IX
One can never forgive the city where one has learned to know one’s fellow men.
—STENDHAL, AS QUOTED BY LE CORBUSIER
1
The return to his hometown felt like a form of death. The train from Milan took the traveler back through the mountain passes through which he had first fled La Chaux-de-Fonds four years earlier. He wrote Ritter that he was heading toward “an ugliness sadder for being pretentious…that’s what my future will be: hard, hurried, arid, dangerous.” As he left “the tragic tunnel” on the train that was to deposit him in his birthplace later that afternoon, it was “the last day of a condemned man.”1
AT AGE TWENTY-FOUR, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret teetered in borderline territory between genius and insanity. His consuming love of female beauty and craving for sex, his determination to make a new architectural dogma with universal application, and his passion for the visual overwhelmed him. For he had no idea how to realize his goals.
He revealed the rich confusion of his unusual mind in a letter he wrote Ritter on November 1, the day of his return home:
I’ve had my fill of death. In Italy everything has crumbled or collapsed. For me Italy is a cemetery where the dogmas that were once my religion are rotting where they stand. Who could believe such a hecatomb? In four years, I’ve suffered and survived a terrible evolution. I’ve gobbled up an East of unity and power. My gaze is horizontal and cannot see the insects at my feet. I feel my own brutality. Italy has made me a blasphemer. I sneer at everything, and my feet are ready to kick things out of the way. I was obeying my destiny when I left everything behind in order to travel at any cost. All that bric-a-brac I treasured disgusts me now. I stumble through elementary geometry in my hunger for knowledge and eventual power. In this mad dash, red, blue, and yellow have become white. I’m besotted with white, with the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder, with the pyramid of great empty spaces. The prisms rise, balance, and advance according to various rhythms, having a huge black dragon writhing on the horizon in order to hold them together down below. Above them is nothing but a white sky: they stand on the marble paving where they compose monoliths unpolluted by color. But at noon the light spreads the cubes in one immense surface; by evening a rainbow rises out of the forms. In the morning they are real again, with lights and shadows, bright as a diagram. One senses their tops, their bottoms, their sides. More than ever, the night is black and white, the white whiter than ever, the black blacker. There are scarlet rooms with luxuriant bacchic evocations, stifling rooms filled with shadows, a sort of paradise aglow with local golden Buddhas. These would be refuges for hours of great anguish and madness. But we would be living between huge walls as smooth as they were white. It would be so ennobling that our progress would be regular, our gestures graceful, and everything would assume color. The world would take on grand and lovely proportions. Painters and sculptors would gradually become masons. Listen to the music of it! Can you see the developing architecture of a tragedy? Can you see the joyous inferno of a commedia dell’arte: Captain Fracasse, Pulcinella, Pierrot, Harlequin, and a black-swathed Don Salluste passing by.
Narrow streets with a checkerboard of windows in the facades. No ornamentation. The whole city one color, one substance. Cars surge past, planes pass overhead with no one paying much attention. There would be avenues across the rooftops amid flowers and trees; huge staircases to climb and long bridges to cross and then the descent down a superb staircase, which confers the gait of an emperor and fills one’s heart with generosity.
Here and there a temple: a cylinder, a half sphere, a cube, a polyhedron. And empty spaces, for breathing.
Up on such rooftops, what else would we be but gentle madmen, leaving the crowd, with all its bright rags and celluloid collars, on the piano nobile below?
What is to be done with women? Steal your best friend’s wife for a night, abandon your own for another, make love when the impulse seizes you, a debauch at essential hours. A splendid resurrection of hetaerae murmuring endearments and performing acceptable coitus. From great white halls you would pass into red ones. And then proceed on your way forgetting the episode, recovering your habitual companion. I desire such things, perfect fool that I am, for what exists today is intolerable. I have lost all religion, and upon seeing two young newlyweds crossing the square in front of the cathedral tonight, entwined just closely enough for the sake of hygiene, I wondered what the devil we were doing here on earth. Surely the stupidest question to ask, for the answer is: do your work, burn your candle, the one you manufacture and sell for the sake of light, and above all, do not concern yourself with whoever furnishes the tallow and with what those you illuminate are doing.
Since the blade has already fallen, I shall not die tomorrow. I am in the next world already. My muscles are prepared, capable of hard work. I shall perform at the top of my powers for several years. And I shall see the two young newlyweds entwined for the sake of hygiene—perhaps she will be the one, the unknown woman who awaits me, and I—I shall be cast into the void wondering Warum?
