At the end of the year, the architect wrote a letter to K. S. Narang, the secretary to the government of Punjab, which he copied to Nehru with a cover letter. Le Corbusier’s contract as architectural advisor to Chandigarh had just been renewed, for the upcoming two years. “I accept this,” he wrote, “but I must tell you that I shall do so gratis: without honorarium and without vacations. I am happy to offer this to India, a country I love.”17 He would come at least once a year to give advice and oversee and correct work; they would need to pay only for his round-trip transportation with Air India.
At the same time, he meticulously listed all the expenses that had not been covered for work to date. He had received nothing for his twenty-first and twenty-second trips to the new city, the last that June, and was now owed a total of 27,200 rupees. The accounting recalled Georges Jeanneret’s diaries about cheese prices, but the conclusion was quite unlike anything Le Corbusier’s father would have written: “I am pleased, then, to make you a gift of all these expenses incurred for Chandigarh and which are now added to my gratis service as Government Architectural Advisor. Perhaps you will be grateful for this gesture.”18
In his cover letter to Nehru, Le Corbusier wrote, “I am making an important gift to India. Believe me, dear Mr. Nehru, I am making it with all my heart and in total sympathy with you. I am happy to contribute my obol to the financial appeal made to India at this difficult epoch for your country.”19 How like Le Corbusier to refer to the ancient Greek coin—worth one sixth of a drachma—as if he were building another Parthenon.
Nehru’s response was cool. To begin with, the prime minister wrote that he would have answered sooner if Le Corbusier’s office had not dispatched the letter written in December almost a month later. Nehru continued: “I appreciate your offer and gift to India.”20 But he said nothing more; there probably was another side to the story.
Perhaps the signature of a head of state was sufficient recompense for Le Corbusier. His weakness for the highest levels of officialdom was never ending. When another Expo Le Corbusier opened at Le Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Le Corbusier was aware of the contrast to the opening of his previous show there: “Père Le Corbusier is respected now,” he observed.21 Not only were André Malraux and a bevy of other government ministers in evidence, but they actually looked at the work, with the esteemed minister of culture commenting specifically on the precision of the early Purist paintings.
Yet the architect was painfully aware that there was not even a small Unité d’Habitation in Paris—although he had now built a substantial one in Firminy, near the city of Saint-Etienne. Success in the capital still eluded him.
5
For the opening of the General Assembly at Chandigarh, Le Corbusier made another enormous enameled door, the size of a wall, that swung on its middle axis. With Jean Petit’s help, he spent a dozen days in the factory in Luynes fabricating 110 square meters of enamel plaques—a substantial leap over the eighteen square meters for Ronchamp. They were baked at a temperature of eight hundred degrees Celsius—a fact that thrilled Le Corbusier.
He and Jean Petit presented those enamel plaques as a further gift to Jawaharlal Nehru specifically. The gesture testified to the architect’s profound appreciation for what the Indian leader had had him do—with, he pointed out, one fifth of the means available in other places.
At the same time, as always, a further quest mattered more than the victory in hand. Knowing that Nehru himself would be present at the opening, Le Corbusier wanted to use the occasion to lay the foundation stone for the Open Hand. Le Corbusier had determined exactly where it would stand—near the assembly and the other buildings, with the Himalayas in profile behind it.
Even more than previously, Le Corbusier saw his monument as having unparalleled value to the world at large. It was his last hope of saving human civilization. Writing Nehru on June 26, 1963, at a time of heightened cold-war tension, the architect declared, “The modern world is torn between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The Asiatic East is gathering together.” He believed that the location of the Open Hand, facing the Himalayas, was pivotal. “At this precise moment there could not be a more significant place.”22
The sculpture was a gesture of welcome that signified an open heart on the part of all people to all people. He concluded his entreaty, “Dear Mr. Nehru, the symbol of the ‘Open Hand’ has a particular significance for me in the management of my life devoted up to now to the equipment of the machinist civilization. I feel with a deep instinct that India is the country where this sign must be dressed—India, which is for us Occidentals since four thousand years, the place of the highest trend of thought.”23
6
Le Corbusier had almost resumed his former pace. He was no longer creating architecture with the same verve as when Yvonne and his mother had been alive, but again he had a purpose. He made urban plans for Venice and went to Brasília to plan the French embassy there. He found this capital city by his colleagues Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer inventive, courageous, and optimistic. “It speaks to the heart,” he said.24 Le Corbusier’s endorsement and generosity gave Niemeyer a boost, which the hundred-year-old architect still prizes.25
In 1962, Le Corbusier was asked to show his paintings in Barcelona. Since all of his major paintings had been commandeered for his retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris, he declined. But he proposed an alternative, again writing about himself in the third person: “He doesn’t feel that he’s a jack-of-all-trades, but quite simply a free man, never having recognized the academy and having opposed the academy.” He reminded the Barcelona architects who had invited him that the first lecture he had given in their city, in 1929, was called “To Liberate Oneself from the Academic Spirit.”26 To celebrate this liberation, Le Corbusier decided to assemble fifty photographic documents—selected from twenty thousand—that showed enlarged details of his work.
