XXIV

Learn, he told himself, before you die, to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.

What do crows think when they hear the other birds singing? They think it’s stupid. It is. Cawing. That’s the only thing. It doesn’t look good for a bird that struts to sing a sweet little song. No, caw your head off.

—PHILIP ROTH, The Human Stain

1

On January 10, 1927, in the hectic surroundings of his office, with everyone around him working away frantically, Le Corbusier suddenly wrote his mother a short letter. Eight draftspeople were in sight; these were hardly the circumstances under which he normally took the time to write.

Time was scarce in “this violent whirlwind in which I find myself,” but he felt compelled by “the violent ups and downs of the idea.”¹ What prompted that repetition of “violent” and was more important even than his frenzied pursuit of architecture connected to his thoughts of the previous day, a Sunday. It had been the first anniversary of his father’s death. Although he was off by two days—Georges had actually died on January 11 of the previous year, not January 9—all day long Edouard had been reliving the events of a year before. This was when he recalled the vital details of his father’s death and the little needle “which allowed him to leave this earth without further consideration.”² While Edouard and Albert and their mother and the cooperative doctor were all party to the determination to help the calm and rational Georges Jeanneret end his life with euthanasia, there is no way of knowing if Georges himself participated in this decision. But this letter makes the event itself clear. The older Jeanneret had been suffering excruciating pain and had reached a terminal state. When Edouard had lain down next to his unconscious father, he had known that a well-organized death, based on carefully measured quantities of the proper mix of chemicals and proceeding at a clockwork pace, was to occur.

To find the most effective means and use them correctly was the mark of a rational, intelligent life. They had given that injection as matter-of-factly as Le Corbusier deployed water pipes, revealing rather than concealing the truths of existence. The honesty and boldness with which his natal family had determined his father’s means of dying was consistent with the new aesthetic with which Le Corbusier was now triumphant. Mechanical efficiency did not displace human feeling but, rather, honored it. His father’s trembling voice and wise words of departure had made clear that the time was right.

2

Founded just after the end of World War I, the League of Nations stood to benefit all of humankind by maintaining world peace and promoting international cooperation. Here, countries of every stripe and size came together as members of a global community.

When Le Corbusier was invited in 1926 to participate in the competition for the organization’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva, he and Pierre Jeanneret laid out a utopian dream. The complex of neat building slabs all raised on pilotis represented a fresh approach to the true meaning of community and cooperation. The wing housing the Secretariat was to be a sleek band that appeared to float in space, its form graceful and harmonious. The crowning jewel among the various structures supported by elegant and lithe legs would be a massive assembly hall built for meetings of up to 2,060 delegates. A bold, abstract composition looking triumphantly over the rest, it was sure to instill confidence in the processes it facilitated. The assembly hall was to be made of reinforced concrete and covered in polished granite, with a concave facade silhouetted against the lake. Its large windows would shimmer between trim steel mullions. Those materials encased a myriad of elements, giving unity to five hundred offices, a balcony for journalists over the enormous auditorium, a roof garden, ample toilets, changing rooms, and a restaurant.

The overall complex was designed to be welcoming and pleasant, with a covered entranceway assuring a comfortable arrival even in bad weather. Pleasantness and efficiency were central goals in every aspect of the scheme. The heating and ventilating systems, the access for automobiles and arrangements for parking, the streamlined offices geared to accommodate the latest technology, and the flawless acoustics of the Assembly Hall were all impeccable.

The structure was to be situated between the lakeshore and the mountains in a way meant to ennoble the activities that would occur within. Like an urbanized version of Mount Athos, the arrangement would enhance the serenity essential for the negotiations that were the league’s mission, while providing a vista that embodied peace.

         

AFTER SENDING IN the plans and drawings at the end of January 1927, Le Corbusier experienced the letdown that often occurred at the conclusion of one of his creative bursts. On February 3, he wrote his mother, “Since our League of Nations plans went off to Geneva, a great sensation of emptiness reigns here. I am somewhat the worse for wear, deflated as always after a big effort.”³ He was also suffering from having given up his habitual pipe smoking earlier.

