Le Corbusier

From 1922 on, Le Corbusier made houses and villas of tensile lightness and refined proportions that took domestic design into virgin territory. In steel and glass, and in concrete as light and taut as a sail perfectly rigged in a high wind, Le Corbusier’s neat, rhythmic structures used modern technology to create a new form of aesthetic luxury: habitations of unprecedented simplicity and airiness.

He built a tapered, five-story studio/house for Amédée Ozenfant—who had recently inherited the wherewithal from his father—that has a triumphant grace and neatness. Here, Le Corbusier realized his desire to make urban life easy and pleasant and to give it many of the charms of the countryside, in a radically modern shell. The Ozenfant dwelling stands opposite the large Montsouris Reservoir, which, as the source of much of Paris’s water, resembles a lake at the edge of the city. The crisp and straightforward factory-style windows open to these bucolic charms. The roof is a progression of angled skylights that bring the sun and sky in. The house embraces the treetops and the reservoir as totally as it reflects mass production and industrialization. And when one views it from across the street and looks through the sequence of large sheets of plate glass set at right angles in the studio, it is like a weightless container for air and light.

The architect who was in the process of developing for himself a skin against the outside world designed an attractive, plain white concrete covering to sheath the rooms. These walls are nuanced with little indentations and slight protrusions, useful in their function of letting in light and warding off rainwater as well as artful in their rhythm and shapes. Ozenfant’s villa is as refined and subtle as a late abstract composition by Mondrian, thanks to Le Corbusier’s judgment and precision about where to hold a border back and where to let a plane protrude.

One touch above all brings the structure to life. This is the curving exterior staircase with its ribbonlike banister. The pirouette of the stairs leads to a right-angled composition made by a ledge—to shield an entrance door from the rain—and a vertical slice of glass above it. Nearby, a cantilevered square projecting at a right angle to the wall under a window grid is action and void; in counterpoint to it, another cantilever over the exposed corner of the house serves the practical purpose of shelter while providing a spiritual lift through its sheer élan. Visual diversion and effective architecture are synonymous. Life inside Ozenfant’s residence and workplace is marked by both plenitude and clarity.

Exterior of Ozenfant’s studio and residence in Paris, 1924

Another of Le Corbusier’s inventions was the study that is like a monk’s cell within the studio. To reach it, one has to climb difficult stairs, with risers of double height. Accustomed as he was to hiking up seven such flights of steps whenever he arrived at his own home, Le Corbusier valued the journey he now gave to his friend. The reward for the energizing ascent was one of the first of the architect’s small spaces meant to provide quiet and solitude. It mimics a boat cabin or a sleeping compartment on a train, with everything necessary for thinking and working in a tidy, aesthetically satisfying, and comfortable enclosure as carefully conceived as it is small.

There was also a garage—unusual in 1922, but a prescient acknowledgment of the need for a car. And the housekeeper was given a real bathroom nearly the size of the one for the master bedroom—a rare statement of social equality, initiated by the architect.

For all that had been done in Berlin and Vienna, nowhere else were the angles quite so rhythmic and pleasing, the lines so playful, as in this house on a corner with its bold, boxlike form and double-peaked roof. The juxtaposition of textures—buffed glass, shimmering and translucent against the black steel mullions supporting it; white concrete, solid against the openness of the window wall and banding—is infinitely satisfying. The black-white rhythms have the quality of cinema. The purity and refinement and understatement were unprecedented in domestic architecture.

Interior of Ozenfant’s studio

In 1922, Le Corbusier elevated the second cousin he had initially disparaged to the position of partner. The principals of the office were, officially, “Le Corbusier–Pierre Jeanneret.” But it was called l’Atelier Le Corbusier; there was no question as to which one had more authority. There was room for only a single genius in the partnership, and while Le Corbusier did most of the designing, the competent but less imaginative Pierre was better suited to be the loyal, skillful manager with his feet on the ground. Few people even knew that the two men in truth had the same last name.

