Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  6

  Early one Sunday morning in the middle of May after he and Yvonne had returned to Paris, Le Corbusier took one of his frequent walks through the Bois de Boulogne. On a road lined by chestnut trees, a magpie had fallen out of its nest. Apparently knocked down by a high wind during the night, the wounded creature was lying on the path. Le Corbusier picked it up.

  During the rest of his usual hourlong walk, carrying the magpie, he thought about what he had done. At first, he considered himself ridiculous. He did not know how he would find the correct insects with which to feed the poor creature, or what box to put it in. He was afraid that Yvonne would force-feed it. It would be necessary to protect the wounded bird from the dog and cat at home.

  But then he reconsidered his action: “No, what I did was right: there are no trivial actions—that’s what I realize every second of my life,” he wrote his mother.13 Half an hour after picking up the bird, he found the nest that had fallen out of a tree. His first thought was that it was not God who had organized this encounter. Rather, Le Corbusier reflected, his eyes—unbeckoned by any other source—had located that nest.

  Le Corbusier observed that his soul had been preoccupied by the search for any sort of container, such as a discarded box, with which to harbor the injured bird. Indeed, before he saw the nest, he had found such a box. Then, although he was no longer aware that he was looking for anything, his unconscious mind, which a few moments earlier had been programmed for the discovery of a box, had now caused him to spot the nest. He noted all of these cerebral processes in the account he wrote his mother and Albert.

  Le Corbusier put both the nest and the bird into the box. The bird opened an eye. Then, all at once, the creature flew off—only to crash into a streetlight and claw onto it for dear life.

  The architect could not get the bird down from the streetlight. He went home, fetched a ladder, returned to the scene, climbed up, grabbed the injured bird, folded up the ladder, and returned home. He went immediately to the roof garden. There Yvonne had her collection of sparrows, which had now grown from forty to between fifty and sixty. Le Corbusier installed the “piaf” on the rooftop structure that housed the top of the elevator. Again, it batted its eyes and flew off, returning to nature.

  The sixty-seven-year-old architect concluded, “This situation has its importance!” It symbolized the fleetingness of all experience and the ungraspability of what one thinks one has in hand. “You know the old song: time is merely an endless, terrifying leak,” he wrote.14

  With his dog Pinceau du Val d’Or (Pinceau II) at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli, ca. 1955. Photo by Robert Doisneau

  What counted even more than the rapid flight of time was Le Corbusier’s relationship to the bird’s housing. Having tried to use a box—constructed by an alien species and made of materials completely foreign to a magpie—at least he had then had the wisdom to include elements of the little creature’s indigenous housing. Nonetheless, having used every means at his disposal—his own cupped hands, the ladder—to care for the wounded animal, he had, in the long run, failed to exercise control, however well meant, and the bird had eluded him. Nature had prevailed; he was humbled by its force.

  7

  At the start of June, Le Corbusier made a quick trip to Ronchamp, his last before its inauguration. For two days, he was on his feet there from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., installing the windows and altars.

  When he got back to Paris, he wrote his mother that he was anticipating eighteen thousand people at the opening ceremonies. On the other hand, it was not necessary for her and Albert to attend. Le Corbusier attempted to explain why: he would not be available to them during the proceedings, and he was going to flee the scene the moment the official acts were over. He could not imagine, besides, how all those people would reach the church on the one footpath. He also advised that it was a longer distance from Vevey than they realized. He proposed that his brother and mother see the new chapel in July, instead. He would happily meet them there for such an encounter.

  None of these was the real reason Le Corbusier did not want Marie and Albert on the scene.

  In the same letter where the architect spun out his fatuous excuses, he continued, “One request in this matter: suppress all declarations like: we Protestants; wir schweizer; etc. I’ve made a perilous work. Rome has its eye on me. The cabals need only a spark.”15 He did not want to disabuse anyone of the false assumption that he was Catholic.

  Le Corbusier became even more adamant in a letter he wrote his mother and brother on June 23, the day before he left for the opening. Reminding them that they would see Ronchamp in July, he asked, as if he could not remember, if he had already written them on the subject of their discretion. In case he had not, he now instructed, “Don’t go shouting: 1. We Protestants…2. We, Le Corbusier’s mother and brother…3. We Swiss…etc. Forgive me, but understand: there will be eulogies…. You understand, don’t you, or do I have to send smoke signals???”16

  Le Corbusier told them about an “imbécile” from the Chicago Tribune who had asked him if to build Ronchamp it was necessary to be a Catholic. The architect replied, “Foutez moi le camp!” On the edge of panic about what his mother and brother might reveal, he snapped, “Like the American journalists, you specialize in insolent questions!”17

  He instructed Marie and Albert that surely they did not want to make his life any harder. The upcoming inauguration of his building at Nantes—scheduled for July 2—was bringing out the foxes and jackals; he begged for support and sympathy.

  He was, he told them, in a state of exhaustion. He had been summoned by telegram to help advise on the new capital of Brazil, but it was all too much for him. Yvonne was even more unwell—too incapacitated to attend the Ronchamp inauguration. He now gave arthritis as the cause.

