Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  This was the moment when he changed his mind. Since it was not a competition, and no jury was involved, it is hard to think that he would have done otherwise. Le Corbusier was moved not just by the beauty of the setting and the freedom he was to be given but also by “the spiritual grandeur of the undertaking.”3 The splendid site supported his faith in a higher being that went beyond any traditional notions of organized religion. A place that had been used for worship of the sun, the deity he revered above all others, was irresistible.

  THE CLIENTS gave Le Corbusier a straightforward program for a church with a principal nave to accommodate two hundred people for mass, three smaller radiating chapels, and the capacity for ceremonies outside on August 15 and September 8, two annual pilgrimage days. A seventeenth-century polychrome wood sculpture that had been rescued from the previous church was to be placed in the new structure. It was also stipulated that there should be a means of collecting rainwater, because the hilltop was famously dry.

  With those requirements and the setting in mind, Le Corbusier began to invent. He summoned ideas unprecedented in ecclesiastical design, just as he had broken the mold of domestic architecture at l’Unité d’Habitation and the notion of civil construction in Chandigarh.

  When he was first on the site, he drew only the horizon lines and natural shapes that appeared before him. He kept himself open to inspiration, a process he described as a communion with nature whereby the horizon lines “architecturally released the acoustic reply—visual acoustics in the realm of forms,”4 and “the idea is born, sways, diverges, seeks itself out”—as if it just happened like the winds of fate.5

  Next, Le Corbusier echoed the hills in the sweeping roofline and the trees in the towers of his building design. Canon Ledeur made note of what the architect did during those hours on June 4. Le Corbusier penciled a curve mimicking the shape of the hills; this line based on nature was to become the south elevation of the church. He then quickly sketched the form of the outdoor altar. He furthered the scheme with a series of convex and concave curves and straight lines—ideas he continued to work out in his small sketchbook. Eventually, he developed the scheme to have large gables that were connected by a rigid line, like a tightrope suspended from peak to peak. Over this device, he seemed to throw an imaginary fabric; the result resembles a tent roof with its two main elements sagging under the weight of water. The rest of the forms derived both from the setting and his imagination. The building design that emerged has an affinity with its site—it looks as if it belongs there—while at the same time it boldly declares its completely unusual presence.

  3

  In designing Ronchamp, Le Corbusier responded to what he saw and let his natural genius for shapes and his instinctive thrill at movement through space take possession of him. The making of architecture was both a physical and a spiritual act, a conjunction of the premeditated and the spontaneous. In determining the form of this rural chapel, he plunged into his own inner depths. Various memories may have figured. There were the outings with his father and mother and brother, where, backpack on his shoulders, he learned at an early age to brave the high winds of mountain peaks similar to this one, if steeper. He had certainly had some residual memory of the ceilings of the barns that had been his bucolic retreats on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds. The immeasurable power of religious architecture as he had first experienced it before the cathedrals of Milan, Pisa, and Paris, their marvelous spires reaching heavenward as they had for centuries, had imprinted itself on his thoughts. So had his awareness of the primitive need for simple shelter and the wish of human beings to gather for the worship of God as he had observed in the male republic of Athos.

  Le Corbusier referred specifically to his memories of a visit in October 1911 to the Villa Adriana in Tivoli as having given him the idea for the remote slip of light near the top of Ronchamp’s tower.6 And he also acknowledged a modern hydraulic dam he had sketched at Le Chastang in central France as a further model for the structure of its drainage and overflow.

  Le Corbusier was responding again, too, to the powerful idea of a white building on a hilltop, of which the Parthenon was the ultimate example. And he let the cadences of music enter his soul as he had in the small rooms of his childhood and the vast concert halls of Munich and Vienna, where opera first moved him to tears. The chapel in the Vosges was an apotheosis that brought all of this personal history to the surface.

