Whether out of naïveté or blindness, Le Corbusier still believed he might exercise total control over all issues of human habitation and that the world would be better off with new cities designed according to his master plan.
11
On September 10, 1959, the Swiss paper L’Impartial did a major feature on the alleged hundredth birthday of Le Corbusier’s mother. The nearly seventy-two-year-old architect, the article explains, had just arrived from India, having traveled all night to be at the birthday celebration.
“There’s the young lady!” he is quoted as saying. “La jeune fille” was then led to the piano, where she played a few chords. Local children sang the Neuchâtelene hymn in her honor, after which her sons ran around to find tables that could be set up for an impromptu lunch. Marie Jeanneret is taciturn and droll: “‘But you still see the lake from your bed, dear Madame!’ an old friend said to her. ‘When I’m in my bed, Monsieur, I sleep.’”24
On February 15, 1960, the great exemplar of vitality and fortitude died, at what was really the age of ninety-nine. She had been ill a brief two months. The Geneva paper added that she died in her “aluminum” house built by the world-famous Le Corbusier and was also survived by her “second son,” Albert—an error that must have pleased the younger brother immensely.
With his brother and his mother for what was said to be Marie’s hundredth-birthday party
THREE DAYS AFTER the death of their mother, Le Corbusier wrote Albert a letter:
Dear old boy. The black car covered with flowers, with rosy little Maman in her coffin inside, has left on the East Road, miraculously empty of cars, there having been a heavy snowfall, the snow now falling silently. And the hideous red “TOTAL”—the gas truck—has arrived; it had to slow down and line up behind Maman. And everything was hidden and finished in a winter silence as total as in the mountaintops.
All that was simple enough. The two bare-headed brothers saw their mother departing. A mother one hundred years old whose laughter they had been hearing for over 70 years.25
Having been present as well, Albert was not learning anything he did not already know. But a dream Le Corbusier recounted was new to him. It took place “on the Jolimont pier, papa and I arriving in a cloud of steam, young Maman waiting for us in a pink dress and a flat pink hat bristling with artificial pink flowers. Greetings, Albert, from Your Edouard.”26
Le Corbusier illustrated this missive to his brother with a drawing of an elegant young woman, tall and buxom, in a hat. She looks nothing like the person in the hundredth-birthday photos. Rather, she resembles Marguerite Tjader Harris as Le Corbusier drew her on the New York pier.
LVIII
We have been the ones to receive kicks and blows on the nose, the back, the head, or wherever you like. Such things occur. Much work has been done, even so, and I am certain that the next two generations, in fifty years, will have achieved something remarkable. If poetry is not in the facts, it will be in the hearts of men, or in their desire. But they will always argue with one another. There are those who make money out of their ideas, and they will always make money. There are those who put vanity into their ideas, and they will always be vain, and those who have a certain social spirit and who will try to talk together. Which is difficult, for it takes time, and such problems require a long development; they cannot be flipped like a crêpe. This entire task facing modern society is addressed to those who have the desire to give to something and for something. They will be called “dupes” by some of their friends. And “the friends of society” by others. We do not work to be praised, we work out of a duty to our conscience, which is within every man and which is there to tell him whether he is behaving well or badly.
—LE CORBUSIER, ON THE LAST OCCASION OF HIS BEING RECORDED SPEAKING, TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS DEATH
1
Le Corbusier had clandestinely involved Marguerite Tjader Harris in the development of La Tourette. In September 1956, when construction had just begun, Le Corbusier sent a Dominican father to Vikingsborg to meet her and discuss the convent. “Of course these Gentlemen are going to talk finance to you,” he wrote, “but I should like to say something so you will understand that they are doing so with complete disinterest, and I should also like you to know that the Dominicans of Lyon have shown themselves to be magnificently open to the most modern ideas (which moreover as they emerge from the Atelier Le Corbusier turn out to be ideas precisely congruent to the decisive periods of architecture’s birth in the west around 1000 or 1100, at the moment when, at the instigation of St. Bernard, certain monasteries of great architectural power were built, free of any superfluous decoration and representing pure architecture, i.e., architecture only). The Dominicans have had to insure, by a loan or by gifts, the conclusion of their undertaking, that is, the final millions, which extend beyond their budget but which we cannot do without if we want to remain loyal and honest architects.”1
Le Corbusier assured Tjader Harris that she could not possibly put her inheritance to better use. The undertaking was to realize the best ideas of both Father Couturier and himself, an unbeatable combination.
He continued the entreaty with a second missive. Le Corbusier underlined the importance of the project and the courage of his Dominican clients. He had exceeded budget in spite of all of his efforts not to do so but was loath to compromise the integrity of the building. He had agreed to create La Tourette on a shoestring, and while he had complied, they still needed her help.
