III

1

These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at…school…. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important; an unconquerable will…. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words….

I’m sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It’s only a matter of will. I’ve got to train myself so that I’m indifferent to insult, neglect and ridicule. I’ve got to acquire a spiritual aloofness so complete that if they put me in prison I shall feel as free as a bird in air.

—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, Christmas Holiday

It is not surprising that Georges Jeanneret bristled. With his fees for the Villa Fallet in his pocket, the nineteen-year-old Edouard told his father, “I don’t ask you for money, don’t ask me where I am going nor what I am doing: I myself have no idea.”¹

Or so he said. Among the few things in Edouard’s backpack was John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence.² He was on his way to meet up with Léon Perrin, one of his classmates in L’Eplattenier’s advanced course, in the Renaissance city.

He left La Chaux-de-Fonds on September 1. When the train carried him on its spiraling tracks through the St. Gotthard Pass to the Ticino valley, the weather was so bad that he could see nothing of the canyon walls or of the Devil’s Bridge, which he was longing to view, having read a comparison of its marvelous construction, a single sweeping arch, to the vault of a Gothic cathedral. Then Jeanneret saw as never before. After the fog and storms of the evening and the hours in tunnels, he spent a magnificent morning in Lugano, where the mountain peaks were reflected perfectly in the clear lake. He thrilled even more in the cavernous glass-and-steel train station in Milan. Standing in the wide piazza dominated by the Milan cathedral, the young man from a mountain hamlet was overwhelmed. The feathery finials of its hovering triangular form and its endlessly variegated facade give a lightness to its mass that dazzled him. This marvel of human building was beyond anything he had ever imagined—larger and more physically impressive than he had fathomed from the illustrations in Ruskin and Owen Jones. The testimony to ingenuity in the center of a metropolis, forthright and graceful at the same time, was inestimably powerful. He sketched it feverishly.

With Albert in La Chaux-de-Fonds, ca. 1905. Edouard redrew his own face on the photo.

He began to explore Milan. Only at seven the following evening did Jeanneret realize that, in his first experience of a big city, he had gone since noon the previous day without taking in a morsel of food. Jeanneret determined that Milan was enchanting in the evening, “but by day, what hell!”³ During the hours of commerce, he had to flee the cathedral square because of his disgust at the wastefulness of humanity squandering its energy and resources. “This is the kingdom of fools throwing away money with both hands,” he wrote to his frugal, hardworking parents.⁴ To L’Eplattenier he described the “colossal crowd of dolts” on that great urban square where one encountered “nothing but stupidities and obtuseness.”⁵

But the cathedral was his refuge. “There was such a racket that I escaped inside. There, what grandeur! The forest’s mystery. Fabulous. Demented.”⁶ Within the walls of the great building, an enraptured Jeanneret felt that the relationship of the human being to the constructed space was an essential element of architecture. “The Duomo is magnificent from outside and imposing within, above all enormous,” he wrote his parents.⁷ It took time to adjust to the grandeur: “Gradually, one gets accustomed to it, suddenly you see a tiny man beside a column; your eye begins to measure proportions, and one remains astonished.”⁸ That emphasis on human experience and the direct emotional impact of scale underlay his approach to architecture forever after.

