XIII

The big break occurred when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was asked, at last, to submit a design for an architectural project of substantial scale. It was to be in Challuy—near Nevers, in the center of France. “Right now I’m studying a big slaughterhouse,” he wrote. “I could never have guessed how magnificent this problem is—and leads to true architecture. An architecture from America and Chicago, and its canned goods are letting me create a château on the Loire.”¹ Not only would he bring the boldness and candor of American industrial architecture to the French countryside and build a monument to rival Blois and Chambord, but his factory for killing animals would be an unprecedented declaration of truth.

After the initial charge, he descended into worrying: “Dubious and less than likely attribution, this work leaves me reticent and melancholy. Ah, life is hard, and a torment for those who are young and believe in ideals!”² Nonetheless, in November and December, he plunged in. First, he ruminated about the project’s requirements. Then—and this is how inspirations always hit Le Corbusier—the design idea came to him in a flash. On the train to Nevers to study the site, he hastily sketched his concept while sitting in the restaurant car.

It adhered to the tenets of Taylorism, the theory of assembly-line efficiency that called for increased productivity through standardized tools, more attention to workers’ abilities and training, and improved working conditions. These ideas had been put forth in the American Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, recently translated into French. Taylorism was then sweeping the industrialized world: it put in place conveyor belts to facilitate man-made production and organize factories for maximum efficiency. Jeanneret envisioned three separate buildings—housing animal stalls, refrigeration units, and the actual slaughterhouse—linked by bridges and Taylor’s mechanical bands.

There seemed a real chance that the commission might be completed and paid for. He was ebullient. The little apartment on the rue Jacob began to feel like paradise. The man who was soon to streamline interiors to bare white walls and stovepipe railings had covered his bedroom with a black wallpaper decorated with bowls of fruit that went well with the Louis XV wood carving in the alcove, where an enormous divan nearly filled the entire space. Rugs of black, white, and red stripes were underfoot; no bare floor whatsoever was visible. An abundance of cushions and pillows offered many possibilities for comfortable seating. Once wartime restrictions on fuel were lifted and Jeanneret was able to maintain the gas heat at his ideal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius, this overstuffed, small apartment was everything he wanted: “It’s a perfectly appointed living room, suggestive of the most complete intimacy. Surrounded by the absolute calm of this residence, all I need do is wait for Sleeping Beauty to awake.” As of yet, the mythic female was only a fantasy.

As 1917 drew to a close, he learned that the slaughterhouse proposal was going ahead. Just before New Year’s, Jeanneret experienced his first charrette, the nonstop, round-the-clock campaign in which architects complete building plans. He was ecstatic.

The making of the slaughterhouse was a “new baptism”: a purifying rebirth that was his own renewal. “The further the project advances, everything grows clearer, more orderly, better organized. Backup draftsmen arrive, my drawing workroom, so lamentably empty, is filling up: until midnight Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, just before Christmas, 44 hours without stopping, eating on a drawing board, the excitement, total reliance on nervous energy.” When he observed “we advance, but we shall not arrive,” it was not a lament; the quest was what thrilled him.³ Throughout his life, the urgent sense of necessity infused Le Corbusier with a happiness rarely matched by the end results.

He was much too excited to react to the gore of the project with anything but amusement: “From ‘Industrial Cold’ this Christmas morning came the nicest secretary, diminutively blond and neat, out of a nice warm bed. And to M’selle Yvonne I dictate memoranda on dung heaps, liquid manure, slaughtering, emptying cow bellies, guts, etc. A thousand pardons!”⁴

“Working myself to death,” he wrote without irony. The more the martyr suffered, the more he knew who he was. At three in the morning, when the draftsmen had all left the office, he remained. This was the moment to take the project to a new stage and to draw the ensemble of factories as a vision without precedent. At last he was an inventor, not just someone who rehashed old ideas of what buildings should be. In his hands, radically new forms were conceived: “Energy and flexibility are needed. I’m stiff with physical exhaustion.”⁵

When Jeanneret finally put down his pencils that December evening and left his office at 29 bis rue d’Astorg, he found himself in a swirling snowstorm. Walking along the wide boulevards of the Right Bank, he lost his way. Then he circled the Madeleine, the enormous nineteenth-century structure built in antique style as a temple to the glory of Napoleon’s army, and the next thing he knew, as if he had no control over his own footsteps, he was back in his office. Aided by the eight people who had just arrived to start a new day, he finished the project. He was nearly as thrilled by his exhaustion as by his achievement: “The big plans, impeccably drawn in ink, describe the really good arrangement of this project, its boldness, its grandeur, its harmonious modernism. It fills me with joy. But how weak my legs are!” The feeling of having given his all was his intoxicant. When those neat drawings were, at last, ready to go, Jeanneret declared, “One is stupefied, like a woman who has just given birth.”⁶

He believed that if the slaughterhouse project succeeded, it would be the beginning of his changing the world: “I’m getting excited just writing this. I see the happy days shining anew, and I wrest myself from the spleen of those days of terrible cold. The flowers freeze with the water in my vases. The river at Alfortville is magnificent, lashed by snow, a mordant green, cruel to the citizens, cruel to my plans. Everything has a color exceeding the beauty of what has ever been seen on this river, but to stop now would be death.”⁷