THE EVENING AFTER the inauguration, some journalists asked Le Corbusier if he was happy with the way the day had gone. Repeating one of his lines from the early afternoon, he replied, “Why happy? I have performed my little task. Today that has provoked speeches that give pleasure to those who uttered them. Probably less to those who heard them. In any case, I hope to deliver a great blow to both the detractors of my architecture and to my imitators, those who imagine that architecture can be reduced to formulas. This possession of Ronchamp by the Catholic cult was extremely beautiful, very precise. It was the most precise moment of the whole day.”18
3
Normally, Le Corbusier wrote his mother and Albert together. On June 27, he wrote to her alone from Ronchamp. However assiduously he had encouraged her absence, he was desperate to share the thrill of his acclaim and his achievement with her. At the same time, he reiterated his warnings about the risks of anyone knowing the family’s background.
The letter was both a boast and a supplication. At the ceremonies on Saturday, Le Corbusier told “ma chère Petite Maman,” “Everything was cheer, beauty, spiritual splendor. Your Le Corbusier was honored to the highest degree. Considered. Loved. Respected.”19
Then he explained how delicate the situation was. For Ronchamp was a revolutionary work of architecture—radical in its approach to the Catholic rites and ritual: “By my architecture, worship is raised to the highest degree, purified, restored to the Gospels.”20 The best of the priests acknowledged this cheerfully. The opposition did not.
The architect’s attitude was grounded in reality but had a paranoiac tinge. He drove home the main points to his mother as if he were depicting a Last Judgment to an illiterate child. Repeating almost verbatim his dread of the response from the Vatican, he wrote, “Everything was joy and enthusiasm. BUT, the devil must be sneering in a corner, and it is his custom not to remain idle. Rome is keeping an eye on Ronchamp. I am expecting storms. And even vile and contemptible actions. That is why I myself have been, by necessity, vile and contemptible in making my recommendations to you on these three points. But I have no right to cease being vigilant.”21
He instructed his mother to go to Ronchamp, to open all the doors he had made there, not merely to see the interior but to enjoy her right to go behind the altar and climb the sacristy staircase. He sketched a bird’s-eye view of the church plan for her, drawing arrows to indicate the path she would take.
Then, in his endless attempt to please and humor her, he reported that at the inaugural banquet he had been seated to the right of the archbishop (a title he underlined to emphasize its importance) and across from the minister when the archbishop spoke about “L-C’s mother (because of the dedication to When the Cathedrals Were White).”22 He was determined that this dedication—“TO MY MOTHER, a woman of courage and faith”—reside at the forefront of her thoughts.
Le Corbusier had asked the archbishop to write her a postcard, which he enclosed. On its face, it showed a detail of the dramatically sculpted rough concrete of the church exterior. A massive, eyebrowlike corner of the roof, as well as the outdoor pulpit, are in view. On the other side, in neat script, is written, “For Monsieur Le Corbusier’s venerable mother, ‘a woman of courage and faith’ whom I had the joy to invoke this morning in the cool, bright chapel created by the heartfelt intelligence of her son”—signed by Marcel-Marie Dubois, the archbishop of Besançon.23
To a stalwart Calvinist, the praises from within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church may have meant little. But her son continued to try to make her proud.
4
The moment you glimpse Ronchamp from the valley below, you are drawn to it as to a powerful magnet. As you approach, the experiences multiply, with a lot happening all at once. The giant ram’s horn of a roof seems audible; concrete has been given the lightness of sound. It is a holy, resonant tone. Then there are the unusual forms of the towers, like giant periscopes, and the apparent faces on the many walls. Some of the masses are anchored; others soar.
Once you have taken in the forms, you notice the shadows—as important to the appearance of the building as what is solid. The roofline imprints itself on the surrounding grass and then moves. Other shadows resemble eyes and mouths and noses, so that Ronchamp sees and breathes, and gives out energy.