2

Jeanneret studied buildings from every angle and with an intensity few tourists could imagine. When, after an overnight stop in Genoa, he arrived in Pisa, he could not stop gazing at the diaphanous surfaces of its Romanesque cathedral. He was so obsessed that he gave little note to having his pocket picked. What riveted him was not simply the building but the variations caused by the changes of light and the state of the sky. He wrote to L’Eplattenier: “Friday in the cathedral square, on the grass, with peace and the lovely blue sky for companions. First contact with the great marvel; I got myself ‘pinched’ (as you so nicely put it) after a few hours. I remained in this square four hours and cleared out only a few hours on Sunday and Monday for the Museo Civico. I almost came to the point of drinking schmollis with the attendants in the little leaning towers ‘of Carrara marble.’ (Signorino, Una, Lira, Chquante!) This facade of the cathedral is simply marvelous, and I’ve never, ever seen anything like it…. The cathedral at six in the evening is an enchanted forest of color, the quintessence of yellows of every value, from ivory white to black patinas, and this against an ultramarine of an extraordinary quality; by dint of staring at it, it becomes black…. At seven in the evening the cathedral is more beautiful than ever, what hues! There’s a certain brown, a certain blue, and all of a tranquility! Behind me the sky is orange and mauve; the green of the bronze doors is dead now, and the yellow marbles reveal themselves; they are matte siena. The columns, though, are the pinkish white of an eglantine petal…. On Saturday morning I sat on the cathedral steps: the facade is in shadow and colors of a hitherto unknown delicacy emerge and become even more delicate. Last evening occurred a magnificent song, the allegro of golden marbles with deep ultramarine. This morning the black marbles, which have been washed for eight hundred years, are as blue as if they still formed the lining of the vault, and the delicacy of this blue behind the alabaster columns makes a sort of ineffable mist…. The marble, once white, is now raw yellow and raw black, a curious patina accentuated by the outline.”⁹

The heightened sensitivity with which the young traveler felt color and saw design details drove him to a frenzy of excitement. He began to sketch and make watercolors of frescoes, pulpits, cornices, and architraves, and he annotated some of these images with notes squeezed to the edges of the page. Architecture induced unparalleled ecstasy.

         

JEANNERET, who arrived in Florence on September 9, was elated when Perrin got there five days later. Now, in addition to sketching and writing about the marvels he was discovering, he could discuss them with a friend.

The physical hardships of life on a budget of sixty francs per month only added to its luster. For a month the two young men shared a room in a pensione on the Piazza della Signoria, where the strong wind that blew through the leaky windows made Jeanneret so cold that he had to sleep under his loden coat. The light in the room was “atrocious,” and his eyes troubled him.¹⁰ The “bourgeoise Minestra” that was the main substance at supper each evening had a tomato color that he associated with Giotto’s frescoes and admired on the walls of Santa Croce—but not in his soup. Having instructed his father to ask no questions, Edouard now described to Georges and Marie how his hands were cramped from writing and sketching, and reported on his eye problems, his exhaustion from travel, and his inability to sleep because of the city noise.

The adversities gave him a feeling of worthiness. Jeanneret happily abandoned eating during the day so as to utilize every moment of light and of the hours when the museums were open. Euphoric, he recognized sequence as an essential ingredient of his emotional transport; Florence was more exciting because he had gone there after Siena, which had been so wonderful that it had put him into a mood of heightened sensitivity.

At the same time, Jeanneret was struggling to come to grips with his break from home. In his room in the pensione, he made a display of family photographs. There were pictures of his grandparents with Aunt Pauline, of his brother, and of his parents—including one of his father with L’Eplattenier. Jeanneret reflected that the pictures “afford me tremendous joy; it is really strange how the notion of a long absence can separate us so much, in thought and in memory; when I see your faces again it all seems quite abstract; I no longer live at La Chaux-de-Fonds; when, for instance, I evoke the bridge of the Hôtel de Ville or the facade of Hartmann’s, they strike me as very peculiar and oneiric.”¹¹

He was a sibling fighting for his space. Writing to his parents two days after his twentieth birthday, Edouard concluded a letter of eight dense pages with a pathetic lament: “I have a notion that you always begin your letter-writing sessions by the Epistle to Albert, and that what’s left for me is only a tiny quarter of an hour between 11 and 11:15.” He signed off like a little boy—“Kisses all around to Aunt P., to dear papa, and to dear mama. Edouard”—and then added the postscript, “You cannot imagine the enormous pleasure a word from those near and dear can give to someone who deals only with people of stone or metal all day long.”¹²

Even if his parents did not respond adequately, they afforded him the chance to voice the new fire that was burning within him: “To think that at this very moment I have seen and frequently touched the most beautiful things ever produced by the human mind. Michelangelo, Giotto, Raphaël, Donatello, Rubens (portraits), tapestries, goldsmith work, enamels, ceramics, ivories, even mummies! They all fascinate me, and I can never be grateful enough to the masters who initiated me and gave me a thirst for the beautiful: I feel I possess a very sure critical sense, and I am more than pleased to find that I get worked up only in front of the loveliest things…oh, the Palazzo Vecchio! What a wonder; I admire it much more than the campanile, and certainly more than the cathedral. Orsanmichele, too, as well as Santa Croce. All the same, Pisa remains number one among all my beautiful moments.”¹³ It became one of the struggles of Le Corbusier’s life to find people who understood that intoxication with visual beauty.