Soon enough, Le Corbusier returned to tobacco; although he occasionally halted, he was a cigarette smoker for the rest of his life. Events in Geneva were one of the reasons. At first, success seemed assured. After architects from all over the world submitted plans, Victor Horta, the president of the jury, wrote the secretary-general to say that the proposal from 35 rue de Sèvres was the only one that would not exceed the budget of thirteen million Swiss francs. Horta recommended that the Le Corbusier/Jeanneret scheme, the jury’s choice, should be awarded the commission. Then the juror from France, the architect Charles Lemaresquier, director of l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, pointed out that Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s plans had not been submitted in the requisite China ink.

Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s design had initially been made in China ink on “tracing paper,” according to regulations. But what they actually submitted was in printer’s ink, according to the process known as “Dorel.” This was a conscious decision on the part of the architects. They thought the Dorel impressions, which corresponded to the most current practices of architectural studios, made greater sense, since it guaranteed that the plans would be completely dry, which was not the case with China ink. While Dorel in its final stage used printer’s ink, it required by definition that the drawings originally be made in China ink, so Le Corbusier and Jeanneret believed that their submission fulfilled the requirements of the competition. They made it clear that they completely understood and supported those requirements—since China ink was more precise and exact than pencil, charcoal, or watercolor.

While the issue of the ink did not immediately put Le Corbusier out of the running, it caused what had seemed certain now to be in jeopardy. Rather than award the commission to him and Pierre as originally decided, the jury now made their scheme one of nine on the short list. Then the General Assembly voted that there was more money to spend on the building complex than originally stipulated.

A battle ensued over which design to use. Sigfried Giedion, an esteemed authority on architecture, defended Le Corbusier and Pierre’s proposal in widely read newspaper articles, and Karl Moser, the juror from Switzerland, championed it as well. On May 8, 1927, an optimistic Le Corbusier wrote his mother,

Our situation is brilliant beyond our wildest dreams, and the future may belong to us.

The French press has made this competition into a success, and we are among the four who have assured France its triumph. We are in fact the only moderns, the others being notorious academics. So that the field is clearer than ever: modernism or academicism? We have weapons…. On all sides the Le Corbusier victory is regarded as the victory of the modern and the other leading moderns have no standing in public opinion.

Here in Paris this is a capital event in the world of architecture. It used to be denied that I knew how to make anything but “machines for living.” Here is proof of the contrary.⁴

Recalling a foe who had said that “what we did was not architecture!,” Le Corbusier told his mother, “We’ll talk about all this when I see you next. The other evening Albert was utterly amazed. I myself maintained the most disconcerting calm, judging even at the first news that this was a manifestation of the jury’s impotence. Actually, I knew we had to come out on top, for we had a well-made plan—extremely well-made—and I’m more or less convinced that no competitor had made a study anywhere near so serious. I can’t separate these events from the thought of dear Papa. What deep personal joy he would have had! All the same he would have said: ‘Yes, but. But.’…Those ‘buts’ which testified to the fact that he feared reprisals and upsets. But there are no ‘buts’ here, and Papa would have been deeply happy.”⁵

Le Corbusier’s excitement was, as usual, tinged by pain. He believed he had won the commission of his dreams, yet he was suffering from nightmares. They were about his mother. He wrote her that they were too painful to describe, but that when he received a letter from her, he could hardly believe his own relief that she was still alive to write it.

         

THEN, IN JUNE, Le Corbusier’s confidence in a League of Nations victory began to wane. He entered the fracas directly in hopes of influencing the jurors, prompting his mother to caution him about the merits of his campaign.

On June 16, 1927, Marie wrote Le Corbusier,

I know your experiences will soon be more firmly based; your portrait (and what a portrait, in reinforced concrete!) has been published here as well as the plans for the League of Nations. Albert tells me you are working hard for victory, and your mother must hope it is with loyal arms that you are pursuing your goal, never forgetting everything honorable and upright that our dear Papa had instilled in you….

