Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The architect could not quite master his voice that day. The man who usually spoke with an arch tonality and complete assuredness was for once “a little quavery.” What was evident to astute observers was Le Corbusier’s “very great sense of the spiritual, or transcendence.”22

  9

  In a statement he issued once La Tourette was in use, Le Corbusier was proud to point out the possible unpopularity of the design from the start and the Icarus-like risk he had taken: “You have a building…which…touches the ground as it may. This is a thing which is not to everyone’s liking. It is an original aspect of this very original monastery.”23

  Initially, he had intended the cloisters to be on the roof, facing the spectacle of nature: “I think you’ve all been on the roof and you’ve seen how beautiful it is. It is beautiful because you don’t see it. You know, with me there will always be paradoxes.” But then he had decided that if he put the cloisters on the roof they would be so beautiful that the monks would lose sight of the real goals of the religious life. It would distract them from the hard realities of their interior lives. “The pleasures of sky and clouds are perhaps too easy,” Le Corbusier had determined. Instead, he put the cloisters below, with the idea that access to the roof could be granted on rare occasions.

  With that focus on the psychological and spiritual impact, he made the church steeple the highest point of the assemblage and devoted himself to the issue of letting light in below. “Emotion comes from what the eyes see, which is to say: the volumes; from what the body receives by the impression or the pressure of the walls on oneself; and then from what the lighting affords you, either in its intensity or in its delicacy, according to the sites where it is produced.”24

  10

  Five years following the opening of La Tourette, Le Corbusier’s body was brought to the monastery. His funeral cortege stopped at the site en route from Roquebrune-Cap-Martin to Paris. The architect’s closed casket spent the night of September 2, 1965, in the austere cavern of the church.

  Paris Match reported, “In the courtyard of the Louvre, in the presence of thousands of Parisians, there was the brilliance of such official ceremonies. But, on the road which the funeral procession took from Roquebrune, there was a discreet halt. This was at the Monastery of La Tourette which he had built and which today is regarded as one of his masterpieces. His coffin was set down before the altar. Yet he was not a Catholic. When asked ‘Do you believe in God?’ he answered ‘I’m available, I’m searching.’ The Benedictines [sic] lined up in front of the remains of this man who had built their cloister and kept watch all through the night.”25

  It was as if Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had been returned to the rustic silo where he had lived on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds as a young man. All night long, on this final visit with some of the truest devotees of his architecture, the Dominican brothers prayed around Le Corbusier’s body in its sealed casket, yet again giving religion to a Cathar.

  LIX

  1

  In the years following Yvonne’s death, Le Corbusier’s creative impulses declined. Their marriage would have suited few people, but his role as peripatetic caretaker had given him what he needed at home to be Le Corbusier in the world. With Yvonne gone, he began to lose his creative spark, even if he was technically very busy.

  He took up painting again. He no longer had the luxury of being able to open the door of his cavernous studio on rue Nungesser-et-Coli to find his wife two rooms away crumbling saffron into a bouillabaisse or wanting him at her side for a pastis, but in his solitude, he threw himself into the making of large enamel plaques, six of them all at once. He would paint away his emptiness.

  LE CORBUSIER returned to England to be anointed doctor honoris causa by the faculty of law at Cambridge University. For the man who had once caused his father serious worry about his schoolwork and who had never received a degree in architecture, there was a certain satisfaction in the endorsement. If the speech about him fell short of likening him to Christ carrying the cross to Calvary, it still put him in impressive company: “He shares with Cicero the view that utility is the mother of dignity. His relation to Leonardo derives from the fact that he too envisages the principles of mechanics with a painter’s and a sculptor’s eye. To those who seek the ‘divine proportion,’ he has given the Modulor, based on the measurements of a man whose height is 1 m 85…. Not only France but India, Moscow, and North and South America testify to his importance, so that in his regard we may cite, with some modification, this line of Virgil: ‘What region of this earth is not full of the work of this man!’”1

  His response to this praise was plain: “In order to arrive at this ‘certain level,’ let us suppose a level meter of a thousand millimeters, whereupon we must begin with the first millimeter, the second millimeter, etc…. regularly and in the order of things. You soon realize how serious, how difficult it is, how steadily you must persevere, how much confidence you must have, and energy to forge ahead.”2 The lessons of the watch engraver and piano teacher were imbued in him still: his father’s insistence on effective labor and his mother’s counsel always to do all tasks right away.