3

The accepted wisdom about what was good or bad in Renaissance art meant nothing to Jeanneret. He refuted the popular idea that Raphael was a poor colorist, praising the paintings at the Pitti. He deemed Giotto as a painter “the master of simple, ample, and powerful composition, of sumptuous color,” but disparaged him as an architect.¹⁴ “The best-known example of Giotto’s architecture does not win me over: not the least bit ‘constructive,’ it would please a painter more than an architect, enchanting by proportion and color. The cathedral, misunderstood inside as out—an accumulation of materials which don’t look like what they are—makes me regret Milan.”¹⁵

Jeanneret told L’Eplattenier that “the city seems to me anything but rich in architecture.”¹⁶ But in this instance he took the rare step of questioning his own reaction. He asked: “Can it be true? Or are my eyes still dazzled by Pisa? As I was saying, the Palazzo Vecchio is a great wonder but difficult to study, its power is abstract as the sculptures are superfluous (no use, it seems to me, even trying to copy Raphaël or Botticelli). But perhaps I’m taking the wrong path and should be drawing the city’s palaces instead. A word from you on this matter would be a great help.”

At the Uffizi, Hugo Van der Goes’s powerful Adoration, a work that puts others off because of the coarseness of the crazed peasants, affected Jeanneret viscerally. He saw in it “that knowledge of the great masters in the balancing of masses, colors, lines, etc.”¹⁷ Titian’s and Botticelli’s paintings and Donatello’s sculpture moved him similarly with their power to conquer viewers.

But the monument in Florence that excited him above all was Orcagna’s tabernacle in the small chapel of Orsanmichele. Andrea Orcagna—an accomplished painter, sculptor, architect, and poet—had been commissioned to make this ornate niche in the church of the guilds of Florence in 1340. A complex composition with bronze girders and supports encasing angels and prophets in half relief, it surrounds a Madonna who ascends to heaven with a gloria. Every centimeter is charged with a sense of urgency and unbridled emotional intensity. The participants in the holy scene are consumed by religiosity, and there is a feverish animation to the movement of drapery and limb, the crevices and swells of the chiselwork. Jeanneret wrote to his parents, “The fabulous wealth accumulated in this marble shrine by a genius like Orcagna exceeds the imagination, you have to see it, touch it, caress these polished marbles which have become transparent by dint of delicacy, your binoculars must search out the darkest corners. I am always on tiptoe, supposing the two centimeters I gain thereby will enable me to enjoy an even intenser pleasure. And the whole thing was created, as the artist knew, to be placed in a dark church where only an artist’s eyeballs can manage, by sheer force of will, to penetrate the darkness. Moreover the same thing goes for all the masterpieces here; the Giottos cannot be seen. You have to hunt them down. Luckily, all the fashionable world doesn’t give a fuck (excuse the Donatellian vigor of the expression), and only those who have something in their belly can enjoy them. This is no longer the fashion-magazine of the Uffizi where you can see crowds fainting with ecstasy in front of wretched daubs. This tabernacle, six meters wide and deep, eight meters high, is built of the most beautiful yellow marble that looks like ivory. Angels and prophets, sculptures, bas-reliefs, and tondos, but the bas-reliefs above all, marvelous in their control of volume, gesture, and sobriety; and everywhere, in the tiniest corners and of course in the darkest places, inlaid enamels, intense blues and golds, vermilions, greens, all vibrating and gently flashing in a rich and robust symphony by Sinding accentuating the construction, or suddenly exploding in the darkness, just where you weren’t expecting it. Just remarkable.”¹⁸

After six hours sketching the tabernacle, Jeanneret was so energized that he violated his usual rule of fasting by day and indulged in a late lunch: “a veritable feast: 15 centimeters of fried potatoes then a little farther on, four sous worth of salami and one of bread!”¹⁹ Orcagna, versed in four art forms, capable of making art beyond all expectation, had become his hero for life.