  MORE RECENTLY, the architect had picked up a crab shell on a Long Island beach. He credited that natural structure as his main source of inspiration, saying it dictated the overall form, which then became modified by, the addition of the element of time. That factor, of architecture being sequential, was central; Le Corbusier explained, “The plan is man’s hold over space. One covers the plan on foot, eyes fixed straight ahead, and perception is successive, it implies time. Perception is a series of visual events, as a symphony is a series of sonorous events; time, duration, succession, continuity are the constitutive factors of architecture.”7

  In the six months that followed his trip to the site, Le Corbusier and his minions at 35 rue de Sèvres turned his concept into detailed plans. André Maisonnier was the main project architect. On January 20, 1951, Monseigneur Dubois, the archbishop of Besançon, and the members of the Commission of Sacred Art, gave their approval. To agree to something so completely unprecedented in appearance was almost as brave as to design it.

  The forward-looking prelate of Besançon offered precisely the sort of support Le Corbusier craved but had found on few occasions in his life. The religious leader defended the project in its early days by publicly insisting that “in a period when art is fumbling, we must avoid all absolutism and all narrowness of judgment. We must have the courage to regard certain novelties with a favoring eye, and not hesitate to make experiments, even if they appear somewhat reckless.”8

  4

  Le Corbusier remained faithful to his original concept, though perpetually modifying the design in a process he depicted as a progression from Zen-like responsiveness to a warrior’s frenzy of action. “When I accept a task,” he wrote, “I’m in the habit of shelving it in my memory, which means not allowing myself to make even a sketch for months. The human mind is so constructed as to possess a certain independence; it is a box into which you can pour any number of the elements of a problem. Then you let things ‘float,’ ‘mix,’ ‘ferment.’ And then one day a spontaneous initiative from your inner being occurs, the catch is released; you take a pencil, a piece of charcoal, some crayons (color is the key to the procedure) and you give birth on paper; the idea emerges.”9

  This making of a monument to the Holy Virgin, the woman to whom a miraculous birth was attributed, was itself a miraculous organic process. Obsessed with the person in whose womb he had grown, he, too, nourished and developed a simple seed. As the process continued, he referred directly both to the “spontaneous birth” and to the period of “incubation.”10

  AFTER HE HAD DEVELOPED the initial design scheme, the architect had to reduce its scale for budgetary reasons. The construction cost estimates made clear that to build the chapel as he had first figured it would significantly exceed the financial limitations. He willingly redesigned the building with smaller overall dimensions.

  The office at 35 rue de Sèvres then made a model out of steel wire at a scale of one to one hundred. To confirm that all the curves and angles would work structurally, they took photographs of that model, which they provided to the engineers. The technical experts then confirmed that all was in order.

  The measurements of the chapel were based on the Modulor. Charting his use of that sacred measuring tool, Le Corbusier wrote about himself in the third person: “The Chapel (like all of Le Corbusier’s constructions, in fact) is based on the Modulor. Thus it has been possible to reduce the dimensions to sometimes extravagant figures without the spectator’s thereby sensing the smallness of the work’s dimensions. Le Corbusier admits that here is made manifest the plastic ev
ent he has described as ‘ineffable space.’ The consciousness of dimensions vanishes before the ineffable.”11 A relatively small building could seem enormous.

  5

  During the construction of this mountain chapel, Le Corbusier was more actively involved with all the details than in many of his other undertakings. At l’Usine Boussois, a factory in the Department Nord–Pas de Calais, he applied color to some of the stones and painted the glass windows. Le Corbusier also worked with his colleague Joseph Savina on the wooden confessionals and benches and the doors. He designated African wood for seating, an aluminum roof painted gray for the ceiling, and cast iron for the communion bench. No aspect of the building escaped his scrutiny.

  On-site, he selected some of the stones from the old chapel to be incorporated into the walls of the new structure. The ones that were not suitable were carted away and piled into a pyramid at the edge of the area of grass that defined the chapel grounds. Then, when the new building was nearly completed, Le Corbusier was asked to erect a monument to the French soldiers who had been killed on the hill in 1944. The pile of discarded stones inspired one of those spontaneous events, governed both by fate and by an attitude of openness, that often occurred in Le Corbusier’s life: he turned the chance pyramid into a monument to the dead.