Starting tomorrow L’Eplattenier will hire a good mason and we shall make Art! A ridiculous notion! Never again must we make Art but only enter tangentially into the body of our epoch and dissolve there in order to become invisible. And when all of us have disappeared in this way, the stone will have become one great block. What will survive us then will be Coliseums, Thermae, an Acropolis and certain mosques, and the Jura, our mountains, will provide a frame as fine as any sea. Long afterward young people will pass by, their passions aroused.
Let me propound my new dogmas: we are remarkable men—great and worthy of past epochs. We shall do better—that is my credo. The primitives are in fashion. Their day is past. They were savages, and we are civilized men. I must raise two altars—to Michelangelo and to Rembrandt. All the others in the history of Art are so much dung. Piero della Francesca is a poet. Cimabue is a painter. And Giotto a decadent. I shall betake myself to Egypt. Asia is our crucial resource. All art critics must be destroyed, excepting only those who reveal contemporary art. Those must sit in judgment. The world must be made white. The fruits of the earth must be eaten and drunk. To make love with the body and thereafter to be stoned to death, having put up a splendid resistance—what a beautiful fate!
Must, must…. There is no escaping it. Must: the dogma of thenew. A hard look and a whip for those who refuse. That sounds like me. Who else?
Yes, I long for imperatives. Such is my destiny, as you well know. Yet wrought up as I am, I aspire to being so for its own sake.
This was just a small part of the fifteen-page missive he wrote as he anticipated losing the gains of his time away. “I shall turn back, mow down my friends, be called a crazy fool, and once there is a void around me, I shall remember that you shouted: ‘Sir, sir, whoa there, breakneck!’ but there is nothing for it. Go your ways.”
This was the occasion when Jeanneret put, on the back side of the envelope, as the return address, “La Chaux-de-Fonds de m…”—La Chaux-de-Fonds of shit.2
2
Georges and Marie Jeanneret did not have room for Charles-Edouard in their apartment. For four weeks, he stayed with L’Eplattenier. Then he visited Octave Matthey. The friend who had advised him on sex was living in an ancient granary, similar to the primitive barn he had rented on Mount Cornu two winters earlier. The moment he saw this rough structure, constructed in 1670 in open countryside, he decided to move in. If he had to be back at La Chaux-de-Fonds, he would do so in wilderness rather than bourgeois oppressiveness.
It was, Jeanneret wrote Ritter, “exactly two minutes from the top of the town, an outbuilding of the old convent which has lately been inhabited by tramps. I was jealous of the place; I had them cut out a huge room from the barn, forty or fifty feet on a side, low ceilings, but with enormous and very beautiful brown rafters and very white walls, I insisted on that. I tell you, my big barn is adorable. You get in up a steep, narrow staircase, and out the window I see a mountain ash, and beyond it the melancholy Mont Sagne bristling with stubby firs. O these horizons under your nose! My friend Octave lives in the apartment underneath, a friend from Coulon days. We share an enormous kitchen, with a fireplace between the arches worthy of a Hindu cult. It is pitch-black, dark as a cave inside, really too dark…. And to get my barn in working order took these cheating workmen a whole month.”3
At “Le Couvent” in La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1912. Jeanneret cut the wide window through the wall on the second floor.
Matthey had an “Egyptian”’s triangular torso and square shoulders, yellow skin, hair that was practically blue, and Dante-like nose. One day, when a former girlfriend of Matthey’s was in his room, Matthey knocked on Jeanneret’s door. The woman, who lived in Zurich, was visiting for two days. Matthey remarked that since Jeanneret had shown him his Maillol—as they called the little terra-cotta from the island of St. Giorgio—Jeanneret might now want to come see his “statue.”4 Matthey added that Jeanneret could stay as long as he wanted, but he should come on tiptoe, since she appeared to be sleeping.
To Ritter, Jeanneret described the encounter with his unique mix of specificity and incoherence: “One shawl spread across the six-paned window, another at right angles hung from the ceiling, both forming—with the partition opposite the second shawl, the ceiling, and the floor—a tiny hollow cube in which the triangle of the two splendid armchairs and the wicker chair produce a design of their own; a pedestal-table covered with what appears to be a service of black and white china, on the far sideboard an enormous pot of dried chrysanthemums, the various stems protruding under their weeping tresses. She was stretched out in one of the big armchairs covered with a big scarlet rug, naked and asleep, her feet thrust toward us, her head in a cloud of red curls hiding the face tilted toward her armpit; the almost complete darkness made her body look colossal.”5
After creeping in, Jeanneret sat down in the second armchair. Matthey offered him a cup of tea, but Jeanneret was too mesmerized to do anything as ordinary as sip a beverage.