I know that here on earth the struggle is a harsh one which requires tenacity and energy, and it is because I know these qualities are innate in you that I can say so.⁶

His mother enumerated those qualities: “your simplicity, your true modesty, qualities great men have always possessed, even at the height of their success.”⁷ Her son’s conceit and boastfulness were, after all, no secret to her.

3

Marie Jeanneret harbored no illusions. She acknowledged that even the new dog was having a tough time. “Bessie is making a terrible racket; the postman is the cause, encouraging her hysteria by swiping at her with his hat. Apropos of Bessie, she is back to living her solitary little life, though doubtless regretting her races with the children at Blonay,” she wrote. The loneliness and exhaustion of the dog was comparable to Marie’s own: “I simply cannot do the work all by myself: curtains to wash, beds to air, closets to clean, actually a general cleanup of a ransacked house. Our friends have left, Mme. Matthey to her son’s house in Herisau, our relatives for the ends of the earth! Alone! Sometimes it’s hard. And I know no one.”⁸

The one comfort to the sixty-six-year-old was her sons. She told Le Corbusier, “A little article by Pettarel has appeared in La Feuille de Dimanche about the Jeanneret family, starting of course with Le Corbusier.”⁹ And then there was “the fine boy,” Albert. He was going to Sweden; this pleased her, but only “in part.” For Marie wanted her sons for herself.

She got her wish. After Albert returned from his travels in midsummer, she wrote Edouard,

I’ve just washed my hair, taking advantage of the sunshine to dry it, while my dear son has gone off to Walther’s for a swim. You can imagine how happy I am to repossess my boy for me alone, a happiness soon to be doubled by your presence.

And soon you’ll be here, dear boy—how long you’ve been expected! The garden is delicious, the peaches melt in your mouth, the big plums are waiting for the birds to peck at them, and the three (count them) pears are growing larger on their tree as you look at them. Isn’t it all so tempting? I add the famous swim, the frogs in the sun-warmed shallows, and the cool shade of the paulownia…. If after all that you don’t rush to pack your bags for your native land it’s because your heart no longer beats at the prospect of really good things.¹⁰

The dynamics never changed: Marie Jeanneret perpetually trying to manipulate her younger son’s emotions, and Le Corbusier always fighting the unwinnable battle for her to renounce Switzerland and see the supremacy of his decisions and achievements. Albert—the peripatetic musician/composer, the helpless innocent of the three, unable to sustain a marriage and dependent on two powerful family members—was the only one at ease.

         

WHILE IMPORTANT SWISS NEWSPAPERS such as the Journal de Genève were in favor of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s League of Nations scheme, others, such as the Gazette de Lausanne, were vehemently against its strident modernism. The mounting opposition, which Pierre, seeing the issues as having to do more with the canton of the family’s origins than with aesthetics, credited to anti-Vaudois sentiment, was effective.¹¹ By July, Le Corbusier again began to smell defeat.

He retreated to his preferred source of sanity. In the summer of 1927, Le Corbusier concentrated with renewed energy on his paintings. He now believed that he had mastered color by understanding the need for its simplicity, which enabled him to clarify his composition. When Fernand Léger praised the new work accordingly, Le Corbusier was ecstatic.

His delight with his painting and the progress of the villa at Garches fed an overall optimism in which he became convinced, falsely, that the League of Nations project would be theirs. On July 29, 1927, in one of his phases when he believed himself triumphant on every front, he wrote his “bonne Petite Maman” a rambling epiphany: “Thanks for being ever brave and enthusiastic. Life is a tangled skein, and now and then one achieves a clear patch, something emerges. To know what is right, what is good, is difficult and the result not of sudden and brutal decisions but of a careful procedure during which each day brings its own contribution…. Life has no goal. Life is only a transition—to vain minds one lives one’s life according to a beginning and an end. I myself believe one lives one’s life in order to make it a mounting progress. Yet one day or another such progress slows down; age erodes the creative forces. One sees nothing but limitless ascents…apparently. And suddenly, the measure of a man is ossification, immobilization, a downward path. A sad certainty. One might hope to die at the right moment. But that, too, is a vanity…. I regard myself as an eternal student, always on the threshold of a new problem. I do not conceive of such a thing as maturity. I neither hope for it, nor do I want it. The deeper one enters into a conception (however shallow, however cloudy) of life, the more one is confused and the less one is certain of one’s goal. And the more clearly one discovers that there is a means of accounting for our presence here: it is to be useful, to be generous, to be open. There are holes on all sides: they must be filled—and it is good to do so—with whatever comes to hand. A selfish life is a life without hope. The opposite kind is full of possibilities.”¹²