  Church of Ronchamp, under construction, ca. 1953

  This bold, minimal sculpture was perhaps the first of the type of abstract war memorial that was to become a staple of late-twentieth-century design. A miniature of the great temples of ancient Mexico and Egypt, it used ordinary stones, rudimentary masonry, and the power of its sequence of ascending right angles to convey with profound simplicity the tragedy of lives lost because people fight.

  The pyramid at Ronchamp is, to this day, a mystery to most visitors. There is no plaque, and no explanation is provided. The ambiguity, the sense of the unknown, suited its creator’s taste and intentions.

  6

  During the design process, not everyone was as open-minded as Monseigneur Dubois. When a plaster model was first shown to the local parishioners, they were appalled at the bizarre form. Many urged that the ruined church on the site simply be rebuilt. The vast majority preferred the non-threatening echoes of tradition; some sneered or laughed, while others became furious.

  Le Corbusier’s perpetual champion Eugène Claudius-Petit came to the rescue. He reinforced the approval already granted by the Commission of Sacred Art. But some powerful clergymen simultaneously urged that the financing be halted. The press laced into the proposed chapel as an “anti-atomic shelter,” a “bunker,” and an “ecclesiastical garage.”12 The full barrage of negative clichés used against all modern architecture in the early 1950s was thrown at the scheme. The local chaplain, Abbé Bolle-Reddat, however, was steadfast. Later, the prelate recalled “in what occasionally nauseating humus this flower of grace has grown” the steadfast chaplain encountered such intense opposition to Le Corbusier’s design that he considered its completion “a true miracle!”13

  The architect, meanwhile, reacted to his attackers quite differently from his usual way. He did not assume the role of embittered martyr or fly into a vituperative rage. Rather, he calmly defended himself and his proposal against the assaults by pointing out his intention of creating something beautiful and his ideal of service to humankind. He also deliberately distinguished himself from the surrealists and many other modernists, with their intention to shock: “Not for a moment did I have any notion of making an object of astonishment. My preparation? A sympathy for others, for the unknown, and for a life which has trickled away into the brutalities of existence, nastiness, egotism, cowardice, triviality, but also into so much kindness, goodness, courage, energy, smiles, sunshine and blue sky. And the resulting choice: a taste, a need for the true. Ronchamp? Contact with a site, situation in a place, eloquence of the place, speech addressed to the place. To the four horizons.”14

  LIII

  From his bed, on a sheet of paper, he had explained to me the reasons for the measurements of a monastery in the highest Dominican tradition: “Here, we walk in two rows, here we sing in two rows, here we face each other and prostrate ourselves at full length; it is just such things which condition the form of the premises: walks, chapel, refectory, etc. and their measurements.” He had drawn that. Then he added: “It is for you, Le Corbusier, the finest commission you can ever have, the one which corresponds to your deepest being: the human scale.”

  —LE CORBUSIER

  1

  Father Marie-Alain Couturier had first met Le Corbusier in 1948, when the architect was working on his scheme for Sainte-Baume. He had subsequently been among the architect’s defenders over the design for Ronchamp.

  Ironically, Couturier was a member of the Dominican order; Saint Dominic had been engaged by Pope Innocent III to restore Catholicism to the territories controlled by the Cathars, those heretics from whom Le Corbusier so proudly claimed to descend. Nonetheless, Couturier recognized, in the way Balkrishna Doshi did, Le Corbusier’s spiritualism: “Not only did we regard Le Corbusier as the greatest living architect, but also as the man in whom the spontaneous sense of the sacred is strongest and most authentic.”1

  Since 1936, Couturier had been one of the editors of Art Sacré—a publication that put forward his view that “for the rebirth of Christian art, the ideal would be to have geniuses who were also saints. But under present circumstances, if such men do not exist, we believe that to provoke such a rebirth, such a resurrection, it is wiser to seek geniuses without faith than believers without talent.”2 This open-minded patron had already commissioned projects by Matisse, Léger, Rouault, and Lipchitz when, in 1953, he gave Le Corbusier the task “to lodge a hundred bodies and a hundred hearts in silence” in a new monastery near Lyon.3 The same architect who could thrill to gongs and drumrolls and to the sirens of Edgard Varèse relished such total quietude. To build a retreat for the cultivation of feeling—at a remove from the hustle and bustle of the urbanism he also loved—was one of his greatest goals. The project for which Couturier enlisted him was to prove to be his final masterpiece.

