XIX

1

Following the war, geniuses in many domains voraciously explored new means of living well. Jeanneret had believed he would change the world as a painter. Now, as Le Corbusier, his mission was to transform the human condition through architecture. Convinced that the right visual environment had the power to elevate the souls of its inhabitants, he was determined to create settings for “healthy activity and industrious optimism.”¹

That happy state was the goal of the Citrohan housing type, which Le Corbusier developed between 1920 and 1922. In a 1921 L’Esprit Nouveau article called “Mass-produced Houses,” he and Saugnier explained that they had deliberately used a name based on the Citroën motorcar because they intended a “house like a car…. One needs to consider the house like a machine to live in or like a tool…what one can be proud of is to have a practical house like a typewriter.”² The further use of the phrase “a machine to live in” would be overinterpreted, but the building concept was clear. The house had a shoe-box shape. A forthright and bold rectangular block, its main element was a two-story-high living room flooded with light from a wall almost entirely of glass.

Le Corbusier had been struck by the idea when he was eating at a bistro on the rue Godot de Mauroy across from Ozenfant’s apartment, where the two artists ate together almost every day. The space was very high and four times as long as it was wide. A two-story dining area opened to the street in front; the kitchen was in the back, in the lower part of a space sliced horizontally into two, with a small dining balcony on the top.

One day, Le Corbusier realized that this was the perfect solution for a human dwelling. The kitchen and a maid’s room and a dining area could be in a space one story high in the back of the house, with a bedroom and bathroom and boudoir above them. A spiral staircase could link the two stories tidily. These nested rooms could open onto a two-story living room. The flat-topped roof could serve as a solarium in front and, toward the back, as the base for two guest rooms reached by outside stairs. All of the light would come in through industrial-style windows on the two short ends, making the structure simple to build and easy to monitor against crime.

Le Corbusier was convinced the concept had endless applications as an ideal habitation. Simple to clean and hygienic, it could be built of whatever materials were most readily at hand. “With this house, we turned our back on the architectural conceptions of the academically oriented schools as on the ‘modern’ ones,” he joyfully explained.³ This “house like a car” had a zip and aura of victory that would be felt by all who entered it.

The dream of the man who had just changed his name into that of a powerful tool, who would soon refer to himself in the third person, was stability and clarity. Having organized form in his paintings to counteract emotional turmoil, he now had developed architecture that provided systematization and effectiveness as anchors in shaky territory.

The Citrohan design was a precise shell in which the rich tapestry of human life might flourish. Its geometrically organized and rationally programmed environment would allow the vagaries of existence, the unfathomable struggles and the sublime pleasures, to be realized in harmony. The inhabitants could feel serene and secure in logical dwellings that worked well and gave pleasure through their agreeable lines and forms.

In one way or another, all of the architecture to be made over the next half century by this man who could be so warm and so cold, generous and arrogant, insightful and shallow, was marked by that same combination of the Romantic, the Classical, and the Modern.

2

Le Corbusier’s enterprise of his new self had taken off beyond expectations. In midsummer, he wrote Ritter and Czadra, “The Le Corbusier campaign is bearing fruits I had not hoped for so soon. I am being asked for houses, which is too bad since I wanted a year’s rest.” The notion of stopping was, of course, specious. Besides designing houses, he was painting and editing his magazine: “The Paris of internal struggles would be stifling for anyone who failed to engage in the fight. It’s a tough battle, but for what stakes! Ambition? Of course, or let’s say determination. For this one is determined.”⁴

He was, he told his confessor figures, “full of good humor, with a bad character.” Their faith in him was a major factor in his life. “I know that you still have all your confidence in me; how gratefully I preserve my precious memories of you. I often write you imaginary letters, thinking you would be in agreement with me. But imaginary or not, you would be, deep down.”⁵