For the scale of these images, the architect had chosen “the measurement of 2 m 26, fruit of the double square ‘113 × 113’ bearing certain proportions discovered one day and baptized ‘The Modulor.’ The ‘Modulor’ is a tool offered gratis, the patent having been placed in the public domain…. Such a resource, in the globalization which has seized the world at present, is a factor of peace—while leaving undisturbed the various systems of assigning dimension such as inch/foot, meter, etc.”
He continued in a rampage. This device he had given to the world free of expense and that would have assured universal peace had been rejected by fools: “But the numbskulls and naughty boys, and those who are always ready and willing to say ‘no!’ (in this instance, they are idiots), declare that this is a strictly personal and arbitrary point of view. Upon the invention of the Modulor, this capacity for globalization was regarded as stateless, as antinational, and rejected with horror by those who have no notion what is involved.”27 His idea for a grand-summation photo mural at the Swiss Pavilion had also been mercilessly attacked, he pointed out. The Gazette de Lausanne had laced into the mural and called it a “corruption of minors” before Hitler’s minions had destroyed it during the occupation—a detail he provided without mention of where he had been at the time.
Now, at last, Barcelona had accorded him the opportunity of righting these setbacks. He was extremely grateful. Le Corbusier relished putting together all these oversized photos of his urban schemes, architecture, paintings, murals, and drawings and having them go on public view.
The mural was in black and white. Thus, like some television in that same era, it demanded that viewers imagine the nonexistent hues. That necessity appealed to Le Corbusier. He cherished the ability of the human mind to transpose what it saw: “Color is the sign of life, the bearer of life. The world that opens before us today is becoming polychrome, has become polychrome. Open your eyes to the many colors of the automobiles, which not so long ago were all black.”28 To look at a black-and-white mural and mentally conjure vibrant hues required viewers to make a worthy leap. And it
realized one of Le Corbusier’s main goals: to get people engaged by using their eyes and imagination.
7
In 1963, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts was inaugurated at Harvard University. It was the first building credited to Le Corbusier in America and his last major structure. The intention of the building was the integration of the arts into general education at Harvard; the Carpenter Center was meant to beckon students from every discipline, with “the sole purpose to convey to present generations the desire and the need to conjugate the labor of hands and head, which is Le Corbusier’s most important social virtue.”29
Le Corbusier’s longtime colleague José Luis Sert was the project supervisor. Le Corbusier himself spent only three days on location in the course of the entire design and construction, on a trip that had a shaky start. When, in June 1960, the architect had gone to the American embassy on avenue Gabriel in Paris to get his visa, he was asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He had not, but he deemed the question unseemly and proposed a meeting with the ambassador. The request was granted, and Le Corbusier asked Jean Petit to accompany him. Petit described the encounter: “Le Corbusier announces straight off that he is unwilling to answer any question about his opinions and his private life. He is a world-renowned architect, that is the sole useful answer to useless questions. The ambassador is charming and amiably accepts the architect’s unmannerly bluntness.”30
Le Corbusier then made the trip. He flew first-class on Pan Am, taking with him the maquette his office had already prepared, although he had not seen the site firsthand. When he arrived in Cambridge, he realized that, relative to the other structures, the small site Harvard had allotted showed how far the university really was from wanting the arts to have parity with law and history.
Nonetheless, what Le Corbusier achieved on the compressed lot in the middle of a rectangular block of neo-Classical buildings has considerable impact. The bold ramps, cantilevered ovoids, and deep brises-soleil are a strong statement of imagination and newness in contrast to the traditionalist red bricks and brownstone of the rest of the university.
Yet the Carpenter Center suffers from some of the shortcomings that often befell Le Corbusier’s presence in America: a certain discomfort, a look of struggle, even confusion. For the building’s opening in May 1963, Le Corbusier wrote Harvard president Nathan Pusey that his doctor would not permit him to attend. He neglected to say that he followed the doctor’s orders only when it suited him. On one level, the architect had reconciled his relationship to the country that had once fueled his greatest optimism. On another, he deliberately kept his distance from the place where he had incurred some of his deepest wounds, and where he felt slighted still.
THE YEAR the Carpenter Center opened, Le Corbusier had good reasons to have his sights focused elsewhere. As minister of cultural affairs, Malraux was becoming more and more powerful and also increasingly loyal to the architect. He now asked Le Corbusier to design a museum of the twentieth century, to be constructed at the Rond-Point de la Défense, a forty-five-hectare parcel on the outskirts of Paris.