Toward the end of his life, Le Corbusier wrote, “Our work as a team permitted an important architectural and urbanist production. Supporting each other, we were able to produce significant mutual work. Between the two of us, there was always total confidence, despite the difficulties of a working life…. Our personal characters in all this advanced side by side, Pierre and I confronting all obstacles together.”¹ In fact, there was to be one long-lasting feud over the issue of Vichy, but Pierre’s presence in Le Corbusier’s life made a great deal possible.

THAT SAME YEAR, Le Corbusier began to live with Yvonne Gallis. They met because Yvonne was a salesgirl and model at the couture house of Jove when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret showed his paintings there in 1919.

She had been born Jeanne Victorine Gallis in Monaco on January 4, 1892. Her father was a gardener, and her mother owned a small flower shop. Full figured, with large dark eyes, a delicate chiseled nose, and cupid-shaped lips, Yvonne was unabashedly sexy and coquettish. When Le Corbusier first met her, she parted her black hair in the middle, pulling it back straight and then letting it cascade in neat waves that draped around gold hoop earrings, so that she resembled an exotic gypsy. She laid on her mascara, eyebrow pencil, and rouge as if with a shovel, and she applied her dark crimson lipstick as boldly as he painted bottles of red wine in his Purist still lifes.

To him, she was “Vonvon” to her, he was “Doudou.” From the start, she made him laugh and gave him a sense of well-being. She had none of his intellect and drive, but she believed in him totally, at least initially. The zealot who was slaving away for long days at the office revolutionizing world architecture and designing everything from private houses to entire cities, and who sanctimoniously told his parents that he had completely sacrificed the pleasures of friendship and private life, let down his guard with this girlfriend who embodied the Mediterranean spirit he craved. With her, he had fun and felt robust.

Although they were to be together thirty-seven years, the first ten unmarried, Yvonne remained almost completely out of the public eye, even as Le Corbusier became world famous. She rarely attended official events and scarcely appears in the material published about him. The architect’s close friends and office staff knew her, but otherwise he kept her like a well-guarded, secret treasure.

The one statement Le Corbusier put in print about this eccentric beauty makes clear the role she played in his mental construction of his life: “Yvonne is the best girl in the world. But she has her own ideas, her habits. She’s a willful little creature, and it’s no use trying to alter her nature. What would be the point? To make her a commonplace bourgeoise? Wasted effort! You would get nowhere. The game isn’t worth the candle. What I can say is that her tastes and mine fit together, harmonized by being different…. Yvonne, the empress’s daughter, used to giving despotic commands, a great sport of a girl, so kind, so pretty, so charming, so affectionate.”²

Yvonne was famous for her practical jokes as well as for her sharp remarks. When the distinguished architectural patron Père Couturier, a Dominican father known for his support of modern art, came to call on Le Corbusier and his wife in the early 1950s, Yvonne, sounding like a well-brought-up Catholic schoolgirl, reverently told the prelate to have a seat on the living-room sofa. He lowered himself gently in his immaculate white robes, only to bring about the sounds of booming flatulence from a whoopee cushion. Yvonne began to giggle like a ten-year-old, as did the admiring Le Corbusier, who retailed the story. She was salty, generous, and famously difficult.

THE FIRST EVIDENCE of Yvonne’s residence in the garret apartment on the rue Jacob is a letter dated September 27, 1922, which Le Corbusier sent to “Mademoiselle Yvonne Gallis, chez M. Ed. Jeanneret, 20 rue Jacob.”³ On his way back to Paris, he visited his parents and brother in Switzerland, where there was no possibility of his being joined by a girlfriend, let alone of revealing their cohabitation, but where he hastened to write her in secret.

Le Corbusier described cutting wood with great strokes of an ax; now his hands were full of blisters. He wrote Yvonne in baby talk, instructing her to rest up and to sing, to be at her best when he got back: “And it would be nice if you made me some little drawings. You’d have fun doing it, the time would pass more quickly, and your Doudou would be so proud.”⁴

He counted on her to understand him, continuing, “My parents are as nice as could be. But they’re terrified of their sons and their damn ideas. Fortunately I never talk about painting—that would stir up a storm.”⁵ To post this letter secretly, Le Corbusier needed to walk through the countryside for nearly an hour in the wind and rain. Sneaking out of the house for love, he felt a sense of true companionship and could fancy himself a Mediterranean at last.