He addressed the issue of Albert’s “neurasthénie,” which translates roughly as “clinical depression.” Le Corbusier warned their mother that she did not adequately understand this illness, but he offered her the comfort that Albert was making considerable progress with Dr. Allendy.

Where Marie could be most effective was with Bessie, “your idealized comrade.”¹³ Le Corbusier instructed his mother to attach a three-or four-meter chain to the catalpa tree next to the villa, “No absurd sentimentality here: what she needs is a purge for two weeks. You must not mask affection by attentions to which this creature is indifferent. And if she is tied up for fifteen days (excellent for guard dogs) she will appreciate her recovered freedom all the more. Not a wire, with all the dreaded consequences; common sense: a chain [underlined four times], promise me this.”¹⁴

Try as he did to lay down the law, he knew that he was up against a force as intractable as any in his life.

4

Le Corbusier and Yvonne took another summer holiday at Le Piquey. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and his wife, for whom Le Corbusier had recently built the studio/residence in Boulogne, were living in a fisherman’s house, where Le Corbusier was mesmerized by the tide table and perpetually monitored the sea coming in and receding, as if to measure the passing of time. He developed the idea of buying three pine trees and four square meters of sand. He would, he said, build a hut on this spot of coastline. For others, he would make grandiose villas; for himself, a modest shack facing the horizon. The idea was seeded for his ultimate refuge.

With Yvonne on holiday in Le Piquey, ca. 1930

While he was holidaying, Le Corbusier learned that the forces against him on the League of Nations project were gaining strength. He wrote his mother, “The struggle is exactly what I had foreseen: us against academicism.”¹⁵ He determined that at the start of September he would spend a week with her in Vevey, from where he would go to Geneva to begin to wage the battle himself, on-site.

With his mother and her dog Nora in Vevey, ca. 1930

Another fight troubled him more. The architect was furious at the builder of La Petite Maison, Colombo. He put the blame entirely on the builder for the dampness problem and leaking roof that had his mother increasingly upset. He insisted that Colombo, negligent as well as miserly, had played a dirty trick and not made an adequate foundation. He had never before had an equivalent problem in anything he had built: “Only that damn foundation is betraying us. Besides I had ordered hollow cinder blocks with a hole; Colombo made them of cement with three holes. Such walls have no consistency and no insulation. He neglected this when I was not around. I had ordered Pitcholine for the roof; he used Toitex and he made neither gutters nor connecting outlets against the parapet. It is all very clear, unfortunately. I have written Colombo to put his nose in his own doo-doo and to keep him from blaming our construction methods.”¹⁶

To have built a second disaster for his mother was more than he could bear. He assured Marie that, busy as his schedule was with the office reopening after the August holiday, he would stay with her until he got the situation completely rectified. Le Corbusier reminded Marie that the fifty-six houses at Pessac had survived torrid temperatures and the heaviest winter storms and that there was not a single ceiling stain—even in empty, unheated houses. His Stuttgart project was being praised to the hilt. He would solve the problems at Vevey!

5

Once the house in Vevey sprang its leak, everything began to spiral downward. By the end of September 1927, Le Corbusier was convinced that his League of Nations foes would defeat him.