They were no longer the only ones to relieve his solitude. Le Corbusier was finding a group of admirers in Paris. The painter Fernand Léger described their first encounter: “I met Le Corbusier in 1921 or 1922, in a rather odd way. I was living in Montparnasse and from time to time I would sit on the terrace of La Rotonde with friends and models from the neighborhood. One day one of them said, ‘look, there’s a funny specimen. He’s riding a bicycle in a bowler….’ A few minutes later, I saw coming toward me, quite stiffly, an extraordinary moving object, a kind of Chinese shadow topped by a bowler hat, with spectacles and a clergyman’s overcoat. This object advanced slowly on its bicycle, scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective. This picturesque personage, indifferent to the curiosity he awakened, was the architect Le Corbusier. Shortly afterward I made his acquaintance. I must say that our tastes had many points in common. He, too, painted.”⁶

These two robust enthusiasts of modern life, who regarded smokestacks and scaffolding with a rare delicacy of perception, whiled away long evenings at La Rotonde and began bicycling together. Unlike many of Le Corbusier’s relationships, this was a friendship that was to last. With the rare individuals who, like him, combined a passion for modernism and human simplicity, he was truly at home.

3

Le Corbusier was ready to redesign the world. Having planned what he considered the perfect individual dwelling, he leapt to the idea of varying and multiplying it on a vast scale. In 1922, at the Salon d’Automne, where he exhibited the Maison Citrohan for the first time, he also presented drawings, plans, and models for a city of three million inhabitants.

This imaginary metropolis was impeccably organized. At the center there was a seven-story-high structure that was a terminal for trains, subways, and automobiles, with an airport on top. Twenty-four cruciform, glass office buildings, each sixty stories high, surrounded it. Beyond the skyscrapers there were apartment houses, one type containing standardized dwellings around a communal garden, the other with luxurious two-story units similar inside to the Citrohan house, with two-story-high living rooms. Each of these cushier residences had a private roof garden, so that the privileged few could connect with nature there as well as in the public spaces. Four hundred thousand people would inhabit the business district, six hundred thousand the area of urban housing surrounding it, and the remaining two million a garden city on the outskirts.

Like Freud, Le Corbusier had sought to discern universal laws and truths: “standards of the mind, standards of the heart, the physiology of sensations (of our human sensations); then standards of history and statistics. I touched human bases, I possessed the realm where our actions occur.”⁷ Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s belief that he knew best about how others should live had reached a new scale.

         

THE BASIC BUILDING MATERIALS were concrete, steel, and glass. They facilitated the height of those living rooms and the large windows that let in the abundance of nature and made the sky present. Le Corbusier was using modern technology to re-create the combination of community living with a direct connection to the universe he had discovered at Ema and to make a haven like the monasteries on Mount Athos: “You are under the shade of trees, vast lawns spread all around you. The air is clear and pure; there is hardly any noise,” he wrote about the life he would give three million people.⁸ “The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement, in this order and in this hierarchy.”⁹ He envisioned an “immensity of space…the sky everywhere, as far as the eye can see”:¹⁰ that uplifting vista he had first known on Athos.

Le Corbusier deplored the helter-skelter aspects of urban living, the elements that were random or inchoate. But a well-run city could be the perfect engine of human life. His new metropolis was the solution: “As the seat of power (in the widest meaning of the words; for in it there come together princes of affairs, captains of industry and finance, political leaders, great scientists, teachers, thinkers, the spokesmen of the human soul, painters, poets and musicians), the city draws every ambition to itself; it is clothed in a dazzling mirage of unimaginable beauty; the people swarm into it. Great men and our leaders install themselves in the city’s centre.”¹¹

Having located himself within walking distance of the Assemblée Nationale and the Elysée Palace, Le Corbusier had put himself in the cockpit he described. From here he intended to launch a new city and build its clones all over the world.

4

The architecture historian Vincent Scully has said that the drawings for the City for Three Million reflect “a monocular vision.”¹² Being unable to see with one eye causes distorted depth perception, which is why, in Le Corbusier’s perspective drawings of the superhighway running through the new city, the vanishing point is much nearer than it would be in actuality, with the extreme foreshortening creating an artificial impression of energy and speed. Moreover, Le Corbusier had become partially blind to most other people’s experience. What he showed at the Salon d’Automne was exciting, imaginative, and bold; had it been built, it would probably have made many people miserable.

