Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Convinced more than ever that the drive for personal advancement and the hunger for money were destroying the world, Le Corbusier, at such moments, was not in his right mind.

  6

  When Le Corbusier witnessed humanity and generosity, however, he heaped praise in the same extreme manner that he unleashed rage. In 1956, Jean Prouvé, with whom Le Corbusier had periodically collaborated on housing ideas, made a small, simple prefabricated house on the banks of the Seine. Its concrete base sat on a bed of stones. The main materials were aluminum and Bakelite; its “bloc sanitaire,” which contained the heating, toilets, bathroom, and kitchen, was manufactured elsewhere and lowered in place by a crane. Le Corbusier was unstinting in his admiration for the intelligence and modesty of this low-cost dwelling, calling it “the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen: the most perfect way to live, the most thrilling thing ever constructed.”20

  Le Corbusier still had his own hopes of improving human existence. There were more than twenty new projects on the drafting tables at 35 rue de Sèvres that year, even more in 1957. They ranged from chapels in six different locations in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany to a hospital in Flers in Normandy; a hotel in Berlin; an apartment building for UN employees in New York (remarkably enough); a congress hall in Thun, Switzerland; a new plan for Les Halles; an ashram in India; a psychiatric hospital in Amsterdam; an art center in Nice; an office building for Air France in Paris; Unités d’Habitation and apartment buildings at locations all over France; and private villas from Nice to Caracas. But not one of these was built.

  He now weathered most of his defeats with grace, but what happened following another conference on urbanism in Berlin devastated him. Le Corbusier was one of 13 architects, out of 151, who had made the short list for developing a new urban scheme there. His plans were then rejected. Le Corbusier was convinced they would have won had not Walter Gropius, who was to be on the jury and would have supported him, become ill. Le Corbusier no longer expected every one of his ideas to succeed, but the hope of redesigning the metropolis where he had once slaved away for Peter Behrens had tantalized him.

  Yvonne in 1949

  When he was in Paris, he painted or worked on sculpture or tapestries every single day. But Yvonne had become so difficult that the architect could never stay home for long. Then, once he was away, he became desperate. “Dearest Von, I love you more than ever…that’s how it is!” He sent her articles about the effects of smoking and lectured in letters that all the pastis was killing her appetite. Knowing she would explode at being given any advice face-to-face, he wrote,

  Your health is in your hands. You are amazingly healthy—an iron constitution.

  You’ve had one bad deal: your bones.

  You don’t take care of them.

  You’ve got prescriptions.

  You don’t buy the medicines.

  You have no notion of the life I lead. Anyone else would have croaked long since!

  So help yourself, and heaven will help you…. And so will I, who have retained all my affection for you and also (yes!) my admiration. You can work miracles. Do it!21

  In letter after letter as he traveled, Le Corbusier begged his wife to be kind, praised her, urged her to eat, and insisted she take better care of herself—starting with having X-rays. He referred, on April 4, 1957, to “36 [sic] years of perfectly happy life thanks to you.”22 Three weeks later, he wrote about “all that you’ve been for me: an empress’s daughter giving despotic commands and a childish waif so sweet, so pretty, so full of charm, so loving (behind her grumpy facade).”23

  Le Corbusier was still obsessed.

  7

  In 1957, Le Corbusier and Yvonne spent their usual August holiday at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Jean Petit visited them that summer and was struck by the robustness of the septuagenarian Le Corbusier. On one occasion, however, Petit was alarmed by the sight of him struggling to climb back out of the sea: “Just as he grabbed the iron ladder to climb back up out of the water, a stronger wave prevented him. Then another. Each time, he was pushed back and violently crushed against the rocks. After several attempts which I watched helplessly, he managed to get up onto land, green rather than white. After having caught his breath, he told me: ‘You see, the Creator is always there to remind playboys like me that they’re not much, and that’s just when you have to react, when you have to fight back.’”24

  AFTER “M. ET MME. LE CORBUSIER” returned to Paris that autumn, Yvonne began to fall even more frequently while still failing to recognize the pain of her own broken bones. At moments, however, she again started joking—overwhelming Le Corbusier with her good spirit and warm heart. When she died at four in the morning on October 5, 1957, the day before Le Corbusier’s seventieth birthday, her husband was holding her hand.

  Le Corbusier wrote that his wife passed from life “in silence and utter serenity. I was with her at the clinic for eight hours, watching her—quite the opposite of a nursling—taking leave of life with the spasms and mumblings in a tête-à-tête that lasted the whole night. She departed before dawn.”25

  Even if the very end was graceful after all those years of misery, Le Corbusier was devastated. To friends he sent out a reproduction of a drawing of his and her hands clasped together, but no form of memorial was sufficient to assuage his despair.