  After the morning ceremony that required his wearing a cap and gown for three hours, he derided such academic formality as a nonsensical waste of time. In retrospect, it became “playing the fool for 3 hours.”3 The architect subsequently declined invitations for honorary degrees at Harvard University and at a new university in Brasília. But even if the ceremony at Cambridge had been three hours of nonsense, Le Corbusier was proud of the tribute and eventually reprinted it as part of his official biography.

  2

  His mother’s death less than three years after Yvonne’s had left Le Corbusier bereft and even more alone. No one could rival these women in assuaging his solitude, in making him feel that with all the unchartable variables of his quirky personality he had a true connection to someone else. Even Marguerite Tjader Harris had become so devoted to her nuns in Connecticut that she seemed spiritually as well as geographically distant.

  It was not that he lacked admirers. Women, especially, still found Le Corbusier charismatic. The gallery owner Denise René was enthralled when traveling with him to exhibitions in Bern and Venice and observed that he completely mesmerized his companions by talking about the sources of the local architecture. When René was with him in Stockholm, a woman told Le Corbusier she simply wanted to breathe the same air as him: “The very elegant architect—tall, a dreamer, a strong presence, successful with women—replied by telling her to calm down.”4

  Heidi Weber, a Zurich decorator who had a gallery to show interior design, became so devoted to Le Corbusier that she swapped her car for a collage by him and then put on an exhibition of his paintings in her studio where, when nothing sold, she bought all the work herself without telling him who the client was.

  His mother’s passing was a fresh reminder of the inevitability of death, and Le Corbusier began to prepare for the aftermath of his own life. In August 1960, while puttering around the cabanon, he developed with Jean Petit the idea of a Fondation Le Corbusier. After his death, it would house his work, his collections, and even his personal possessions. It would be located in the villa he had designed for Albert and Lotti but would also preserve the apartment at rue Nungesser-et-Coli, as well as the Villa La Roche, which Raoul La Roche offered for this purpose. This organization would manage the archives the architect had long hoarded with what he termed “my old-fox order.” But Le Corbusier was concerned more with young people and those who would profit from his legacy than with issues of preservation. He intended to create a travel scholarship for worthy recipients “who want to learn to see.”5

  The architect was delighted when he gave a lecture in the largest amphitheatre at the Sorbonne, with seating for 3,500, to find that a thousand students beyond that capacity clamored for seats. To the new generation, he voiced his ideals, exalting the highest moral standards while using American materialism as an example of the o
pposite: “I want to address here the man and the woman, which is to say, the living beings who have a heart, a sensibility, a mind, some courage perhaps, and who desire to see things as they are. There are possibilities—a Cadillac, of course, that’s one, but there is the other possibility—to have the satisfaction of one’s own conscience.”6

  Sketching during a lecture at the Sorbonne, February 1960

  The office provided some welcome distractions after his mother’s death. Le Corbusier designed a museum for Chandigarh—a large structure similar to the one he had made in Ahmedabad, a crisp container for Indian art from ancient times to the present. There were new proposals for churches, apartment buildings, an embassy, a hotel, and a factory—the majority in France and Switzerland, but some in locations from Egypt to Chad to Brasília to Oakland, California. All these projects met the usual fate, but they kept Le Corbusier and his staff busy. In 1963, the Olivetti company, with which Le Corbusier had initially tried to work nearly thirty years earlier, asked the architect to design a laboratory and factory for electronic calculators. These mathematical tools, evoking both the timepieces of his youth and the Modulor, greatly appealed to Le Corbusier, and he liked the idea of building the place where they would be developed and assembled. Moreover, although he was no longer alive, Adriano Olivetti, whose name was synonymous with the aesthetic refinement that was just then catapulting Italy to the forefront of elegant design, had been “not only an industrialist in love with beauty, but also an organizer of our epoch.”7 But nothing came of the project.