4

Much as Jeanneret loved Orcagna’s tabernacle, he lamented to his parents about “the parade of imbeciles lasting all morning, Baedeker in hand, striding around the marvel, blinking and making their escape, fully satisfied to have seen Orsanmichele, and to be able to tell some Kreutschner, ‘When we saw the tabernacle…oh you can’t imagine!’”²⁰ Le Corbusier always evinced this contempt for people who look without seeing.

At age twenty, he had already developed a completely independent sense of judgment. The “red ochre, ultramarine, burnt siena, yellow ochre” of an obscure Etruscan tomb painting that he copied in the garden of the archaeological museum made it “stronger as decorative painting than all the Giottos in the world.”²¹ He prized legibility, declaring of the first Greek vases he ever saw, “How beautiful, what style, how easy to read!” After his initial evaluation of Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel—“ultimately, they cheat you”—he retracted his view, for he realized that this impression had been caused by the darkness of the small chapel, to which he conscientiously made a second visit. On that occasion, he noted The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden as “splendidly composed, lovely simplified figures, ample gestures.”²²

Jeanneret observed urban life in all its variety, well beyond the dictates of guidebooks. He wrote his parents that Florence was “the city of wind and cats.” He depicted those cats with a novelist’s flair: “big ones too, burly and complacent bourgeois, with solid muscles, eyes a little dimmed by idleness, their fur unbrushed. You see them everywhere, anything but fierce, sitting with their tails wrapped around their feet on every doorstep.”²³ On one occasion, he decided to share his lunch with a cat, and in a letter home feigned offense at the way the creature strode off without a thank-you or a backward glance.

He reported almost everywhere to his parents. Comparing the husband-hungry ladies of Florence to streetwalkers, he wrote Georges and Marie that the Italian city had a “nuptial atmosphere; women not of the upper class all look more or less vicious, they pass you at the corner of the Palazzo Vecchio at high noon; usually mama accompanies the young lady, she smiles at you quite pleasantly and makes her proposition in French, if you please; it’s with her, I assume, that the agreement is reached! Most of these transactions occur on the steps of a church; singular morality. I may be making too much of this—I confess to not being preoccupied by it in the slightest. I leave such commerce to those to whom Angelico has nothing to say.”²⁴

And how Fra Angelico astonished him! “I’ve also seen the most extraordinary, the most disconcerting thing at the Academia: a picture by Angelico painted 500 years ago and which I swear dates from…tomorrow.”²⁵

         

JEANNERET was crystallizing the passions that were to determine his life’s course. “Ah! The monasteries! I’d like to spend my whole life inhabiting what are called their cells,” he wrote L’Eplattenier.²⁶ He was referring both to those simple white cells at San Marco rendered sublime by Fra Angelico’s graceful frescoes and to a lesser-known sight that was to exercise a lifelong grip on his conscience: the Charterhouse of the Valley of Ema.

No single architectural monument—even the Parthenon, which he visited four years later—had such an impact on the future Le Corbusier. The intelligence of the plan that gracefully combined community living and the sanctity of the individual’s private existence made the monastery a perfect small city. The access to nature was ideal, and the internal arrangements of the cells reflected a logic Jeanneret found admirable. He had traveled the six kilometers from the outskirts of Florence to this fifteenth-century Carthusian monastery because of John Ruskin, who sent his readers there. After studying the monks’ small houses with their private gardens and observing the church and refectory and the central courtyard that served as meeting places, he wrote L’Eplattenier, “This is the solution of the unique type of workers’ habitation, or rather of the earthly paradise.”²⁷