To Ritter and Czadra, he acknowledged his partial blindness: “I am a Cyclops in spite of myself, a nasty joke. And for this very reason things are quite complicated for me. You get used to it: it’s been going on for two years. The cause: overwork.”¹³ In spite of the ocular problems he had had since his youth, he was convinced that the loss of sight in his left eye was a direct result of his detaching his retina when working at nights with very hard graphite—an explanation that supported his sense of martyrdom even if it made no sense medically.

As a Cyclops, he was in his self-image a giant with a foul disposition, but also the primordial son of Earth and Sky.

5

Le Corbusier observed his own ascent with pleasure. In April 1922, he wrote Ritter, “A new incarnation seems to dawn for Le Corbusier; glowing prospects, art as free as possible. On every side, in every realm, the battle lines are moved forward. One is observed, appreciated. One must do well. It might be said that I have reached this point: of being at grips with the powerful figures, the ones who count. In architecture, complete success: I am alone in my category.”¹⁴

For all the gloating, though, he remained daunted by the challenges: “Succès d’esteem in the press and elsewhere, in Paris and abroad. All of which is of no importance. Every day I face the work to be completed, occasionally sick to my stomach, then leaping forward, etc. A thrilling life, but not on days when I am sick. At thirty-five, you are old enough to be given credit, but it is an age when you must produce. I am not complaining, I am content. Content especially with being, at this moment, of my generation, for the period requires an adaptation of full consent in order to grant you understanding and a reason for working. Art is eternal, of course. Only what has contributed lasts.”¹⁵

He had severed his old life: “Switzerland alienates me. I feel I belong to the Mediterranean coast, and not Norway.” He told his friends that he had destroyed his old possessions, burned his archives, and saved nothing. Even if this was only partially true, he was now living in empty white rooms, with no furniture and nothing on the walls. The apartment had the purity and simplicity of Athos: “‘Everything’s been said, everything’s been done, there’s not even a new sin,’ you wrote me that last year. Yes and no. About sins you’re right, but not about painting: observe this figure.” Here the man with a new name and a new profession drew a line like an uncoiled spring, looping its way along, with an A on top toward the end. “We still are entitled to try to be at A. That’s what matters.”¹⁶

6

That summer, Le Corbusier shortened the issues of L’Esprit Nouveau from one hundred pages to fifty in order to save money. His financial mistakes were over. “In an enterprise of ideas like this, money talks, and talks tough,” he wrote to Ritter. What was required was a “magazine that will be more direct, swifter, and more readable…. The speed factor intervenes.”¹⁷

Le Corbusier was approaching his own life with that same enterprise. He sought efficiency and structure. Set on his course of changing the world through architecture, he would do what it took to navigate effectively toward that goal.

Yet even as he forged ahead, Le Corbusier was still subject to Jeanneret’s bouts of doubt and sadness. That September, he went to Venice. On a postcard of the Piazza San Marco, he wrote Ritter and Czadra, “Dear friends, I have made my escape and I’m doing water-colors, happy as a clam. This is a city for water-colors, a technique for such beauty. Taking the train I indulged in bitter reflections on the ravages of time; I am no longer young in body and mind. Life has become hard with ever-higher ambitions. Harsh labor, endless struggles. I was telling myself (leaving the hospital) that the heroic age was probably past, an age unfamiliar with weariness. So I’m doing water-colors and enjoying this theatrical city. Best regards and forgive me for such a long silence.”¹⁸

The reason for the hospital stay was a hemorrhoid operation, which left him physically uncomfortable, aware of age, and vulnerable. But the Veneto restored him. Le Corbusier fired off another postcard to Ritter and Czadra, pressing words so tightly into the margins around his message in every direction that it had to be turned 360 degrees, and required the use of a magnifying glass, in order to be read. The picture side of the card showed a Tiepolo from the Villa Zileri in Vicenza that, appropriately, depicted Time Revealing Truth. In the dramatic allegory, winged creatures with ardent expressions on their faces flaunt banners emblazoned with their noble crests. Jeanneret wrote to the two men, “I think of you united with me in my enthusiasm for Vicenza, Palladio, and Tiepolo…. It would be nice if you would write me a letter of twenty lines about your Tiepolesque delights.”¹⁹

Le Corbusier himself was ready for his own version of those delights.