The chapel has a circulatory system that connects it to the natural climate. The flow of water off the roof, down the drainpipes, and out the spouts is emphasized by the overstated nostril-like gargoyles and the catch basins that receive the melted snow and summer rain.
At age twenty-one, when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret looked out of his window on the quai Saint-Michel and gazed at flying buttresses atop Notre-Dame, those fantastic jutting protuberances represented a language of hope and possibility after the clay-footed blocks of La Chaux-de-Fonds. Now he used architecture to express faith and optimism.
Inside the chapel, the tiny cracks of light between the immense sagging roof and the tops of the looming white walls resemble the slim lines of daylight seeping through the logs of those granges on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds. He built Ronchamp out of concrete, but he also constructed it out of daylight (see color plates 18 and 19). And then he augmented the composition with color; the deep red of the walls of one of the side chapels evokes the blood of Christ, making that particular space feel like the chamber of a beating heart.
When you walk toward the altar, every step yields a change. Colors beckon you; their aftereffects come and go. Turn from one of the intense painted glass windows and then look at a massive white wall; you will see, briefly, that same red or yellow. That brief encounter with an illusory hue is the sort of psychic event Le Corbusier loved to orchestrate.
The tilt of the floor, the irregular and shifting depths of the windows, the helter-skelter pattern of some of the openings, and the roof that for all of its weight floats ethereally give a sense of sheer liberty. At the same time, there are traditional religious motifs. An arrangement of seven panes of glass refers to the seven sacraments; three windows evoke the Trinity; cruciform shapes are everywhere.
On the outside, nature changes the building perpetually. For Ronchamp is a transmitter for the cosmos, wearing a different covering with every movement of the clouds. Inside, the light shifts constantly, causing an ongoing performance. Le Corbusier has given his real gods—the universal forces worshipped in India as by the ancient Greeks—a modern temple.
LE CORBUSIER’S great admirer, Father Alain Couturier, an expert on modern ecclesiastical architecture, had understood why this was, indeed, a sacred space. Two years prior to Ronchamp’s opening, Couturier had written:
At first the extreme novelty of these forms will be surprising, but in short order…the sacred character is affirmed everywhere, and first of all by that very novelty, that unexpected aspect….
We may assert that it is in such edifices that we accede to that higher type of architecture which transcends pure functionalism and in which the dignity of functions is directly manifest (and already operative) in the beauty of the forms. In religious structures, these things assume their entire meaning: for a truly sacred edifice is not a profane edifice rendered sacred by a consecrating rite for its eventual use (as was recently written in an extremely ill-considered article); a sacred edifice is already sacred and substantially so by the very quality of its forms.24
Le Corbusier himself said of Ronchamp, “All I know is that every man has the religious sentiment of being part of the human capital…. I bring so much effusion and intense interior life to my work that it has this quasi-religious aspect, by which I mean to say that it is not an emotion of pounding drums.”25
It is as if what Bach discovered about the direct effects of certain musical cadences on the humor of the brain—and what experts in brain chemistry have found in the realm of psychopharmaceutical medicines—Le Corbusier had instinctively recognized about the effects of movement through architectural space and the sight of certain visual leaps and turns. Color, t
oo, had those magical abilities that he cultivated; in combination with ever-moving form, it can impart well-being.
This amalgam of Stonehenge, Noah’s ark, and a spaceship, as infused by faith as the soaring Gothic cathedrals and as radical as Picasso’s boldest canvases, as true to the immediate necessities of construction and shelter as a cormorants’ nest on a remote island, and as sophisticated as the music of Stravinsky, evokes so many comparisons because, while being unprecedented in its architectural vocabulary, it joins them in its authenticity and force and as an embodiment of human courage.
5
Ronchamp is also a private homage made public. Inscribed into the chapel windows in large, bold script, at a low level, are the words “la mer,” the sea. We can also hear it as “la mère,” the mother.