  AS WITH HIS FATHER, following Yvonne’s death he voiced only unequivocal love and admiration for an individual he deemed totally selfless and kind and the soul of goodness: “A high-hearted, strong-willed woman, of great integrity and propriety. Guardian angel of the hearth, of my hearth, for 36 [sic] years. Beloved by everyone, adored by the simple and the rich alike for the pure riches of her heart. She measured people and things by that scale alone. Queen of a tiny fervent world. An example for many, and entirely without imitators. In my ‘poem of the right angle’ she occupies the central place: characters E3. She lies on her bed in the guest room, straight as a tomb figure, with her mask of magisterial country bones. On this day, feeling calm, I can believe death is not a horror.”26

  The crusty and often outrageous Yvonne Gallis was, indeed, for people like the young Robert Rebutato and the fishermen at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, every bit as decent and amiable as her husband remembered. She was as addicted to acts of generosity as to alcohol. Even when the former beauty had completely disintegrated emotionally and physically, her deep-seated kindness, complete indifference to pretension, and Mediterranean earthiness had remained intact. Toward the end, Yvonne had developed the habit of giving cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes—the amount had expanded from mere packages—even to strangers. It was an extraordinary gesture, especially for a frugal person. Many people who met Yvonne remembered that eccentricity above all else.

  Though the creature Le Corbusier had saved in the Bois de Boulogne had flown to freedom, this wounded bird had stayed. She was always at home, and her need for him was a rare constant in his tumultuous life. He had no children, but she played, in many ways, the role of a needy child. She was the one person in the world who depended on Le Corbusier completely, and acknowledged it.

  In his own way, Le Corbusier had adored his wife and never failed to provide for her. In return, this kindhearted, tough, temperamental woman was a source of stability that energized him. And even though she hurled verbal abuse at him, Yvonne, unlike his mother, revered Edouard—not as an architect, but as a man.

  A WEEK AFTER Yvonne died, Le Corbusier responded to a condolence letter from Pierre Jeanneret, who was in India. Thanking his cousin for the, precious comfort his words had given, he wrote, “Her death revealed Yvonne in a luminous intensity transcending anything imaginable. She (Yvonne) is in the hearts of so many people. In addition to these words, I think I can report that there is no reason to be pessimistic about the concluding work on the Capitol. Someone high up is watching over the future. I have my contacts. Perseverance. It would take only a moment of inattention for a collapse into the kingdom of failure of an enterprise which, by the en
ergy of 4 or 5 individuals, may just as well terminate with a magnificent burst of brilliance. Impossible to say just when I can get to Chandigarh. Wait for November.”27

  Not everyone would have jumped so instinctively from the subject of his recently dead wife to the challenges of making architecture. But Le Corbusier was ready to get back to work.

  The issue with which he was wrestling above all others was human goodness. There were people like Yvonne who were decent and emotionally honest, and then there were bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and authority figures who applied their power unworthily. The world of architecture was full of vipers; he had needed this rare woman with whom he had no doubt where he stood. Life was a battle in which one side acted out of kindness and good intentions, the other out of selfishness and cruelty. For all their intellectual differences, for all her eventual toughness and all his errant ways, Yvonne and Le Corbusier, two strangers in the world, had been good to each other.

  LVII

  1

  One of Le Corbusier’s most provocative buildings no longer exists except in photographs. The Philips Pavilion, erected for the 1958 Exposition Universelle in Brussels, was a multifaceted structure that resembled gigantic tents impossibly interlocked, simultaneously collapsing and inflated.

  Here, too, Le Corbusier had initially said no to the project. Early in 1956, representatives from Philips had approached him with the proposition; compared to all he was working on in India and elsewhere, a 6,500-square-foot space was not of much interest. Then Philips, a leading manufacturer of lighting and sound equipment, assured Le Corbusier access to all the latest technology that would enable him to integrate the most advanced sound and lighting devices into his architecture.

  With that idea in mind, Le Corbusier was inspired one Sunday morning walking his dog in the Bois de Boulogne. He used the third person to describe the arrival of the idea in his mind: “He sees several notions gradually appear: light, color, rhythm, sound, image…psychophysiological sensations: red, black, yellow, green, blue, white. Possibility of recalls, of evocations: dawn, fire, storm, ineffable sky…. Measurement of time: rhythm, elegy and catastrophes.”1 It would be an “electronic poem.”

  Le Corbusier conceived of a carefully programmed spectacle through which visitors would walk over a prescribed period of time inside an organic structure. In ambient darkness, there would be a violent performance of colored neon lights and images projected on the walls. A sound program by Edgard Varèse would accompany the visual shifts. The total visit would take eight minutes, during which seven minute-long films separated by brief interludes of darkness would be shown in sequence.

  Varèse’s involvement was central to the architect’s thinking. He wrote the composer, “I hope this will please you. It will be the first truly electric work and with symphonic power.” Varèse replied, “I find your project superb…. I accept with great pleasure your offer of collaboration…. Like you and the Philips company, the only thing in which I am interested is to give birth to ‘the most extraordinary thing possible.’”2

  The Philips Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle of 1958

  When the people at Philips voiced fear about the effects on the audience of the composer’s unusual electronic score, Le Corbusier supported his fellow modernist with the loyalty he expected others to display for him: “There can be no question, not even for a minute, that I will renounce Varèse. If that should happen, I will withdraw from the project. This is a very serious matter. My reputation is at stake as is that of Philips. My life has been a succession of efforts and battles. The UN in New York was built on my plans (stolen)…. I have written more than 40 books.”3

  Le Corbusier convinced his clients to accept Varèse’s combination of percussion and the sounds of machinery: “rattles, whistlers, thunders and murmurs”—as they were eventually characterized by the New York Times critic, who called the building “the strangest exhibit at the Brussels World’s Fair.”4 Sirens of the type used on ambulances and police cars vied with screeches that were like the cries of tropical birds on a desert island and with deep animal roars. By calling on Edgard Varèse, the architect had summoned everything he believed in: bold modernism, the timeless forces of the universe, and the spirit of the automobile, all combined.