His mind went through complex gyrations as he faced the sleeping, naked woman. He wrote his mentor, “We were talking softly about the Beauty Sanctuary constituted then by the huge spherical lantern of orange and white paper with a big blue eye in the center which Octave lit and hung above us. We decided it had to be painted. Octave took his brushes; the shawl spread in front of the six little panes of the window made a green fluid immobilized above the dishes which looked, in the warm light of this sanctuary—pink flesh in a vermilion matrix—as if they were made of some black and white substance. That was when I left. And here on my desk upstairs there was the blue cover of a book of Mallarmé’s poems—I read the ‘Soupir’ and his translation of ‘Ulalume.’”6
Matthey’s girlfriend returned to her family. Two days later, Jeanneret did a watercolor of the sleeping woman from memory. It released a new energy in him, and he began to paint with zeal. Drawing on recent memories for his subject matter, he believed that by making art he could create the vibrancy absent in his everyday experience. He painted the Parthenon in emerald green and vermilion, and the temple of Jupiter in green and “rose-caleçon”—a pink Jeanneret inexplicably identified with boxer shorts.7
Yet nothing was good enough for Jeanneret. On a postcard he had bought in Florence in happier times, he wrote Ritter, “I don’t know what I’m doing. What appears disgusts me; I spoil everything in ten minutes and yet I don’t give up. I’m telling you I no longer have any control over the thing. I look into myself with a deep expression of exasperation. But isn’t it true to make a sky exploding with light you have to leave the paper blank from top to bottom, not daubing it at all? Yet this strange persistence of black and of dirty grays produce a kind of tragic harshness. You can imagine how sick I am of the whole, can’t you? I walk like a drunkard with huge gaps, light and darkness.”8
Then, for six weeks, he stopped writing even to Ritter. When, at the start of February, he broke the silence with a postcard, he again utilized the term “depression.” He felt outside of himself; it was as if his mind as well as his body were freezing in the barn. Matthey had left their shared home without warning—giving the incident of the sleeping woman in the armchair as the reason but specifying nothing more. Without a roommate, Jeanneret’s financial affairs were in chaos, and the city government had failed to give him an office.
SUDDENLY, HE BEGAN to soar again. A sentence Jeanneret had read in Ritter’s “Musical Life” was so beautiful “that it may help me to disperse the mists which imprison me.”9 He was designing two villas, one of which was to be a new house for his parents; in his new role as a teacher, he was gaining a wider audience. Elation replaced gloom.
Le Corbusier later compared L’Eplattenier’s new division of l’Ecole d’Art to the Weimar Bauhaus. It taught everything that pertained to the art of building. Teaching twelve classroom hours per week, Jeanneret enlarged students’ understanding of basic geometric elements and enabled them to apply that knowledge to architecture, furniture design, and interior decoration, with the emphasis on abstraction more than structure.