In Details Concerning the Present State of Architecture and Urbanism, a pivotal text Le Corbusier wrote in 1930, he discussed the direct impact of this highly intelligent organization of space on his own mature work: “I’ve seen, in the musical landscape of Tuscany, a modern city crowning the hill. The noblest silhouette in the landscape, the uninterrupted crown of monks’ cells, each with a view over the plain and opening onto a little walled garden down the slope. I believe I’ve never encountered such a joyous version of habitation. The back of each cell leads through a door and then a gate onto a circular street covered with an arcade: the cloister. All the common services function here—prayers, visits, dinners, burials. This ‘modern city’ dates from the 15th century. The radiant vision of it is always with me. In 1910 [sic], returning from Athens, I visited the monastery once again. One day in 1922, I mentioned it to my associate Pierre Jeanneret: on the back of a restaurant menu we spontaneously sketched our ‘villa apartments’: the idea was born.”²⁸ In 1948, in The Modulor, he referred again to the impact of Ema as the exemplar of “individual freedom and collective organization.”²⁹ In 1950, when writing about his intentions for l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, he again cited Ema as his model: “The harmonious organization of collective and individual phenomena is here resolved in serenity, joy, and efficiency.”³⁰

The day after visiting Ema, the twenty-year-old vowed to his parents that he would never forget that all human housing should provide some of the solitude and tranquility enjoyed by monks. For “at least they knew how to arrange a delicious life for themselves, and I am convinced that, all things considered, they are blessed, especially those who have Paradise in view!”³¹ The goal of his architecture was never to shift.

5

After writing his parents about “the thirst for the beautiful” and proudly declaring, “I feel I possess a very sure critical sense, and I am more than pleased to find that I get worked up only in front of beautiful things,” he proceeded in the same breath to ask his father to send him, “by return mail, an American razor of first quality,” for which Georges should use funds Edouard had left behind for such purposes.³² He instructed his helpful parent to unwrap the razor to make it appear used, a deceit intended to avoid customs duties. Jeanneret explained that in Italy a shave cost ten sous, and “they stick their fingers in your mouth it’s disgusting and the hair grows too thick.”³³

His preoccupation with money and hygiene dominated the letters home. He reported about a train on which he was so black from smoke that he had to go to the toilet twice to wash, differentiating himself from the Italian “swine.”³⁴ With his need to impart personal details, he described dinner at the pensione in Florence as “an enormous plate of soup with macaroni, then meat and the problem of Italian-style vegetables, and mystery, yes, of course, good or bad, who knows what to call it: constipative… certainly!”³⁵ The state of his bowels was a major issue for him, of which he kept his parents apprised with frequent reports of both constipation and bouts of diarrhea.

6

He was, however, as poetic as he was mundane. From Padua, Jeanneret wrote his parents, “Before falling, the leaves become gray here, a splendid, fine gray; the fields remain intensely green, and only the plowed fields strike a vibrant note. The soil of Italy is extraordinary; salmon-red, tile-red, and with the occasional groves which turn a brilliant lemon-yellow, the plowed fields with their deep and regular furrows, the clumps of small trees, the little walled gardens, the narrow paths of a rich, gray color: it all forms what the famous frescoists have left us on their walls, a gift to the eyes and to the imagination. In Ravenna, on the other hand, the grass is a raw acidic green and the earth is violet.”³⁶

That instinctive feeling for color and nature governed Le Corbusier’s approach to architecture. He designed his buildings in close relation to their surroundings. Le Corbusier never envisioned a project merely as a static model or as blueprints and plans made under artificial office light. Rather, he acted in accord with the realizations of this eye-opening trip to Italy: buildings live and breathe in constant connection to the specific environment in which they are set, and they change with the same frequency as weather and light conditions.

         

CONSIDER, FOR EXAMPLE, the sight of Le Corbusier’s Atelier Lipchitz (1925) in late autumn—the same season when the future architect marveled at the subtle colors and transformation of leaves in northern Italy. Le Corbusier made this studio/residence for Jacques Lipchitz when both he and the Cubist sculptor, a friend, were enjoying their first periods of critical and financial success.

On a quiet residential street in a Parisian suburb, Lipchitz’s house is dominated by a massive, silo-shaped concrete cylinder, set down with the weight of a kettledrum against the light piccolo tone of tubular-steel balustrades and playful openings along the facade. That counterpoint between the immense central volume and the jubilant smaller elements evokes the paintings of Le Corbusier’s and Lipchitz’s mutual friend and colleague of that time Fernand Léger. But the careful orchestration of concrete, steel, and glass is only part of what occurs.