  On May 4, 1953, Le Corbusier, accompanied by André Wogenscky, now in charge at 35 rue de Sèvres, visited the site where the monastery was to be built. It was another hilltop, not quite as commanding as that at Ronchamp but similarly secluded and with a view of rolling fields—near the town of Eveux, in the Rhône-Alpes, about twenty-five kilometers from Lyon. The Dominicans had acquired the property in 1943. It included substantial agricultural lands, an old château, and vast woods. Le Corbusier instantly recognized that the setting was perfect for building the sort of monastic community that had been his ideal from the time of his earliest travels. He made preliminary sketches and asked Wogenscky to question Couturier about details of the monks’ everyday lives so that he could attune the program accordingly.

  The reverend father, who was suffering from myasthenia, was then in the Paris hospital of Bon Secours. Le Corbusier regretted that he would have no time to visit this wonderful man himself before leaving for India, but he wrote the farsighted Dominican, “While I’m still here, since you’re not going to be spending your time indefinitely in hospital, it would be a kindness, as soon as you have a little appetite, to telephone my wife and tell her you’re coming to lunch or dinner. The poor girl will be delighted; she’s very fond of you, and you’ll be performing a pious action by going to cheer her up in her solitude.”4 He could put two good souls together.

  And Le Corbusier was comfortable in the knowledge that on Couturier’s first visit to rue Nungesser-et-Coli, when Yvonne had deployed her whoopee cushion, the priest had reacted with as much mirth as the hosts.

  2

  Marie-Alain Couturier gave Le Corbusier the freedom and the confidence essential to making his best architecture. In July 1953, the Dominican wrote him, “It will be one of the great joys of my life to have been able to persuade you to undertake this, and even now I know it will be, in its very poverty, one of the pure
st and most important works of our time.” To this supportive sentence, written with a manual typewriter, Couturier added, by hand in fountain pen, “And I hope that you, too, take joy in it.”5

  Le Corbusier warmed to the positivity and to the mandate to make a place where, in the Dominican’s words, “the poverty of the buildings must be very strict, which consequently implies that the shared necessities will be respected: silence, sufficient warmth for continuous intellectual work, areas of comings and goings reduced to the minimum…. Our type of life is absolutely shared by all and consequently requires no personal differentiation within groups.”6

  Couturier was Le Corbusier’s sort of person: straightforward, well grounded, masculine, and professional. Clean shaven, his white hair cut very short, he was modest in his style, inevitably dressed in the same plain black-and-white robe. Whether it was a coincidence or a habit he deliberately adopted, the no-nonsense priest’s only bow to modern style was that he wore eyeglasses identical to Le Corbusier’s.

  Once Le Corbusier considered someone a friend, there were no limits to what he might do for him. Unknown to the priest, the architect desperately sought information on a more effective treatment for myasthenia, for which Couturier was enduring twenty-five injections per day. That fall, Le Corbusier took his Chinese-medicine specialist to his new friend; the results were miraculous, and Couturier again became master of his movements while stopping the shots. But Couturier then suffered a relapse.

  Le Corbusier devoted himself to pursuing other treatment options. He had an American friend, Pauline Shulman, an architect who lived in Bloom-field, Connecticut, who told him that Prostigmin, the most effective medication for myasthenia, was now available in France but should be administered only by a doctor experienced in its use. Shulman knew a doctor who in turn consulted Dr. Henry Viets, the world’s greatest authority on myasthenia and an advocate of Prostigmin in Boston. Le Corbusier and Shulman organized a chain of communication from Viets to translators to French doctors to create a team to help Couturier—with encouraging information about nearly miraculous remission for certain symptoms of the incurable disease.