rhythm and a vitality to the forms. One of these celestial residences housed an austere piano teacher living at the edge of a cold lake, while the other was for an international arts patron with bright-green wild parrots in her garden, but the values were consistent.
It was the specifics that were different. Le Corbusier had applied himself to the task of Sarabhai’s villa with a keen awareness that he was constructing in conditions unlike those for any of his other houses except for Hutheering’s. This was one of his few private residences where he did not also have to factor in the need for heat in cold weather. His primary goals were coolness, shade, and the ability to capture air currents; the heat of the sun had to be minimized or avoided. Since mosquitoes were a significant factor, he incorporated screens and netting.
Knowing that a glass wall could become an enemy in the summer heat, Le Corbusier again utilized brises-soleil. He also situated the house so that it would be traversed by the prevailing breezes. He used bricks and rough concrete, the latter often coated in white to induce coolness, both physical and psychological, with bright colors creating elements of joy. The results were salubrious.
From the start, however, Le Corbusier’s relationship with his client was contentious. After the initial contracts had been signed in the summer of 1953 and plans were under way, the architect found it necessary to have Ducret write to his patroness to say,
I beg to insist quite particularly on the character of the role taken by M. LE CORBUSIER.
M. LE CORBUSIER is not a businessman. He is an artist and, the world over, he is regarded as such and surrounded by consequent respect.
It is extremely disagreeable for him to discuss questions concerning the rates of remuneration for his services, and he is especially unhappy to have received the impression that he might be regarded as attached to financial considerations.2
Le Corbusier had by then made several trips to Ahmedabad. His draftsmen had done considerable work on the plans, and he had commissioned expensive surveys requiring him to lay out considerable funds. He had received only a pittance in payment. His office manager insisted that the architectural fees an
d travel costs to date be paid immediately.
During the construction process, relations improved. The architect collaborated quite easily with Manorama Sarabhai, acceding to her views on many issues. He shifted from a black stone for some of the walls to a lighter-toned brown, as she requested. However, when Sarabhai requested a reduction in the size of the swimming pool, Le Corbusier made it clear that he had gone as far as he was willing to go. To make the pool any smaller would put Anand at risk of losing his life by striking his head on a pool wall. “I’d look like an idiot if I made a pool 24´ by 24´ at the end of a slide 46´ long!” the architect wrote his client.3 Here, he prevailed.
WHILE THE BUILDING PROCESS was taking place between 1952 and 1955, Le Corbusier visited Ahmedabad every November. When he returned in the spring of 1956, the house was complete. This was when the trouble really began.
The architect was furious at Manorama Sarabhai’s treatment of his creation. He wrote his client, “You’ve got a lovely house. But you can Kill it!” He informed her that the work of her gardener, along with her old furniture and decorative, tasteless art objects “will have soon annihilated the ambiance, the atmosphere, the spirit of the house.”4 While couching his critique in polite language, Le Corbusier warned Sarabhai that she had better take care; she needed to make an effort to keep from disappointing visitors. He suggested that Doshi, who was at this time in Ahmedabad and had his full confidence, could help rectify the mistakes she had already made.
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