Le Corbusier again took up the museum idea he had realized in compromised forms in Tokyo, Ahmedabad, and Chandigarh. His excitement was palpable. He compared the idea of bringing it into existence to what he considered the ultimate act of creation: “Before giving birth, a woman doesn’t know the color of her child’s hair.”31
But soon Le Corbusier and his staff came to the conclusion that the site was “devoid of all landscape charm” and proposed a different location in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Le Corbusier also recommended that the city consider destroying both the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais—buildings he had never liked—to fulfill Malraux’s request for a new museum. When he did not succeed in shifting the site to either true countryside or the city center, he abandoned the project.
STILL, LE CORBUSIER’S life had its sweet moments. In the spring of 1963, when he was offered a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Geneva, he was convinced that the main reason was that he was owed credit for the “prime” project for the League of Nations thirty years earlier. The architect wrote “Bravo!” on the letter that announced this redress of an old wrong.32 While explaining that every day he turned down requests to travel, in this instance he accepted. His one stipulation was that he had to wear a suit, rather than evening clothes, at the celebratory banquet. The former Charles-Edouard Jeanneret enjoyed returning to Switzerland on his own terms. He stayed at the elegant Hotel Richmond—a distinction, given his many defeats at the hands of some of the League of Nations officials who had once been at home there.
Then the city of Florence organized a large Le Corbusier exhibition and gave him the gold medal of the city, declaring him the “greatest urbanist architect of our epoch.”33 The University of Florence was yet another institution to offer him a degree. In response, Le Corbusier wrote the French consul to the Italian city explaining that he had not requested the degree and had already received many such honors—he attached a list—but that, nonetheless, he would gladly be present at a ceremony if it could take place in Paris. The event occurred that December at the Italian embassy in the French capital: the mountain came to Mohammed.
That August, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where he lived mostly in solitude even with the Rebutatos next door, Le Corbusier again reread Don Quixote. In his copy of the book, covered with the hide of his beloved Pinceau, he found a penciled note he had written nearly forty years earlier. It recorded a dialogue between himself and the young woman who had recently moved into his apartment: “Greatness. Von: ‘And that time I walked from Montmartre to the rue Jacob?’ Le Corbusier: ‘But why did you walk all that way?’ Von: ‘Because I didn’t have money for the Métro.’”34
12
With the people he still enjoyed, such as Jacques Hindermeyer and the Rebutatos, Le Corbusier was warm and outgoing; with those who annoyed him, he had become increasingly cantankerous. It was standard fare when Le Corbusier said to the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo, “I’ve been listening to you, and for a long while I wondered if I was dealing with an imbecile—yes, I was dealing with an imbecile.”35
Those who met Le Corbusier’s brother were struck by the contrast. Albert was “much more affable and agreeable than Le Corbusier, much sweeter” than the “boorish” Edouard.36 When Le Corbusier felt himself contradicted, he would explode, “I’m right! I’m right! I’m right!” The conversation stopped there.
He was despotic at the office. It had long been Le Corbusier’s practice, after returning from his travels, to be furious at what the others had done in his absence, often requiring them to remove their own detailing and restore where a project had been before he left. On one occasion, when a range of buildings and urban plans were in process, he summarily dismissed all his draftsmen.
In February 1960, he sent a letter to his employees: “I have been quite dissatisfied lately with the slow progress of our work. I’ve already spoken to you about this. And I am specifically requesting that you do not begin your tea breaks during the afternoon. You are not to leave the studio. I am making this a specific request, for otherwise bad habits will be established…. Once again, there is a lapse in the production of drawings. What is the reason for this? I am astonished that it has not occurred to grown men like yourselves to establish a program for your work involving the numbering of the presumable plans to be drawn and the indication of the scale…. I am here to give you overall ideas concerning the creation of the work. You are sufficiently adult to take all the necessary initiatives within the parameters of the ideas I have given to you or that you have helped me discover. You are fortunate to be working in a studio characterized by a calm atmosphere. You must understand that I am overwhelmed by work every day including Sunday. Do not ask me to be a studio manager as well. The studio is reduced to a small number of persons. You are individuals, and we do not want to be organized here à l’américaine (a form of organization that does not correspond t
o the objectives I have in mind)…. You will be good enough to take note of these instructions. I have written them out so that there can be no ambiguity.”37
If someone was up to standards, however, Le Corbusier was exceedingly generous. When Roger Aujame, the young architect who had demonstrated the backstroke to him nearly twenty years earlier in the river near Vézelay, needed a letter of recommendation, the master interviewed him at length and then spent an hour and a half writing it.
Nonetheless, a firsthand account of Le Corbusier written that same year opens with a sentence that reads like a clinical impression of mild autism: “He does not have the open expression and the easy smile of those who readily inspire sympathy; admiration and grace are lacking; the eyes are dull, the voice is flat and uneven.” The author was Maurice Jardot, in his introduction to the architect’s autobiographical My Work. Jardot’s description of Le Corbusier’s “porcupine manner” and his “expostulations, abruptness…aggressiveness, egoism, complacency and…somewhat bleak attitude” was published with the subject’s approval and tacit endorsement.38 Le Corbusier did not mind being seen as difficult so long as he achieved his purposes.
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