  Le Corbusier was proud to be busy enough to have to turn down work, especially from potentially prestigious clients. Prince Moulay Hassan of Morocco summoned him to Rabat to consider taking charge of the reconstruction of Agadir, which had been partially destroyed by an earthquake; the architect declined, saying he was too consumed by a plan for the Meuse valley, among other urban schemes. He could refuse such offers because there was something in the air that warranted his utmost concentration. At last, Le Corbusier had—or so he believed—a major project in the heart of Paris.

  This would be his first structure at the city’s epicenter and thus more significant than the Cité de Refuge or the two pavilions at the Cité Universitaire. The new Paris undertaking was similar in scale to the three great buildings about which he still felt slighted: the unrealized League of Nations in Geneva, the architectural assemblage for Moscow that had been reduced to a single structure, and the stolen UN complex. He had one more chance of influencing the look of the world as profoundly as did the Parthenon, Notre-Dame, and the Milan Duomo. Again, he was full of hope.

  3

  The plan was for a hotel and cultural center to be built at the Gare d’Orsay, the large nineteenth-century train station overlooking the Seine on the opposite side of the river from the Tuileries. The main stipulation of the undertaking was that nothing disrupt the reigning aesthetics, but there were no impositions about the choice of materials. Le Corbusier was thrilled at the possibility of the views he would be able to provide of sights he had deemed exquisite ever since his early years in a garret—“the unexpected poem of Sacré-Coeur, the splendor of Les Invalides, the spirit of the Eiffel Tower…a feast for the mind and for the eyes.”8 His relationship with the city he had known for half a century was as complex as that of a child with a parent he both loves and wants to destroy, but he had come to worship the poetry of Paris’s landmarks more than ever.

  He was thrilled to design a place where people would gather en masse; he would give them the benefits of modern technology: “Actually what I’m talking about is a cultural center for congresses, exhibitions, music, performances, lectures, provided with all the latest equipment for traffic, for acoustics, for ventilation and fresh air, and impeccably connected with the totality of Paris by water, by Métro, by streets, and (perhaps) by the (express) train to Orly, now the main wharf of Paris, not a seaport but an airport.”9 The enthusiasm of this run-on sentence recalled the happiest days of his past.

  Yet again, Le Corbusier would seize the moment: “The construction methods of modern times permit the creation of a prodigious instrument of emotion. That is the opportunity Paris has, if Paris realizes the desire to ‘continue’ and not to sacrifice to sentimentality the enormous historical landscape existing on this site. It is by a fervent love for Paris on the part of the promoters of this project that a goal so accessible on the one hand, but also so lofty on the other, can be attained.”10 Le Corbusier’s manic ecstasy overtook him when he thought he could vanquish his enemies and give the world something unprecedented.

  Not that he had stopped smarting over previous Parisian failures. “My name has always frightened Paris,” he announced.11 He would not forget, or let others forget, that his stadium design of 1937 for one hundred thousand had been summarily rejected, while now its clones were popping up everywhere. Perhaps the same ugly fate would happen with the great complex on the Seine. But for the moment he was floating on air.

  THE PLAN CALLED for a hotel with twenty-five floors of rooms and a large public space for airplane companies, boutiques, and a bank. All the commercial enterprises would be in a giant slab on pilotis parallel to the Seine, with the powerful skyscraper attached to a congress hall and cultural center. The Gare d’Orsay would have been torn down.

