X

1

When war broke out in August 1914, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was exempted from military duty in the Swiss army because of his bad eyesight. He had worn thick glasses and suffered from vision difficulties at least since 1904, when the local oculist had requested that l’Ecole d’Art excuse him from engraving. Within a few years, he almost completely lost sight in one eye. He credited that problem alternately to a gradual deterioration accelerated by an intense period of painting at night in 1917 and 1918 or to an accident with a sharp pencil point. All that is certain is that Le Corbusier had monocular vision and was known to argue with optometrists that his eyeglasses, frame included, should be half price.

Albert, too, was exempted from the army. In his case the reason was a slight heart condition, genuine enough but exacerbated by hypochondria.

Years later, Le Corbusier claimed publicly that he had done his military service by directing the construction of roads. Considering French soldiers “a marvel, nothing could be finer, more robust,” he implied that he had been among their ranks, but it was a fantasy.¹

         

THE CRUEL REALITY of war did, however, lead him to develop a brilliant concept of housing for the victims of bombs.

In September 1914, Jeanneret received news of the partial destruction of the cathedral at Reims. He wrote Ritter, “I’m profoundly disturbed by the spectacle of these fallen stones. Reims destroyed. All I had to do was to consult images of this unique, ineffable vessel of glory in the fantastic structure of its stones in order to feel a decisive hatred, somewhat equivalent to the sadness you must be feeling. Oh, I promise you my architect’s soul is suffering.” That catastrophic damage to a masterpiece horrified him: “these stones arched over a tabernacle and the eloquent relics within—now hurled to the ground by a pig named Wilhelm or Kronprinz.” He called it “a cruel nightmare. Everything crumbles before these criminals, and so many men will die who were beacons in the darkness.”²

The bombing of Reims made Jeanneret wish he could “take a pickaxe, and if possible prowl around the cathedral, piously gathering up the ruins,” as he said to Ritter. He was plagued by his own inability to take action: “This is a terrible screed I’m sending you, harsh and fidgety, without the slightest note of calm. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of that. Despite all my efforts, I’m unable to control myself; I feel a constant, morbid compulsion to talk instead of shutting up. And at the same time, an imperative sense that I owe it to myself to do so.”³

As was often the case, when his world was falling apart, Jeanneret came to life. The citizenry of La Chaux-de-Fonds, against L’Eplattenier’s new section for having violated the traditional approach to art education, forced its dissolution. Plans for a building by Jeanneret to house that innovative institution would never see the light of day. His parents were becoming upset over problems with their house. And now Flanders had erupted in a military conflagration that threatened the fiber of everyday life. This was when the future Le Corbusier’s first major innovation, the Dom-ino system, rose from the ashes.

2

Dom-ino was a form of housing conceived for the victims of war. Based on standard elements that could be combined quickly at low cost, it could exist anywhere.

The plight of people ravaged by the forces of destruction and suddenly left homeless offered Jeanneret the fresh start he craved, and he came up with a snappy, elegant idea that was totally original. The Dom-ino system is a structure of three parallel slabs, stacked at intervals like toasts in a club sandwich. The uppermost two slabs are supported by lithe columns of reinforced concrete; inside, the levels are joined by concrete stairs. These straightforward units have an airy, ethereal appearance. With their tensile lightness, they use the latest technology in materials and engineering. Their aesthetics are fresh and contemporary; every form is simplified and pure, virtually a Platonic ideal of its type.

The flat-roofed structures could theoretically be joined in infinite combinations; the columns were within the space and not in the walls.⁴ Jeanneret planned entire Dom-ino complexes to replace areas that had been destroyed by the war. This early idea of mass production—dedicated to the well-being of all inhabitants, respectful of human scale—was to have echoes in the city planning with which he altered the face of civilization.

         

JEANNERET’S FRIEND Max du Bois worked with him on Dom-ino. Du Bois, from Le Locle, near La Chaux-de-Fonds, had known him since he was a toddler and was a key figure in the younger man’s rise to success. An engineer in Paris, Du Bois attended to the technical details and development of Dom-ino, while Jeanneret masterminded its design; Du Bois also applied for its patent. Then Jeanneret developed grandiose ideas that the Dom-ino patent might be worth a lot of money and became suspicious that Du Bois would put everything in his own name. In fact, Du Bois, who had done the work mainly out of friendship, did not even have his name on the patent when it was received, but Jeanneret had by then damaged the friendship by accusing his helpful, more established colleague of selfish motives and insisting that no part of the authorship of Dom-ino be attributed to him. Dom-ino is one of many designs today associated with the name of Le Corbusier where credit should be shared; Du Bois was only the first of many people to feel that Le Corbusier erased his significance from history.