  Two days after he wrote that entreaty, the crowd at Ronchamp cheered Le Corbusier as one of the creative giants of the twentieth century. But Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was still determined that his mother and brother recognize the difficulty of his lot in life. He was counting on them, for once, to go easy on him—and to guard their silence.

  LV

  I improvised, crazed by the music…. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

  —JOSEPHINE BAKER, ON HER PERFORMANCE WITH THE REVUE NÈGRE IN 1925

  1

  On June 25, 1955, when the chapel at Ronchamp opened to the public, the event was instantly recognized as a milestone in postwar cultural history. The time had come to be receptive to modernism—to endorse what was daring and untraditional—rather than to risk being guilty of committing the sin of the famous rejections that had thwarted Manet, van Gogh, and the Fauves in their heyday. However outraged the critics and public were in private, they had now learned to act respectfully. Reading Le Figaro’s coverage of the inauguration of “the chapel built by Le Corbusier” over its morning café au lait, the French public now knew the architect’s name as a household word that warranted respect.1

  Under brilliant sunshine, the day’s events began at 8:30 a.m. at the local town hall, where Mayor Pheulpin made Le Corbusier an honorary citizen of the town of Ronchamp. From there, a cortege formed, headed by the local band, and proceeded to the monument to the dead. A spray of flowers was placed on the impressive pyramid of discarded stones. Previously, such monuments to victims of war tended to be figurative sculpture, often with Latin inscriptions. Now the crowd stood for a minute of silence before something that resembled a heap of rocks. What Le Corbusier had spontaneously erected on the chapel grounds was the perfect physical equivalent of that silence.

  At 9:30, further dignitaries arrived in their official cars at the bottom of the steep path. They walked up and joined the rest of the assemblage in the chapel itself.

  Le Corbusier had asked Edgard Varèse, the composer whose work he had admired in New York eight years earlier, to produce music that would somehow be recorded in a
linear way—on a ribbon or wide thread—and could be cut into morsels by a music director during the opening. Varèse had declined. Some of the music performed during the inauguration was almost as modern—“Te Deum” by Marc-Antoine Charpentier; “Apparition de l’Eglise Eternelle, les enfants de Dieu, les Bergers, Jésus accepte la souffrance” by Olivier Messiaen; “Symphonie de Psaumes” by Igor Stravinsky—but there was also the traditional “Enveillez-vous” and “Grand Prélude” by Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Alfred Canet, secretary of the real-estate company that had diligently overseen the development of this unusual project, publicly gave the new building to the archbishop of Besançon, Monseigneur Dubois. The Belfort newspaper reported: “An especially moving moment, for it was the workman on the land who offered his labor to the Lord and Master of all things.”2

  The archbishop quoted Minister of Reconstruction Roger Duchet’s praise of the local authorities for having had “one of the masters of contemporary architecture” replace the destroyed sanctuary.3 Following that discourse, Eugène Claudius-Petit, General Touzet du Vigier—a member of the Force Française Libre (FFL) who had been a companion of De Gaulle’s in North Africa—and Le Corbusier himself could all be seen praying respectfully. No one seemed aware that the architect descended from the sort of Protestants who during the Reformation had pillaged the edifices of Roman Catholicism.

  Further officials and dignitaries gave speeches emphasizing the tragedy that had befallen the previous chapel and affirmed the wish that the new structure would serve pilgrims as its predecessor had. Canet offered profuse thanks to “the leading architect of our time who, with an exceptional team, accomplished this work he holds so dear to his heart.” He ended by reciting the prayer that King Solomon had offered Almighty God on the day of the dedication of the Temple at Jerusalem: “Grant to all peoples who climb toward…this house we have built for You…in order to offer You prayers, and grant us Forgiveness, Justice and Peace.”4

  Le Corbusier repeated the realtor’s gesture of publicly handing the building over to the archbishop. Man’s work was being given to the representative of God. He underlined the religiosity of the chapel and the way it conformed to aspects of a traditional ecclesiastical program, while pointing out its ability to serve nonpractitioners as well: “In building this chapel I wish to create a place of silence, of prayer, of peace, of inner joy. The sentiment of the sacred animated our effort. Certain things are sacred, others are not, whether or not they are religious.”5

  The architect singled out Maisonnier and Savina—the two craftspeople with whom he had worked most closely—and praised all the other engineers, workers, and administrators who had figured out the mathematics and systems necessary for the construction of this complicated building.