The architect was having his bachelor digs remade to suit his girlfriend’s tastes, and wrote her from Vincenza about the details. Pierre had wallpaper installed. While Le Corbusier was traveling in northern Italy, Yvonne was hanging curtains and applying yet another coat of polish to the parquet. He wrote her that his consolation each evening when he returned to his hotel room was to look at her photo and think of her in their new domesticity. After a six-week separation, he was counting the days until he would be back “in my little nest in the rue Jacob with you my happy little song-sparrow.” Anticipating the hard work he faced in Paris, he wrote, “You’ll be there to soothe me with your caresses…. I know I’ve got a bad character, but I wouldn’t do any harm to a nice little friend like you.”⁶

He instructed her not to come to the station when he got back. His train was to arrive early in the morning and might not be on time; this would fatigue her. He would head straight home; she should await him in bed.

Le Corbusier now considered himself a connoisseur of women and wanted Yvonne to know of her high standing: “Venetian women are lovely—dark and distinguished, built rather like you; so I kept thinking of you, and I was quite pleased with you in comparison.”⁷ His way of being faithful to her, he explained to his mistress, was by embracing his pillow. He urged her to ask him, once he got back to Paris, what his ideas had been when he was doing so.

Within months of their beginning to live together, the relationship between Le Corbusier and Yvonne had advanced to a point of complete dependence for both. But even a year into the affair, he remained nervous about the need to keep her existence secret from his parents. In August 1923, when he went to Blonay, he instructed Yvonne that if she wrote him at his parents’ rented chalet, she had to be sure to address the envelope with a typewriter, to prevent his mother from having any ideas about the sender.

Pierre, on the other hand, was in the inner circle. During that holiday, the quieter cousin was in charge of Yvonne’s entertainment and well-being in Paris. Following Pierre’s report that Yvonne was grimacing when she took her cough syrup, Le Corbusier, like a tough parent who had put a caretaker in charge, wrote that if she was still coughing when he got home, he would give her a “good thrashing.”⁸

At first, she was nothing but worshipful and sweet to her lover. But by their second year together, she periodically burst out angrily. Le Corbusier appeared to handle her anger rather than rise to it. With his mother and colleagues, he feuded; he dealt with Yvonne as one might cope with an enchanting pet cat, accepting and enjoying the limitations of control.

But how he admired his inamorata. He credited Yvonne with “a quality which makes for peace in the house,” while complaining to her about his mother’s chronic restlessness and twitching, her need always to be doing something, and her inability to sleep.⁹ The contrast between these two totally different women, which Le Corbusier often pointed out to both, obsessed him.

When Le Corbusier returned to be with his mother and father in Switzerland for Christmas that year, Yvonne again remained in Paris. Back in his parents’ world, the thirty-six-year-old architect simply did whatever was expected of him. He again cut wood for the winter and helped slaughter pigs for the holiday meal. He slept on a board in a freezing room under the roof, and when his father took off on mountain outings in brutal weather, he joined in cheerfully. But in the letters no one saw him mail, Le Corbusier emphasized to Yvonne how much he missed her. He complained of his loneliness and the sexlessness of life there, conjuring up a picture of the bare planks on which he slept solo, in contrast to their warm bed at home with her in it.

Realizing that she would be alone for Christmas, Le Corbusier wrote on December 24, seemingly unaware that, even if in his mind he thought he was comforting her on Christmas Eve, she could not possibly receive the letter until a day or two after the actual holiday: “Yet your Doudou will be thinking of you and sending you a nice kiss during the night. In my chilly room under the eaves, I’ll be thinking of my brave little girl far away in her soft beddy-bye while I’m sleeping on a plank. I’m scouring the countryside, which is covered with snow, and it’s cold and wet and dreary, and I’m out looking for sites. No fun, but my parents are so happy about the future house that I’m glad to take on this task.”¹⁰

The separation and hardship and foul weather were all worth enduring for that chance yet again to create a place where his parents would live. He had a new idea in his mind, and this time, with a different name, advanced skills, and a sense of reality, he would not let them down.