3

Jeanneret loathed what he considered the Swiss obsession with money: “Liveliness, originality, even wit are not Helvetian qualities to anything like the same degree as seriousness, conscientiousness, strength, clarity, and initiative—the sense of practice and of exploitation—altogether remarkable.”⁵ He considered himself as culpable as his fellow countrymen in having viewed war for its potential financial gain by joining the speculators who, as early as 1914, were imagining how they would heap profits during the inevitable period of reconstruction. He railed against this “civic consciousness built on the ruin of others. I yield to such consciousness. We spend hours in the speculators’ offices, and we talk figures and realities.”⁶

Following the demise of the new division, the local officials who, exceptionally, admired his work, tried to commission different projects, but he was too angry toward his former foes as well as toward himself to accept the offers. On November 28, 1914, he wrote Ritter, “My history of being-in-opposition has turned against me and disgusts me now. I have had valiant defenders and, the conspiracy having failed, I triumph, but with such a feeling of bitterness that I’ll probably decide to send in my resignation.”⁷

In Jeanneret’s mind, everything became associated with the relationship to one’s parents and home territory. He wrote: “A touching story: our little cat, the son of the one you saw, was given a month ago to some poor people on the west side of town who had asked for him; and after dinner today he turned up here, apparently guided by instinct, amazingly enough. He’s taken up residence in his mother’s bedroom, napping beside her. The minute his mother shows any sign of attention is followed by a session of tentative licking: the prodigal wants to nurse, and so the old woman’s bourgeois peace is troubled; whereupon quarrels, unpleasantness, abandonment. Appearing so miraculously from so far away, the sad little cat recognizes the premises, jumps into his old basket (in which he was born), feels reassured, starts to play. He is terribly skinny, his fur matted; the tiny creature is quite melancholy, though at the age of wild frolics…. The old woman was annoyed and upset, and the little cat is gone again. Fascinating story! It moves me nonetheless, this cat business!”⁸

Not only did Le Corbusier always respond deeply to cats, dogs, birds, and donkeys—to their honesty and chicanery as much as their innocence—but he identified with these creatures of instinct, often wounded, always pure of heart. The affectionate, needy kitten, morose just at the stage of life when he should have been playing carefree, spurned by his own mother but desperate for her love, was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s image of himself.

4

In June, Jeanneret handwrote and sent Ritter a three-page text called “First Step in a Residence.” For this evocation of a salubrious dwelling, he delved into memories from Ema to Balkan villages to Athos. The goal—which was to permeate all of Le Corbusier’s domestic architecture—was to sanctify the myriad acts of everyday existence. His idea derived from “the nostalgic architecture of the red rocks of Dalmatia; a distorted antiquity whose every theme is atrophied, accumulating symbolic motifs to excess. And this becomes an evocation, chalk-white and terra-cotta. Roman, Etruscan, Byzantine. Everything strong, rich in values suggested by great heights, and the violence of the volumes. A vestibule whose door opens onto a courtyard. Further suggestions of enormous volumes. The peristyle was of square columns, bristling out of the earth.” There would be relief sculptures “suggesting good meals and high life. A tiled structure drowned in a big cement pool…. The ceiling simulates low, white beams separated by black intervals, and over each of the narrow doorways, an exaggeratedly prominent pediment, white with a black tympanum—which will be the leitmotif in the courtyard, though made of red terra-cotta in a whitewashed wall. This is what gives strength, freshness, height, and generous lodgings for people who love action and dreams.”⁹

In this ideal residence, water would be everywhere. There would be a pool made of smooth marble and a tiled basin receiving the flow would emerge through six tiled channels in a niche on one side of the courtyard. “In the vestibule, almost all the reliefs are engraved in the mold, in the fashion of old Greek, Byzantine, Sassanian, and Etruscan coins.”¹⁰ This exotic vision of home conjured in 1915 has a luxuriance that, however concealed, underlay Le Corbusier’s most machined buildings.

         

EARLY IN JUNE, Jeanneret went to the south of France to meet Auguste Perret. The first leg of the journey was a train from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Lausanne. Before boarding, a stranger approached and asked Jeanneret to take charge of a teenage girl taking the same trip. “I was introduced to her and then I was requested to be sure nothing happened to her,” he later wrote.