Le Corbusier made his request, and gave the history of the monastery, with characteristic candor: “God knows you have Ladies and Gentlemen who come fund-raising, since the day your Maman left you more than you need to pay for lunch and dinner every day! But our friend Father Couturier was a master; it was he who got the Monastery of La Tourette going. He died very suddenly in his hospital bed two days after having informed me that he was cured of his muscular asthenia [sic] following the violent shock he received when Rome took her dramatic decisions against the ‘worker priests,’ especially the Dominicans, who had employed nonacademic methods in the practice of their convictions. This monastery of La Tourette is therefore (forgive me) a very strong, valid work to which I have devoted all my talents. I’d be happy to think that when they put fifteen centimeters of soil in which grass will grow and perhaps some tulips and narcissus, ordered from Holland, on the church roof, it will be thanks to your dollars that this smile of the earth could be addressed to the heavens. You are a brave girl. I have nothing but the best memories of you. And you know perfectly well I’m no fund-raiser.”2
There was no chance of Tjader Harris providing financing, however. By now the heiress had paid for a chapel on her Connecticut property, which she had in turn given to a convent. The sisters were settling in, and she was moving into the garage apartment to function as their secretary. She was effusive and admiring to Le Corbusier in response, but her funds were depleted.
As always, she urged the architect to visit, but now with a new twist: “If ever you’d like to get some rest in a northern Convent, surrounded by gracious and silent sisters, come, come and find the Peace of a house of God beside the salt blue sea. (They accept pilgrims, men and young people.)”3
LE CORBUSIER WAITED nearly three years to answer. When he did, he acted as if Tjader Harris’s letter had arrived only the day before.
In 1956, the American divorcée had signed her refusal to fund La Tourette with “all my admiring and affectionate thoughts.” In July of 1959, Le Corbusier wrote her, “You kissed me off in your reply of October 9, surrounding your refusal with any number of kindnesses and favors and even inviting me to visit you as ‘pilgrims, men, or [sic] young people,’ as you put it.”4 Now he was back with a more modest and realistic financial proposition. He was attaching a document with the Dominicans’ needs marked in red. He pointed out that in the previous two years, Ronchamp, which had opened its fantastic door only four years prior to his writing, had seen its annual income from entrance fees rise from four
million to thirty-three million francs. The builders of the church had been penniless at the start; now their courage was paying off. He expected similar success at La Tourette.
Le Corbusier made his entreaty: “Dear Friend, money has to be good for something. If you don’t want to give any, be good enough to contribute to the loan being proposed.” He attached photographs and stated his case: “It’s a crate of ‘divine’ proportions. The interior has a stunning kind of lighting. The walls are entirely raw concrete…. The hundred cells for meditation are oriented around a huge flat surface facing…the sky.” And he summarized his own attitude toward money: “An excess of money is pure sterility. It’s easy for me to say so, since I’ve never had any. And yet…at this very moment there is coming into being a movement for the purchase of painting by Le Corbusier all over Europe. Imagine, Le Corbusier honored everywhere after thirty years of silence! And perhaps I’ll have some change in my pocket. I can assure you quite simply that the vanity of money seems to be an obscenity at this particular moment. So long as people have to fight for life such combat is licit; once the proportions change, the very definition of money is in question once again!”5
Marguerite Tjader Harris, surely, was one person who would understand his personal plight, his frustrations as well as his dreams, and the paramount importance of his architectural goals. “Soon you’ll be taking me for a Preaching Friar; which is hardly the case,” he continued. “I’m leading a terrible life, my travels criss-crossing Europe. They’ll do me in, if it goes on much longer. On August 1, I’m going to see my mother who’ll be a hundred next year. P.S. Last year in Brussels I made a devilish thing: the ‘Electronic Poem’ in the Philips Pavilion. I can promise you it shook out the fleas from those who saw and heard it. But it was a localized manifestation. Now I’m looking for the possibility, in my Monastery, of being able to extend certain sonorous experiments from the Philips Pavilion.”6
Again, Tjader Harris had to turn him down, though she profoundly admired La Tourette: “Everyone is delighted by it—including your humble friend in Darien.” But she was building onto the convent in Connecticut. She had a proposition, however. Le Corbusier could raise funds if he would grant her an interview for the American publication Liturgical Arts. Convinced that such an interview would lead to contributions from readers, the following day she sent questions and ideas for the article in a letter which she signed, “Your secretary, servant, friend…Marguerite.”7
Tjader Harris offered to pick up Le Corbusier at Idlewild Airport, perhaps if he was on his way to Boston to work on the arts center he was undertaking for Harvard University. She amplified the offer with an enticing detail: “I have a shack here, quite nearby, at the sea’s edge, heated and full of tropical plants.”8
By the time Tjader Harris’s letter arrived at 35 rue de Sèvres—following the celebration of that hundredth birthday he had admitted to his lover would actually occur the “next year”—the architect was back in India. His secretary acknowledged its receipt and forwarded it to him. Le Corbusier answered four months later by having the secretary write on his behalf: “Madame, M. Le Corbusier will be in India until approximately May 15. He would have liked to write you personally, but he has requested me to inform you that since the New Year began he had been leading a very fatiguing life. Having been ill in January and February, his work has accumulated, and he was subsequently obliged to make four successive trips in less than a month.”9
Their relationship was not yet over, however. Le Corbusier and Marguerite Tjader Harris were to see each other one more time.
2
Six years after Marie-Alain Couturier died, Le Corbusier did justice to his patron’s vision and completed the monastery complex.