  2

  After engaging Varèse and conceiving of the pavilion as a building without a facade, to be made from the inside out, accommodating Varèse’s sequence of sounds and allowing for the seven films, Le Corbusier assigned much of the design process to Iannis Xenakis, one of the younger architects on his staff. Xenakis, born in Romania in 1922, had studied engineering before fighting for the Greek resistance; after his radical politics led him to flee to France in 1947, he had been hired to work at 35 rue de Sèvres. Since 1951, he had been concentrating on l’Unité at Nantes and then on La Tourette.

  Iannis Xenakis’s lack of formal training in architecture in no way bothered the master. Moreover, the young man, handsome in spite of a severe face wound that cost him his sight in one eye, was a great advocate of the Modulor. Also a composer, he had written the seven-minute-long “Metastasis,” performed by sixty-one instruments, with the Modulor and its proportions and divisions as its basis. Xenakis wrote two minutes of music for the Philips project, to be played between presentations as one audience left and another filed in.

  While Le Corbusier was in India, Xenakis came up with the scheme of the building as it was constructed, sketching the hyperbolic paraboloid forms and making a model in which he used piano wire and thread. Guided by the structure of shells, Xenakis unquestionably followed Le Corbusier’s lead and accepted the idea that the requirements within the container must determine its external appearance, but then he devised shapes far from Le Corbusier’s initial idea.

  In July 1957, Le Corbusier visited the Philips headquarters in Eindhoven to learn more about the technical requirements for the Electronic Poem. During his August holiday in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, he ruminated on it, and in September the model for the pavilion was published in the magazine Combat. The design was attributed solely to Le Corbusier.

  Xenakis was appalled. He wrote Louis Kalff, the art director at Philips, demanding that his name appear alongside Le Corbusier’s. Kalff turned him down, explaining that Philips had commissioned Le Corbusier, who had conceived and developed the plan, which Xenakis had then simply sheathed. Attribution would be given to Philips, Le Corbusier, and Varèse—and no one else. Kalff assured him, however, that articles and histories of the building would acknowledge Xenakis’s role.

  Le Corbusier became enraged that Xenakis, his employee, had been directly in touch with a client without his permission. The master advised Kalff to “take a panoramic glance” at the six volumes of his Complete Work. Kalff would discover that Le Corbusier had never “personally drawn a line on a drafting table. Consequently I authorize you to agree that it was not I who designed the palace of the League of Nations nor the Centrosoyuz nor the Mundaneum nor the World Headquarters of the United Nations in New York nor the Villa Savoye nor the villa at Garches nor the plan for Bogotá nor the plan of Meaux nor the chapel at Ronchamp nor even the apartment in which I live on rue Nungesser-et-Coli. However, the following fact will appear curious: among the 250 architects who over thirty years have formed the studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, not one has appeared on the professional horizon…. All this is quite troubling, don’t you think?”5

  Le Corbusier then resorted, as usual when he was piqued, to downplaying the conflict as if everyone other than he was simply being childish: “It frequently happens that the team is convinced that it is driving the carriage. Let’s not give this incident greater importance than that of a violent outburst of a temperament itself violent.”6

  FOUR DAYS AFTER WRITING to Kalff, Le Corbusier decided that the wording engraved in concrete on the front of the pavilion, to appear in all future publications, was to read “Philips–Le Corbusier (coll. Xenakis) Varèse.” That this would make sense to the general public is unlikely,
but the master had spoken. Xenakis was sufficiently satisfied to continue working at the Philips project, on La Tourette, and then on the stadium in Baghdad.

  But the affair was not over. Following the summer holiday in August 1959, Xenakis and two of his closest colleagues in Le Corbusier’s studio returned to 35 rue de Sèvres to find the doors locked and their keys no longer working. Shortly thereafter, Xenakis received a letter that begins, “Modern architecture triumphs in France; it has been adapted. Today you may find a field of application for everything which you have acquired by yourself as well as through your work with me.”7

  Xenakis was shattered. A year later, when he and Le Corbusier met at the inauguration of La Tourette, in an astounding about-face, Le Corbusier asked him to return to 35 rue de Sèvres as architect in chief. Xenakis replied that he now only wanted to compose music. He never again practiced architecture.

  3

  At the start of 1958, the town of Poissy insisted that the Villa Savoye be torn down so a school could be constructed on the site. Since French law did not permit “historical monument” status for buildings when the designers were still alive, there were no legal grounds for saving Le Corbusier’s masterpiece of the 1920s. Distinguished supporters from all over the world sent telegrams, but the bulldozers were scheduled.