He was bowled over by the adolescent’s beauty: “I saw her for the first time, and perhaps for the first time as well I the solitary and hitherto unlikely connoisseur of women, found a depth, a tranquility, deep and distinctly apparent, a wealth of impressions leaping from the heart as well as from the lovely lips, charms as in a pretty round face, smooth and well-proportioned, and in gray eyes rimmed with ochre, clear and straightforward, all of the qualities which are not those of a doll but of a woman of ravishing sensibilities.”¹¹

Changing trains with his temporary ward in Lausanne, he witnessed a heartbreaking scene on the platform that both saddened him and awakened his voyeurism. A woman had accompanied her fiancé, a soldier, from Geneva to Lausanne, where he was being mobilized to Italy: “They were pressed close together against each other on the step of the railroad car, their faces constantly united, seizing, sucking, drinking each other, drenched with the young girl’s slow tears. And long, sudden hugs, like bedroom recollections. Broken apart, having continued, having certainly given the totality of gifts in this last afternoon of the first stifling summer day, having pressed against each other with all their skin, with all their strength, in alternating anguish and delight, and the hideous suggestions of possible outcomes. The mother of the mobilized soldier was eagerly watching this supreme expression of her son’s heart, whose last moments she reserved for herself. The train left. The girl beside me was weeping gently. I dared not look at her; I registered the faint sound of her tears. Bellegarde. Culloz. So many other tiny stations where the train kept stopping. Staring at people and weighing the silences, the smiles, and that friendliness of men over forty which one sees so much of everywhere, and then at each stop, seeing getting into the train not even accompanied, without embraces, without anything, one, two, five soldiers with red trousers. I was quite overcome. At each station, my nerves were at the edge of my eyelids. One of those famous artillerymen, a chasseur alpin! Very masculine, short, but tough and nervous. And all with such gentle expressions. Ambérieux. ‘For the wounded’: this young woman is selling short-stemmed roses, I walk off with mine, hide myself in my compartment, remembering those fragments of sentences I feel it necessary to write, for this is a unique year, and each episode of this country’s history is like a temple corridor or gallery to me. The day before yesterday, I was telling the young Jewess about my desire for action and the cravings, which sometimes grew so intense to fight as well as the others. I am timid here, feeling so useless I only dare glance at them out of the corner of my eye, these poilus who are going back to the front—these poilus, fresh, clean shaven, well brushed, quite short: not husbands, not fathers, but mama’s boys. That rose for the wounded I had bought is quite pale and not the royal flower of the lips. Its perfume is scarcely apparent, something like a big eglantine. The train pulls out.”¹²

The “young Jewess” to whom he was referring was the girlfriend of his friend Charles Auguste Humbert. She was another of his friends’ girlfriends who obsessed him while he still did not have one of his own: “with black hair, blue eyes, heavy eyelids, matte-white skin, she would make a wonderful seraglio odalisque, and were it not for La Chaux, I would declare myself the Sultan!”¹³

Continuing on his journey, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret became increasingly devastated by the wounded soldiers, young wives in mourning, and military men armed for battle. With his penchant for good machinery, he admired the weaponry—“The first bayonet. A terrible device at the end of a rifle. Long, black, splendidly sleeved”—but even if he respected the mechanism, he was shattered by its significance. “The afternoon Lyon–Marseille express, dear friend, is the train of women in mourning. Black crepe in almost every compartment. In the streets of Lyon, life was so normal that I returned to the station, curious about what had come over me this morning and annoyed with myself for still being a man of pathos, of immediate sensations, of indiscreet emotions. The train full of these women in mourning brought it all back.”¹⁴

         

FACED WITH the human suffering wrought by the war, Jeanneret was anguished by Swiss neutrality and his own distance from the action he was witnessing in France but had essentially ignored at home. He lamented “a lack of awareness for which I cannot forgive myself. For after all, this country is at war, and it’s been nine months now that I’ve imagined these horrors…. No one talks about it. Up till now, there’s been no sign of a black soldier, a Gurka, nor a cannon. Now the train is full of soldiers. We share a car with officers. All quite clean and calm, very calm. They’re about to do their fortnight in barracks! Is that what war is?”¹⁵

As the train wound its way south, and he scribbled away at this twenty-eight-page letter to William Ritter, Jeanneret’s flickering mind jumped from the human drama to the changing landscape outside the train window:

Here we have it! Classical lands! It begins before Orange, with ruins clinging to an ochre pinnacle; there was a stone church with a tiny germinated window; there were whole mountains covered with glistening gorse, the first olive trees, the cypresses, and since the sky is full of melting clouds, it is van Gogh before Cézanne. Then, to the left, the last Alps, strangely silhouetted like cumulus clouds in a stormy sky on a stage set of the Vieux Colombier. Then: the gray walls, the pink earth, the gray olive trees, and all of a sudden, as a kind of hors-d’oeuvre, a huge bed of the most radiant pink and blue foxgloves….