La Tourette looms large on the hillside. Like Iviron on Mount Athos, it initially appears top-heavy. The windows and pilotis of the bold convent give the illusion of hanging loosely from a roof that is mysteriously fixed in place, like a taut curtain rod without visible supports. While in truth the vertical structure within the walls holds up the top, it appears like a religious miracle—as if what is above is floating in space independently, with everything else suspended from it.
This unusual building is exciting but discomfiting. It does not soothe or welcome. Its surface of rough reinforced concrete is cold, and its complex fenestration is challenging, full of shadows and of suggestions of what is unknown and cannot be seen. The structure echoes the rugged and somewhat secretive lives of its inhabitants.
Once you are inside, La Tourette resembles a grim high school or administrative building, with dark corridors going in myriad directions. But then you reach the church. The experience is without precedent. Like Ronchamp and the interior of the auditorium of the General Assembly at Chandigarh, this place demonstrates Le Corbusier’s unequaled imagination. It reveals artistic bravery and gives courage.
The church offers the celebration born of tragedy. A tall, generous space, it feels like a small, heavenly city. Yet it is a cavern that conjures those underground refuges in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret found safety during the bombings of 1917—deep, dark spaces with light seeping in from above. It also recalls the tall, unadorned barn at La Chaux-de-Fonds, similarly illuminated mostly from above. This stark interior like a gigantic cellar is hard to reckon with. It is unbelievable that the heavy blocks that make up the flat ceiling above don’t fall and crush us. Yet they float ethereally over the narrow clerestory windows.
To look up and around and walk through the space is to have one jolt after another. The colors beneath the bands of fenestration are bold and powerful. The pitch-blackness in front of the organ suggests the power of music that will emanate through the church. The altar, again with unexpected colors, is a surprise. Compared to the Baroque church within the monastery at Ema, this is blood and guts, a raw and tough encounter (see color plate 20).
The cinder blocks and concrete are painfully honest and devoid of covering. The radiator pipes are uncompromisingly factual. The cement floor—patterned according to the Modulor, which Le Corbusier renamed “Opus Optimum” for the occasion—and the rough slate of the altar do nothing to soften the impression. But for all its brutality, the church is majestic and simple. And it emanates truthfulness.
IN THIS harshly minimalist space, dramatic lighting ushers in intense delight. It comes both from a single square skylight punched into the flat ceiling and from that ever-so-narrow band of clerestory lighting—both at the altar end. Far below, to the left and right of the altar, there are more small windows, pristinely simple openings composed of right angles and straight lines.
Because the clerestory strip has been divided into three distinct units, the light recalls the Holy Trinity. But, equally, it could represent Le Corbusier’s personal holy trinity of sea, earth, and sky. The plain windows to the left of the altar, three on one side, four on the other, invoke the seven sacraments or the seven days of the week.
At the opposite end of the church, behind another altar, a vertical window is stretched to its ultimate height and narrowness. A sliver of light makes its way into the church. A more diffuse light arrives from the two chapels that jut off of each of the long sides. One of these chapels is in the courtyard of the monastery, the other on its exterior; they both are well lit from above, and their muted glow beckons you to come in from the darker sanctuary.
When we accept this summons to leave the larger sanctuary and go into the chapel growing out of the outer wall of the convent, we feel as if we are in a crypt. The crypt floor is a series of broad platforms that proceed down shallow steps, following the natural slope of the land. Each platform has its own altar, allowing for priests to celebrate individual masses. The concrete walls behind the altars are painted a striking orange-red and a celestial blue; that blue is also used for the ceiling.
Opposite those brilliantly colored walls behind the altars, a concrete wall undulates like ribbon. Convex at the top, it twists itself into concavity moving downward, while at the same time it l
eans in as if blown by a strong wind. Fantastically, daylight pours in from above through three circular wells—or cannons. Again, the number is holy. The inside of the first is painted white, the second red, the third blue. From the outside, where these wide cylinders emerge from the chapel roof, they look like periscopes or gigantic compressed Slinky toys. The shapes cause an ever-changing, unpredictable light and color to fall below, as if they come from a spiritual realm. The light coming in at these angles is unique in the history of building design. It has a stunning effect and gives the two candles and small crucifix on each of the altars below a crystalline majesty.
Iannis Xenakis deserves credit for these light cannons. Creating La Tourette, Le Corbusier had become increasingly dependent on others in his office. The work on the monastery began in 1953, in the heady days when the architect was also building in India and completing Ronchamp and other major projects. This was well before the difficulties over the Philips Pavilion, and Xenakis had been given the assignment of transforming Le Corbusier’s quick sketches into actual building plans. In the course of that work, Xenakis had invented these new forms to illuminate the monastery chapel.
Xenakis was equally responsible for the marvel we encounter if we yield to the temptation to go off from the main sanctuary in the opposite direction—to which we are beckoned by a small opening suggesting a chamber of mysteries beyond. Proceeding that way, we enter the sacristy. This chapel has seven angled cannons of light. But whereas the ones over the crypt are round and at differing angles, these unprecedented sources of illumination have flat sides and trapezoidal cross-sections (see color plate 21).
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