His cousin Pierre became his latest scapegoat. Le Corbusier could not stand being at Pierre’s mercy whenever he went to Vevey to be with his mother. “That damn Pierre hasn’t written to tell me what he’s doing.” Le Corbusier complained to Yvonne on one occasion, “If Pierre deigned to specify his intentions I’d feel better about it…. It annoys me, since it’s the same story every year. He doesn’t even realize what a lack of consideration it is. He mustn’t get it into his head that I’m enjoying myself.”¹⁷

Swimming remained Le Corbusier’s emotional salvation. Trying to resolve the problems of his mother’s house, which he now called the Villa Le Lac, he could raise his spirits by taking off in the freshwater just a few steps from its doors. “If I didn’t have the opportunity to swim (and I swim remarkably well) I’d be completely disgusted,” he wrote Yvonne.¹⁸ Gliding through water, he encountered no obstacles and could control his own path. For the rest of his life, up to his last breath, this was how he could feel that he controlled his own destiny.

On the milestone of his fortieth birthday, Le Corbusier wrote his mother from Paris. She was, he reminded her, “the creator of my life on earth.” Le Corbusier vividly reconstructed his own birth.

Forty years ago this must have been a very painful day: that is what is called a deliverance. Maman was delivered, and a big baby filled the house with his cries. He had a cloud of hair on his skull, a mouth from ear to ear, and ears you could fold over his mouth.

Forty years later, a handsome boy, of course. And the best thing about it all is that he has no notion of blaming his mother for having brought him into the world. No! All’s well—why wouldn’t it be? The road is stony, the chariot must be pulled; one pulls.¹⁹

The bizarre monologue continued. His father had had worries and doubts about him; now Georges would have had reason for optimism. Le Corbusier charted his evolution for his mother.

In any case these forty years represent ten years of painful and unrewarded efforts. Then ten years of drifting, of hopes, and of a certain pride on the part of the parents. Then ten years of ineffable pride mixed with fear. And then at last ten years when it would have been better that the parents knew nothing of what battles were involved, what emotional situations, intense troubles, resolutions, rage, and desperate efforts which failed, ever-present hopes, etc., etc.

These forty years having passed, there intervenes a salient point along the curve which I hope will continue its spiral ascent. After these groups of four decades, three of which in any case are marked by what one might call human sufferings—dreams ever and again defeated by inexorable realities—the struggle seems to be achieving, in its most effective areas, gains worth the trouble they cost…. Whereas during at least the first two decades, for twenty years (!!!) that struggle was so often impotent and futile.

You were not sufficiently included in our joys—as was also true of the opposite—we were under great strain and it was better to keep it to ourselves.

And so much for the forty years and my thanks to my chief collaborator and my deep gratitude as well to the worthy and loyal father who along with her raised us.²⁰

Le Corbusier had recently been in Zurich for a “council of war” regarding the increasingly precarious League of Nations situation. He launched into a related comparison of Germany to France. Having gone to Stuttgart to work on his houses there, he was appalled by Germany in general. Its cities were atrocious; they made one physically ill. Even the most allegedly sophisticated citizens were barbarians at heart. Paris, on the other hand, was “a dazzling crystal, straight, transparent, concentrated, conditioned, human”—adjectives that constitute the Corbusean ideal. The roads in Germany were disastrous, while the minute one crossed the border at Strasbourg one was in the land of “Colbert and Napoleon: clear and distinct ideas! Straight and magnificent roads, with cathedrals of trees planted along them, already two centuries old! The whole country has proportion, measure, style.”²¹

Le Corbusier always categorized nationalities, inextricably linking a country’s art and architecture with the citizenry that had made it. Were the largest buildings in Geneva to bear his imprimatur, they would signify the strength and independence of Switzerland; if not, if the League of Nations were to wear the tired vestiges of timid academicism, he would have to separate himself even further from the homeland he so disparaged.