But back to van Gogh. Under the steely sky, the writhing cypresses; the gamut of the intensest emerald: green-green-green, no black, no red; yes, one red roof…. Then van Gogh, the drawings…: wheat fields, oats, vineyards, olive trees, fruit trees, vegetables in geometric patches….

Cézanne will not be at the party today. The “motif” is not here. It’s true, Monsieur Cézanne does not do “skies with pale gray mixed into the blue,” so today there will be no painting the earth of Provence, whose soul belongs to a man of the north, his pathetic passion so imperiously interposed between us.¹⁶

Even as he failed to make sense, the power of color on his brain and his fascination with the vision of great and radical artists was clear. He then noted the saline and eucalyptus smells in the air. Recalling a large bouquet of anemones he had arranged the day before, he launched into a diatribe against geraniums and a commentary on the sweet smell of roses in the warm air, which led him to memories of Mount Athos. “The flora, the sensation, the smell, the evocation of the mornings on Mount Athos where the sea, as here, was always present, but larger because we were seeing it from higher up, but paler and more intoxicating because the season was August instead of June. And because we had the recollection of having seen the islands as red, while they are green, and because we were after all in Greece itself, while here it is only Magna Graecia.”¹⁷

Then, at long last, the train brought Jeanneret—and, we presume, the teenage girl of whom he had taken charge—to the Mediterranean port that ultimately was one of the most important places in his life: “A stir and a rising of the waves in sparkling sheaves, a spreading apostrophe. Marseille! Marseille!”¹⁸

5

Jeanneret’s reunion with Auguste Perret in the salubrious setting of Provence made him burst with joy. They talked animatedly about Paris and the new ways of seeing that were being promulgated there. The reborn Jeanneret reversed himself about Cubism. Previously he had disparaged the artistic movement recently launched by Braque and Picasso; now he was at home with its multiple ways of seeing at once: “Let’s hear it for cubists: let’s understand everything the world offers by way of ‘fantasy,’ ‘evocation,’ ‘spirit,’ and everything the world has to offer aside from photography and banality and ready-made vision.”¹⁹

Jeanneret wrote Ritter that he greatly admired Perret’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and regretted not having been able to accept his former boss’s invitation to return to Paris and work on it: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best piece of architecture in a long time. Auguste Perret has no diploma, he tells me. His thoughts are permanently molded, like reinforced concrete.”²⁰ Here was a role model to replace L’Eplattenier. Modern technique, steadfast resolve, no official credentials: these were the ingredients of genius.

The halcyon setting lent magic to their reunion: “But Marseille, gateway to the east!…A city of life, swarming life…. A city of fortresses and a city of peoples. The empire reigns at the gates of the port, and the empire is all of Europe. The Hotel de Ville is at the very least the Great Khan, China, and the Indies. It is the port of masks, the sea glimpsed beyond the forts, a second Attica, Magna Graecia…. A port, but what a port! Negroes, ships, waves, fish with fantastic scales, shellfish, masked crowds, Chinamen, Gurkas, and Kamerat!”²¹ The love affair with that exotic seaside city was, after yet another world war, to culminate in one of Le Corbusier’s masterpieces.

6

Back in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the twenty-seven-year-old worked on a series of interiors where the lacquered inlay and other bows to tradition came to represent “corruption of the most banal sort and the most vulgar.”²² Then, in August, he returned to Paris.

As usual, his mind was full of contradictions. He wrote Ritter, “What a paradox this war is, this mass uprising. Yet only man is so rich a marvel that he includes all consolations. Paris, a harmonious city. This war has destroyed the old sense of greatness. It is very harmonious here. But the city, all cities prove to me that we are living on conventions: the convention of an old and absurdly idiotic abode.”²³

Humankind appalled him: “But the contortions, the grimaces of Paris! If you saw the faces here, the whole greedy and insane swarm, the cruel egoism: life as a funnel down which one slides to the depths.”²⁴ Yet the French, compared to the Germans, gave him cause for hope: “there are many flagrant proofs of this people’s charming and serious ingenuity—much more profound than across the Rhine—which frequently exalts me and gives me the courage to follow my star.”²⁵ Even in his rage and confusion, Jeanneret’s exaltation and inner strength were returning as he zeroed in on the idea that that star was to make cities that were “explicitly modern.”²⁶