He began to relish his role of embattled martyr: “People hate us a priori because we were trying to do something fine. The minnows and the piglets have protested—they hate us because we were trying to clear the muck out of their stable. In the same way that the socialists hate L’Eplattenier because the monument has made him radical, the bourgeoisie hate us, the young ones because we don’t have anything to do with them since most of my friends are boors, wild men with red beards and clumsy gestures whose elocution offends them more than spelling mistakes.”10
If only he could reconcile the world of watchmakers and the love burning inside him. “What I’d like is to be able to do whatever I do with a great deal of passion,” he wrote. “Anything deserves to be well done. It’s true—to adapt yourself to the milieu, to love and express it: the roots of the trunk of the tree of art. So that we no longer rebel against the Convent. That would be too easy. We smile at the Gray City which does not smile back. The Gray City would like to spit on us, a business of carefully ejaculating a gob of saliva; pleasures of smokers and drunks.” Even his mother was against him: “Bare-faced lying, if there’s any hope for success. They’ve just covered my head with ashes and called me a chimney sweep; that’s my mother for you: chimney sweep because it’s not yet practical.”11
But this time, rather than sink into incapacitating depression, Jeanneret resolved to work fiendishly hard. “All action is an act of optimism. In all inaction is a fall into the gray void.” Yet he was completely confused about what direction to take: “To make ‘beauty’ for others—is this a necessity or an impertinence? It is either civility or altruism. It is? Damned if I know. I’d like to be a milestone of positive contribution, not of combat. And to make a contribution is to be a tiny thing in a great mass. To be avant-garde is to set yourself up alone on a pedestal, very high in spite of yourself, with principles of movements. To be a poet and describe a flower! It seems to me that it’s permissible and necessary even for certain individuals to be the pope. Sometimes the poet and his flower seem selfish to me, and sometimes so wise. Every problem is a question for me, and I am not sufficiently indifferent to life not to ask it.”12
3
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret managed to harness his energy and to set his course in spite of that burning tendency to turn belief into doubts. By the middle of the year, he had determined that making beauty for others was all that mattered in his life. It was insignificant that he was not certified in his profession; in fact, he never attained the official qualifications to practice architecture. Having decided who he was, he opened an office at 54 rue Numa Droz in La Chaux-de-Fonds, with the mathematically satisfying telephone number 939. The letterhead declared, “CH.-E. JEANNERET * ARCHITECTE.” The description beneath the name was “Architecte des Ateliers d’Art Réunis.” A list of services followed: “CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAS, COUNTRY HOUSES, APARTMENT BUILDINGS—INDUSTRIAL CONSTRUCTION—SPECIALIZING IN REINFORCED CONCRETE—REMODELING AND REPAIRS—INSTALLATIONS OF SHOPS—INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE—GARDEN ARCHITECTURE.”
WITH VILLAS UNDER CONSTRUCTION and spring sunshine, he wrote Ritter, “The irises and the lilies of the heart bloom and open and spread their perfumes of the heart out the furthest fiber of the corollas, the same generous gift has risen and has traced, violet and blood-red on a field of mourning, a line of life. The rose of Hope is reborn each spring, which must afford us great comfort.”13
Hope brought dreams: “Of Venice and of Ravenna, of huge, opulent women, smiling giantesses of Ferrara. Sickly Paris, Paris of the Folies Bergère, military service. Colombia: oaths, ecstasies, enthusiasms—youthful impulses. Enormous desire. Kindness in virtually everyone…. Paris glistening like a paradise and our thoughts transport us to the land of dreams, sometimes.”14 It was, however, time for a clean break: “It’s all over between L’Eplattenier and me…There is nothing left between us but masks. Masks that must be torn away.”15
It was to be a pattern of Le Corbusier’s life: worshipful attachment followed by total rupture. The end with L’Eplattenier left him “a soul still sad at the agonizing spectacle,” but severance was the only possibility: “I’ve had to put down others. Oh, yes, eliminate and destroy many things, hopes, people I loved and who I believed loved me, who themselves believed they loved me.”16
Like the fire in his father’s workroom, catastrophes opened doors: “It’s a great deliverance. The grim, huge, melancholy, the swamp of stagnation, gives way to the rush of light. Yes! This is a cruel landmark.”17 Throughout Le Corbusier’s life, conflict was a sublime stimulus; there was nothing like annihilation to clear the air.
IT NOW WAS, Jeanneret decided one August morning at his parents’ kitchen table, “the modern moment!” “To raise a tower, first you must dig,” he declared. He blasted himself for the work he had done locally. “As for the houses I built this year, I have committed certain anachronisms in their regard. I have been old, old-fashioned. With a fool’s ear, I listened to dubious gossip, citations, unlikely aphorisms. I have been scandalously unsuitable. The absence of suitability, which has flung me this year into an abyss, has shown me the darkness of this condition. And now I see white!”18
He was in a manic upswing. “The hour of battle sounds in music…. Music is the great promoter of joy. I listen, and I hear so much! Music, by its rhythms, is of all forces the one which is combat,” Jeanneret wrote Ritter. He was determined to understand and harness his euphoria. “What are they physically, then psychically, these explosions, these discharges, these outbursts, these ecstasies experienced, suffered?—once at the age of twelve in the presence of flowers, another time in front of that Alp, then inside that charterhouse near Florence (ineffable, agonizing vibrations), here in Palestrina’s mass, there in Paris, along the Seine.” The list of stimuli went on: the minarets he had seen in the east, the Parthenon viewed in conjunction with the sea and the sky: “Each thing offers itself to the eye.”19
Now determined to celebrate rather than deny pleasure, he compared his responses to art and music to his sexual emissions when he was sleeping. His aesthetic reactions resembled “the effervescence of carnal dreams.” Ritter was the one person who would understand. “I ask you—you who have inhaled life with such generous lungs—what becomes of and what use are the fugitive hours when we no longer belong to ourselves and where tears, cries, prayers, and blasphemies emerge pell-mell in our seething nonconsciousness? I’d like an answer from a man who has inhaled life with generous lungs.”20
That zest for existence in all its magnitude brought with it a keen awareness of death: “Can it be possible that Life withdraws from those who love it? I am agonized by this question. Is all we have experienced…lost? Does it vanish, devoured by the grim indifference of external things? How to emerge from this abyss? Do you believe that with a sincere effort and a love of reality (and I know how readily the REAL can be masked!)—do you think that such things may keep us from dying?”21 The questions were not rhetorical; they burned inside him.