This impeccably engineered assemblage of man-made forms exists in constant interplay with nature, for Lipchitz’s house is covered in vines. Sounding the same “vibrant note” of the foliage Jeanneret observed in Padua, these vines produce a flurry of large red-and-gold leaves, bowing forward in their last moment of life. Higher up on the building walls, the vines form a bare network of infinite complexity, woven out of more elements than a spiderweb. This tracery of lacework is remarkably like the filigree patterns that so enthralled Jeanneret in Pisa. What makes the Lipchitz house so intoxicating is the coupling of architecture with the never-ending motion of the universe that caused Padua to be “a gift to the eyes and to the imagination.”³⁷

7

The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off for a week by his subjects’ barricades, and now reigning once again.

—GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA, The Leopard

On October 25, Jeanneret and Perrin arrived in Venice. The rain was merciless. The downpours continued for five miserable days, with such intensity that one night a shower woke up a flock of ducks settled in under the windows of their pensione. Then came two days of opaque fog. The Adriatic flooded the Piazza San Marco. Having known only a mountain climate until then, Jeanneret wrote L’Eplattenier, “One feels like scratching everywhere on one’s body: are these fins breaking out…or simply mosquito bites?”³⁸

At last, the sky shifted. The effect was to be paralleled when the clouds whipped by overhead at Le Corbusier’s funeral fifty-eight years later. The change in light was a miracle for the twenty-year-old Jeanneret, who wrote: “Two or three patches of sunshine allowed us to judge Venice at its finest, and the other evening we even observed a real apotheosis, a dramatic sky entirely covered with black clouds drowned in the yellow mist, and the brilliant sun next to the lantern of Santa Maria della Salute; sea, sky, and houses making a single enormous torch seen through tears.”³⁹ To cry at beauty, especially after darkness, was his norm.

The apotheosis continued: “The blue sky is a miracle. At such moments, everything sings. I have seen the most extraordinary colors in the canals. The theory of complementaries set to work by a superior magician.”⁴⁰ And if San Marco, the Ca’ d’Oro, and the Palazzo Ducale enraptured him by daylight, they were even better at night. Brightly lit by “the glow of gas lamps,” they became “a marvelous and supernatural specter.”⁴¹ Now, even more than in Milan and Florence, Jeanneret dreamed of making public architecture that could stir the soul.

8

The travelers’ next destination was Vienna, where they hoped to find work in an architect’s office. Jeanneret became obsessed by his clothing. He wrote his parents about “my shoes, which gaped all around the soles, the toes were likely to extract sighs on the delicate porches of Ravenna; bought a pair for 17 f.25 (secondhand!) in town: splendid yellow ‘melon slices’ as P. would say, the envy of the entire population of Ferrara. As well as a necktie, which happened to have been embroidered one fine day by the subtlest of lace makers. Now it’s my nightshirt that’s giving up the ghost, I’m sorry mama saw fit to give me one in such poor condition, the Italian air doesn’t suit its failing lungs. I’ve bought myself an elastic collar, quite practical.”⁴²

He was determined, as he set out to join the workforce in a sophisticated city, that his wardrobe be pleasing. He instructed his parents that he needed “another very practical zephyr shirt, size 7, collar 37 centimeters from one buttonhole to the other. In case anyone wants to buy me more, maybe in brighter colors, less drab-looking. Not any more collars, please. As for shoes, it’s pointless to mention spats and dress boots. Rubber soles, yes, and leather slippers too.” And he hoped for “my (chic) brown kid gloves.”⁴³

He was in a state of anxiety—both about that trunk he hoped would await him in Vienna and about his first sea voyage. He enjoined Georges and Marie to participate in his nervous anticipation: “One does not leave a place like this behind without great regret. Including tonight, including the ball! Luckily the sea doesn’t look at all threatening…. Au revoir and wish me a good crossing! Kisses all around.”⁴⁴ This entreaty to his parents was illogical. Surely Edouard knew that by the time they received his letter in the post, he would already have arrived at his destination. He needed, however, to imagine his mother and father cheering him on. So he would always be: a brave traveler and a child in need of comfort.