The name “Marie” and the words “full of grace” loom largest of all. To the world at large, that name and description refer to the Holy Virgin, the mother of Jesus. But they are, equally, a reference to Le Corbusier’s private Marie, his own mother, who had also borne a “Le C” who would change the world and sacrifice himself in glorious excruciating martyrdom for his cause.
6
When asked about his intentions for Ronchamp, Le Corbusier had a stock answer: “I am asked what are my secrets for Ronchamp. There are none save a harmonious research among the problems raised. The Gospel: an ethic. The site: the four horizons. The means: a crab shell. Open your eyes and perhaps you will understand. Can the writer assist a man who does not find the meaning of the sentence in the words? One must seek out finesse while preserving force. Not for a moment have I had any notion of creating an object of astonishment. My preparation? A sympathy for others. For the unknown.”26
THE ARCHITECT WORSHIPPED the power of the sun, the wonder of conception and birth, the stupendous construction of all living beings. Ronchamp is their vessel.
He elucidated the visual miracles that many people considered holy. The most salient of these was light, the symbol of the immaculate conception with its ability to pass through glass without breaking it, the incorporeal equivalent of the Holy Ghost: “The key is light, and light illuminates forms. And these forms have an emotive power by the interplay of proportions, the interplay of unexpected stupefying relations. But also by the intellectual interplay of their raison d’être: their authentic birth, their capacity to endure, their structure, their boldness, the interplay of beings which are essential beings, the constituted beings of architecture…. I compose with light.”27
He was also attentive to the traditional religious elements required by his client’s goals. Le Corbusier gave close attention to the holy crosses within the chapel. He made them out of metal and concrete as well as the traditional wood. The symbols of Jesus’s death and martyrdom have physical and psychological weight; just looking at them, you imagine how heavy they are to bear on the shoulders.
When the human-scaled wooden cross made for the altar arrived at the building five days before the inauguration ceremony, Le Corbusier believed that that was the moment when the building ceased being a construction site. He saw it as a silent evocation of the great tragedy that had occurred on the hill of Golgotha and was now being represented on the hill at Ronchamp. Martyrdom was what affected him most of all.
7
The day before the inauguration of Ronchamp, Le Corbusier had begun a letter to Marguerite Tjader Harris that he completed shortly after the chapel opened. At one of the proudest moments of his life, the architect could not get over his regret at abandoning her idea of a colony of small houses where they could have been close to each other: “I am leaving to inaugurate the Chapel of Ronchamp. It will not perhaps be as beautiful as your nunnery at Vikingsborg, which was materially and spiritually inspired by you. I had written you the day after the tidal wave at Cap-Martin. You did not reply. I think you were navigating at the time between heaven and earth. Preferably heaven! As for me I’ve had the most intense regret for having to take the decision I was obliged to make. But the gods wanted me to be present at the tidal wave. I lost several years of work on a theme particularly dear to me. I should consider myself a dishonest or criminal person not to have warned you and to have begun work on the site that was ready for such activity. Hence I had the comfort of your friendship and your kindness in this matter. You have a vision, and that is rare! I was sure of creating something very fine for you. But you know very well that here on earth men do not do all that they desire (nor do women); later we shall speak of this again when we meet in the Upper Regions. But meanwhile I hope to see you again on this earth!”28
In the part he wrote after the opening, Le Corbusier complained about the coverage of the event in The New Yorker for being “without proportion and without much tact.” For all the praise, there were always thorns in his side: “We shall see what we shall see! The architecture of reinforced concrete has entered into the history of pure architecture, and moreover—what is even more amusing—the priests have said that this church inaugurates a new era. I am afraid that the pope is not very happy! He had sent a bishop to supervise the inauguration.”29 He hoped that, while a devout Catholic, Marguerite Tjader Harris would be more lenient.