  Then, carefully, and with a brevity unusual for him, Le Corbusier specified the ways in which the chapel honored Catholic liturgical tradition: “Certain scattered signs…and certain written words express the praise of the Virgin. The cross—the true cross of torment—is installed within this ark: the Christian drama has henceforth taken possession of the site.”6

  It was an occasion for him to be humble and unassuming. Yvonne, as a Catholic, would surely have been pleased. There was no way she could have made it up the footpath to the actual scene, but he would tell her about it. Addressing himself specifically to the archbishop, Le Corbusier concluded his remarks, “Excellency, I deliver to you this chapel of loyal concrete, built boldly perhaps, certainly with courage and the hope that it will find in you, as in those who climb the hill, an echo to what all of us have inscribed herein.”7

  While the architect underlined the religiosity, the archbishop praised the modernism. Monseigneur Dubois called the chapel a “witness to the faith of new times.” It was as if he had boned up on Le Corbusier’s history and the goals with which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and Amédée Ozenfant had launched L’Esprit Nouveau more than three decades earlier. The religious leader then declared, “Maître, you have performed an act of courage in creating such a work.”8 Dubois said that the new chapel honored the tradition of thirteenth-century cathedrals as “an act of optimism, a gesture of courage, a sign of pride, a proof of mastery.”9

  Dubois pointed out that, three years earlier, Le Corbusier had told Claudius-Petit he had created l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille “‘for men.’ Here, Monsieur, you have labored for a greater master: for God and for Our Lady. You feel this: the soul of the true ‘radiant city’ is here, on this hill.”10

  For a cleric to be so knowledgeable about the architect’s work and intentions was unusual. His recognizing and publicly acknowledging the consistency and continuity of Le Corbusier’s life’s work and the extent of his dedication to the goal of making the world a better place was a small miracle on the holy site.

  Mass was performed. The archbishop gave his benediction and “by special favor, grants an indulgence to those who have associated themselves with this benediction.”11

  The crowd returned to the pyramid made from the stone of the destroyed chapel. It was then officially dedicated to the memory of those who died during the liberation of France. Two generals presided; the flags of the FFL were ceremoniously placed on the monument by a group of veterans. “General Touzet du Vigier evoked, with the simplicity and feeling of a great-hearted man, the harsh battles which took place on this hill and which this monument commemorates.” The general adjured, “Our Lady, take under protection those who died for France.” One must never forget “those who have given their lives so that there shall be no more division, hatred, and war.”12

  A representative of a veterans’ organization offered sympathy to the families of the dead, and “The Marseillaise” was sung. Probably no one present realized that, while the dead people now being honored had been fighting France’s invaders, Le Corbusier had been working away in Vichy.

  2

  Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is either instantly healed or goes mad.

  —HENRY MILLER, The Colossus of Maroussi

  The morning that had started in bright sunshine turned torrid, and then the sky became stormy. But the weather cleared again, and a light breeze offered relief from the heat. Four hundred people were given lunch in a vast metal hangar erected nearby. Le Corbusier granted interviews to journalists. According to one account, “He rather disappointed us by the slightly ironic tone he gave to his answers…. Then he surprised us by these statements: ‘I have performed my little task…. If what I have done is understood (apropos of the motifs decorating the doors of the sanctuary) I have succeeded; if not, it is a failure; I have in my pocket a child’s drawing; I do not know what it is, but he surely knows.’”13

  As people were finishing their lunch, the ceremonies ended with “the solemn salutation.” A number of those present had made the long journey because the following day, Sunday, was to be the official beginning of “the era of new pilgrimages,” one local newspaper reported. Almost everyone there was visibly moved by both the building and the words used to sanctify it. One local journalist referred to “the generosity of the faithful” that had made possible this sanctuary, “whose dazzling whiteness emerges from a nest of foliage to be silhouetted against our country’s sky.”14 The architect who had designed it was just one of the thousands of people in a state of transport.

  RONCHAMP ENABLED Le Corbusier to articulate the true merits of his own achievement with new authority and simplicity. While he was glib with the journalists, in his public address he had told his audience, “The premises begin to be radiant. Physically they are radiant.”15

  The architect expressed his foremost goal: his burning wish to give all people—ever
y stranger who might enter one of his buildings at any moment—uplifting and salubrious experiences. There were “things no one may violate: the secret in each individual, a great limitless void where one may lodge one’s own notion of the sacred—an individual, totally individual notion. This is also called conscience, and it is an instrument for measuring responsibilities or outpourings ranging from the tangible to the ineffable.”16

  “Ineffable” was one of the words he used time and again, because the concept of what was too great to be expressed in words, and too sacred to be uttered, was of such vital importance to him. For all of his cynicism about human greed and intransigence, Le Corbusier believed that everyone responded to visual wonder, that it opened up the heart.

  The inauguration ceremony at Ronchamp on June 26, 1955

  However misguided some of Le Corbusier’s decisions—aspects of the Plan Voisin; the attempted collaboration with the authorities in Vichy—his instinct had always been the same: to provide each and every human being with the palpable pleasures of which architecture is capable. In Ronchamp, the devices, at least as he described them, were simple enough: “curved volumes generated and regulated by straight lines…a kind of acoustic sculpture of nature,” evidence that “architecture is forms, volumes, color, acoustics, music.” In summation, he declared, “Architecture is an act of love, not a stage set.”17

  The impulse to tap into clandestine sources of spiritual feeling had inspired the shelves with which Le Corbusier had fit his brother’s room in the house that had wrecked the family’s finances; the ramps of the Villa La Roche; the soaring entrance at the Cité de Refuge; the colorful facade of l’Unité d’Habitation; and the amusement park of vision offered by the great public buildings of Chandigarh. At Ronchamp, the “act of love” was the most rapturous yet.