DEATH BECAME MORE than theoretical when the thirty-seven-year-old journalist Auguste Bippert died demonstrating a small plane with a professional aviator on October 15, just after Jeanneret’s twenty-fifth birthday. Bippert was “one of the only men hereabouts (perhaps the only one) who was interested in art, who understood something about it, who was really alive.” At least to perish in an airplane was better than to be one of the living dead around him: “How much enthusiasm it takes, how much faith, and how many inner demons!”22
He focused more on Bippert’s risk taking than his death: “The law of equilibrium demands that some exaggerate and caper since the rest are clams and rotting lobsters.” Jeanneret disparaged the cliché that the accident was predestined: “The believers have already cited the Finger of God, turning Him into a kind of boulevard swindler.”23 It was the contrary; Bippert, rather than fall victim to death, had commited a heroic act. The end of life must be the way Orcagna represented it, as a triumphant moment. At age twenty-five, Jeanneret resolved that, whenever the time came for him to die, it would be according to his own will and in a blaze of glory.
4
Albert had taken to performing silent pantomimes of someone playing the piano. When he was in these disturbing trances, no one could get through to him. In the same period, Edouard began to have upsetting, complex dreams, which he described vividly to Ritter: “I dreamed once of a Biberstein autumn, deep puddles of blood as far as the eye could see from your windows. Then the snow fell, rising above your roof. We were guarding your books, which the snow was gradually burying. Wolves had passed; then two exhausted Moujiks appeared, whom you greeted. The potters’ workshops had vanished under the snow. The Romanian blouses were covered. There were no longer any windowpanes and I stepped inside through the open windows. Yet even tilting, the Plain of Biberstein was one great puddle of blood. Yes, but there was the sky, the sun setting over that anguish.”24
A perpetual lack of sunlight and the premature turning of the leaves added to his gloom. He wrote Klipstein, “It rains incessantly, tearfully. Enough to drive you to suicide.”25 When five hundred copies of his Study of a Decorative Arts Movement in Germany were published at the end of 1912 and there was “no reaction, no response,” his depression worsened.26 Jeanneret was exaggerating—he had heard from readers in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels—but he had not started to change the world as he hoped.
After the highs of early summer, he had now crashed completely: “No music for months and months, no shocks, no jolts, no excitement, no joy. Your footsteps track the rainy days over the squelching earth…and my soul is so profoundly unwell that whenever I attend a concert I realize I no longer hear the music. Overcome by the day’s fatigue and paralyzed by the circumstances, my ears listen, but my heart remains cold. Unbalanced, I intensify my illness by a constant nonsatisfaction. The past abides like a book I’ve already read. It has not yet assumed the position of a witness, and uncertainty prevents me from making any resolution for the future.”27
Even a kitten disappointed him! “I’m infatuated with cats: this morning someone brought us a kitten, the future guardian of our residence: ugly and oddly marked, the creature fails to attract me. How many women, too, generous though they may be, wake no response because they are not lovely?”28
The man who half a year earlier had been exulting “the rose of hope” and “ecstasies, enthusiasm…enormous desires” now lamented, “Alas, most of one’s dreams will never come true.”29 There remained, however, one sole, splendid prospect: the great white villa he was in the process of building on the slope over La Chaux-de-Fonds for his parents, brother, and himself.