8
A week after the opening of Ronchamp, Le Corbusier’s second great Unité d’Habitation opened in Rezé, near Nantes. At that ceremony on July 2, the architect publicly addressed himself to the representative of Minister of Reconstruction Duchet: “I am 68 years old. I have achieved a position throughout the world thanks to my researches concerning the structures of a machine civilization. I have created a hearth around the mother of the family, under new conditions of child-raising; I have re-established the ‘conditions of nature.’”30
He had not just made architecture; he had made a pact between humanity and nature. A contemporaneous newspaper pointed out that success: “These tenants, as in Marseilles, have formed an association. Their opinions? Out of 120 families questioned, only two are satisfied, 118 are enthusiastic. And these enthusiasts declare: ‘we prefer to live in the year 2000 rather than vegetating in 1830.’ Certainly this must be said: that everything has been admirably thought out and anticipated. Grouping 294 habitations without achieving a monstrous construction, but on the contrary a haven of peace, that is Le Corbusier’s merit. The labor of the mother of the family has been simplified. A true family hearth has been recreated in each habitation. Le Corbusier distributes freedom, silence, independence, verdure and nature.”31
This bold structure on the outskirts of the commercial capital of Brittany has a force and energy and a use of color all its own. Looming over the landscape, it is rough and impressive, an energizing amalgam of coarse stone and primary colors.
The other buildings of distinction in greater Nantes are charming factories—structures used for the making of biscuits and other butter-based confections indigenous to the region. Their architecture has the pleasurable quality of what they produce. Le Corbusier’s building, with its Modulor carved into the facade and its gigantic pilotis next to which we walk on a floor of flagstones, has gargantuan strength, a crazy vitality. Looming over the flat Loire landscape, its bright panels glistening in the sunlight, its rhythmic facade in nonstop motion, it is another bold declaration of human existence. As at l’Unité at Marseille, Le Corbusier gave people a new way to live.
LVI
1
Yvonne seemed somewhat better that summer. She and Le Corbusier were eager for their annual holiday—she because she had done so little, he because he had done so much. When they arrived in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin at the end of the third week of July, the architect was very pleased because “Vonvon” was able to walk from the train station to the cabanon.
Three weeks into the holiday, he wrote his mother that Yvonne “has the gift of catalyzing the right values. Instinctively she avoids bores and draws good people to her.” One of them, named Vincento, was another of her visitors who came to play the accordion. To his mother, Le Corbusier described his wife’s companion as loo
king like a little monkey and having some of the same attributes as peasant architecture: “He plays like a pair of thumbs, but sensitive thumbs. How far we are from the conservatories! Pieces from the Italian hills, from the mountains, enlivened by answering voices from the audience.”1
With all the acclaim Le Corbusier was enjoying, the rustic getaway at the edge of the Mediterranean was remarkable for its “utter purity…. Not one false note. Everything is natural, healthy, honest, and extraordinarily intelligent. I can’t stand bourgeois performances any more, with their commentaries.” In his high spirits, he read authors who shared that disdain of the bourgeoisie—Rabelais, Villon, Baudelaire, and above all Cervantes. He considered Don Quixote “an inexhaustible book…the finest of all, read and reread these last five years.”2
What an exceptional couple they were in their one-room cabanon (see color plate 16). While Yvonne, in the few hours of the day when she was sober, read, at most, fashion magazines and detective fiction, Le Corbusier, in the respite from his hectic professional life, not only read those masters but also plunged into Homer’s Odyssey.
His mother was mellowing. Marie Jeanneret sent a postcard to him at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin: “My dear boy! There you are, living in the laughing land of the sun, in peace and the joy of life, far from tumultuous Paris…. Repose, yes, you’ve needed that for a long time.” She now called Edouard a “good son and brother.”3
Le Corbusier’s spirits were dampened when Fernand Léger died that summer, but the architect accepted the loss of one of his few longtime friends with resignation. His fellow Chaux-de-Fondian Blaise Cendrars wrote him on the subject: “My dear Le Corbusier,…but fuck the devil! Léger just died, beautifully. He had a seizure, right there where he was standing. I embrace you, Blaise Cendrars.”4 Like Cendrars, Le Corbusier thought it was the right way to go.
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