  Le Corbusier credited himself with “a spirit of absolute loyalty, of total constructive organic rigor, and with the desire to provide a decisive manifestation of architecture at the hour when Paris must be wrested from the profiteers or from the mindless.”12 So he claimed, but there are few among us who can regret that this project failed to become a reality. His proposal would have brought the worst aspects of modern Parisian architecture—exemplified today by buildings like the Tower of Montparnasse and the Australian embassy—into that magnificent region where, on one side of the Seine, some of the most charming streets of the faubourg St. Germain remain a bastion of small-scale architecture, and, on the other side, the Tuileries and the Louvre exert their quiet splendor. Not only would the scale of the structures proposed by Le Corbusier have been a disaster, but his skyscraper did not even have the charm or excitement of most of his work. It resembled a gigantic, merciless grate.

  Le Corbusier’s office prepared a photo of central Paris with the model of this massive block superimposed. It’s not hard to understand why the city administration took the idea no further after seeing this mock-up. The shadows Le Corbusier’s project would have cast over the seventh arrondissement would have committed the very offense the architect so loathed in New York skyscrapers. His towering hotel would have put people in permanent shade and deprived them of direct sunlight.

  For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence. His fervent faith in his own way of seeing blinded him to the wish of people to retain what they most cherish in their everyday lives. The old Gare d’Orsay is a building of dubious architectural merit, but at least its ultimate renovation did not destroy the heart of a beautiful metropolis.

  4

  Not everything came to a halt. In Zurich, Heidi Weber persuaded Le Corbusier to do more printmaking and to design a villa on the lake; intended mainly for the display of his graphic work, it was completed in 1967. The architect also had some amusing forays in the design world. One of his tapestries was hung in the great London fish restaurant Prunier, for which he also designed china.

  In 1961, Le Corbusier overcame his ambivalence about official accolades sufficiently to travel to New York to receive a doctorate at Columbia University and to go on to Philadelphia to be awarded the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects. The advance directives from the dean of the Columbia University School of Architecture, Charles Colbert, must have afforded the architect some satisfaction, given his previous slights in America. They stated that events “will conform entirely to [Le Corbusier’s] wishes, which we will determine upon his arrival.”13 At Columbia, the architect was to receive honors and speak “with th
e entire audience anticipating your words of direction and wisdom.”14 Le Corbusier circled “direction” and “wisdom.”

  When Le Corbusier arrived at Idlewild Airport on April 25, he was greeted by the entire student body of the architecture school and taken by limousine to the Plaza Hotel. Then, at the magisterial campus on Morning-side Heights, he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa. The statement read: “Charles Edouard Le Corbusier, eminent theoretician, profound architectural innovator, inventor of the skyscraper-studded park, you have resolutely proclaimed Man’s right to an environment of increased amenities. Through your architecture you have sought to bring Man and the Forces of Nature into beneficent accord. In a technical age you have endeavored to produce a Universal Man, a concept designed to give unity and validity to creative achievement in those broad fields of the Arts upon which your abundant energies have been so productively expended.”15

  AS ALWAYS, however, there were areas of conflict. In 1962, Pierre Jeanneret wrote Le Corbusier that Hindustan Machine Tools, a large Indian company, wanted to create an “industrial city” next to Chandigarh. It was to go between the Punjore Gardens, a lush outdoor space, and the main cement factory.

  Enraged, Le Corbusier wrote to Nehru. Knowing that the prime minister was busy because of upcoming elections, he apologized for the intrusion, but this potentially disastrous development required immediate action. Yet again, the forces of good and evil were as clearly defined as in a Last Judgment: “It is revolting to annihilate the immediate approaches to Chandigarh by an industrial city, and this at the very moment when the theory of the ‘Industrial Linear City’ appears as my social, political, geographical, demographical solution, responding at last to the modern conjuncture…. I am speaking to you as seriously, as profoundly as I know how. At the moment when Chandigarh appears as a site created for the good of mankind, here comes the devil to meddle with it, instituting this hideous canker on the flanks of this city!” Le Corbusier then tried his familiar tactic of false humility: “I am boring you. I am assailing you with complex arguments, each linked to all the others. And you are in the midst of elections at this very moment. I am embarrassed.”16