5
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret first conceived of a new house for his mother and father and Albert at the start of 1911. His parents owned a large lot on the hillside overlooking La Chaux-de-Fonds. Edouard designed a sprawling structure that was fit for gracious entertaining they never did and was luxurious beyond their wishes. It is astounding that Georges and Marie agreed to it, but by the end of April 1912 the foundations were laid, and by the start of 1913 his mother and father were in their sumptuous all-white bedroom, with an “ennobling” blue floor, and he and Albert were in their capacious semicircular aeries on the floor above. The place he created as if his family would spend many more years intact—the sons unmarried, the four of them under the same roof—was imbued with boldness and grace. There were vast living and dining rooms and a terrace overlooking the landscape of woods and Mont Racine.
The proud son was bursting with excitement: “One feels one is very high up, dominating a landscape somewhat reminiscent of Mount Athos—minus the sea!”30 He wrote Ritter, “My dear Sir, within my white walls my mother has become a slender girl again, and sings Schubert at her piano as she did at thirty. Is peace created here at home? In any case, I have experienced great joy on account of my mother’s happiness and my father’s contentment.”31 With the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also called the Maison Blanche, he was, for the first time, the author of human joy.
Then, even before the great family house on the hill was totally finished, reality hit. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had destroyed his parents financially. “Where is duty?” he asked Ritter rhetorically. He answered for himself. “Duty: I have a papa and a mama.”32 He was shattered by what he had done.
It is unclear if anyone had ever discussed a budget for the Jeannerets’ mansion. But what is certain is that the final cost was about fifty thousand Swiss francs. The sum would have been substantial no matter what the clients’ circumstances; it was exorbitant for people of the modest means of an enameler of watchcases and a part-time piano teacher. The entire savings that Georges and Marie had acquired through years of hard work had been depleted by the construction of their new home.
Jeanneret heaped blame on the people he had hurt. If they had led their lives differently, his parents would not have been in this predicament. Edouard considered his father’s work “a stomach-turning and degrading métier.” Nearly forty years of doing the same thing had turned Georges into a passive person who had few personal pleasures beyond some limited time for reading and hiking. He admired his father’s intelligence but deplored his isolation: “My father has nothing to do with anyone, neither relatives nor friends.” His mother, at least, was, at the age of nearly fifty, still “ardent and youthful” and adored by her piano students.33 But in his frenzy, he resented everyone. Even if one of the main reasons he was back home was because of L’Eplattenier’s asking him to form the art school he would later equate with the Bauhaus, he acted as if he had been obliged to return from Greece to assume an immense burden of responsibility for both of his parents because Albert was away. Now, in his devotion, he had gotten them all into deeper water with the new house, an enormous blunder. Not only had he encumbered his parents financially, but he had foolishly established them away from the city and their neighbors.
The Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also called the Maison Blanche, in the snow, ca. 1912
The irony is that when the house that broke the bank was completed, in June 1913, it was the first architectural achievement in which the future Le Corbusier assumed his own voice. Unwieldy to run and made of materials too fine, it was, nonetheless, a superb and original design. Its gentle, sweeping forms and lively details lent harmony and charm to everyday life. This house had infused Jeanneret with an energy and originality that enabled him to go beyond the static formality or overly local style of his previous work.
The rear facade was bold and playful. For the first time, he made a wall by building a straightforward slab and perforating it so that the long, continuous form was a syncopation of thick and thin, glass and stone, mass and opening. Delicate steel mullions balance thick stucco; feathery lightness jibes with dense weight. The dominating whiteness is punctuated by a band of vibrant blue. The octagonal rectangles of the white shingles that cover the house—a pioneering concoction of compressed concrete with visible fibers, each small panel nailed to the support beneath—further the impression of energy and candor.
When he had been designing the Maison Blanche, Jeanneret had had Klipstein send him photographs of religious buildings that had impressed him in the Balkans.34 The boldness and simple massing of these anonymous Romanian buildings, and the confidence with which those majestic structures were planted on the ground, have their echoes in the villa. The influence of the Parthenon is also apparent in the way Jeanneret’s cubic structure is enlivened by the sequence of evenly spaced vertical elements.
With his father in the garden of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, ca. 1916
With his parents and brother in the garden of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, ca. 1916
Previously, Georges and Marie Jeanneret had surrounded themselves with comfortable clutter in small rooms with flowered wallpaper. Their younger child moved them into a small palace, aesthetically more austere than anything they had ever before known but also far more luxurious. Now the closet for their clothing was the size of their former living room, and their lives were graced by noble forms and a plethora of inventive details. Edouard had realized his goal of making his parents different from the other townspeople; these modest-living, hardworking people had not been able to turn him down when he had proposed it. The problem is that, from the moment they started to live there, they knew they could not afford to stay for long.