6

In mid-October, Le Corbusier received a letter from William Ritter saying that Janko Czadra, Ritter’s longtime partner, had died. Le Corbusier wrote his mentor, “Since my father’s death, a death before my eyes, a new aspect of life has become apparent to me: that of death. And a whole cycle of ideas inevitably leading to it. Death is everywhere. I had no idea.”²²

Ritter was the exemplar of human tenderness. “I have no idea what’s become of you. Dare I hope that you’ve grown terribly strong? You must know that your image and your presence are as distinct for me as ever—but you who are so violent of heart, what’s become of you? You were all heart. That’s what remains to me of you. And Janko was the object of your heart’s impulses.”²³

There was a price to pay for such sensitivity. Denial was essential for vulnerable people to survive life’s unbearable sadness. “My mother, I believe, is sustained by an almost alarming stoicism. It is the triumph of life. Tell me how you really are? Deliberate blindness and, luckily, daily exhaustion overwhelm us, which is how human resistance is formed.”²⁴

This had become Le Corbusier’s own formula for survival. He believed that to manage in the face of setbacks and the inevitable tragedies of human existence one has to wear blinders and fatigue oneself in everyday struggles.

Offering condolences to the grief-stricken Ritter, Le Corbusier brought the subject back to himself:

Remember: I owe you a lot. You are the first to have awakened me. I wanted to confide in you, in spite of everything. I say in spite of everything, for it is in spite of everything that life goes on and supplants disillusion and decline.

I have been singularly affected the last two years by natural phenomena, cosmic events that torment me with their grim fatality, their indifference. A dramatic obsession whenever I travel and am released from the specific and intimate problems that absorb me: painting and thinking about architecture.

Life opens its fan, and there is drama everywhere. At which point laughter becomes the buoy.

But at certain moments you cannot laugh; laughter is only a mask.²⁵

He counseled fortitude to the bereaved Ritter: “How ardently I wish you the potential of strength you need in order to go on, for there can be no stopping.” Le Corbusier acknowledged his own struggles. “I’m afraid you might think me insincere, a parvenu. I am, as always, a student at the foot of the mountain. Praise terrifies me and knowledge renders me ever more timid, for there are holes that open everywhere. I have survived the worst miseries, but I have always had joy. I am still just a little bird on the branch, and today, when the elite concern themselves with my important case at Geneva (a battle of the old against a faith), I am increasingly anxious, in my innermost self, behind my closed door.”²⁶

To Ritter, the architect allowed his deep-seated sense of isolation and fragility: “I was a child, and the elders were above me. I felt the shadow fall over me and the horizon was limited. The duties of solidarity were revealed. Strength leads us to be conscious of the weaknesses of the young and the old, those who have fewer powers of resistance. A lonely, a very lonely situation. No support. On the contrary. People turn to you for support. Which is serious. Such moments are no laughing matter. Then come events in one’s innermost self, and one realizes that life foments suffering everywhere.”²⁷

Le Corbusier had written Ritter frequently in recent times and been devastated to have no response. He had assumed that Ritter was not answering because the music writer had given up on him; now he realized it was because Ritter was completely distracted by Czadra’s ill health. “You must have doubted me,” he wrote. “I told myself: it’s fate. You didn’t like (or no longer liked) a life of combat. You had taken refuge within yourself. I kept thinking: ‘he takes me for a lost cause.’ If you knew how indifferent everything is to me, aside from the tyrannical search for perfection. And now I realize quite clearly that it becomes more indefinable every day. But I don’t want to collapse into skepticism, I must avoid despair.”²⁸

“Ch.E. Jeanneret” ended by lambasting himself for having been so consumed with his own issues that he had misconstrued Ritter’s silence. Their friendship waned with the passage of time, but William Ritter was one of the rare people whom Le Corbusier admired unfailingly. For in his music and fiction, and with his undisguised homosexuality, the writer was both passionate and brave: the essentials for a Le Corbusian hero.

7

It suited Le Corbusier to pin his failure to win the League of Nations project on bureaucratic rigidity and nationalistic competitiveness and to ignore the other factors. In November 1927, a committee assigned to review the nine schemes under consideration said of Le Corbusier, “In his desire to innovate, he unremittingly applies—to a structure that must nevertheless assume a representative role—certain formulas and procedures that, presented in so schematic a form, seem more suitable to purely utilitarian buildings.”²⁹

Le Corbusier disparaged such disapproval as complete moral corruption—and occasion for the sort of battle he relished. At the start of December, he wrote his mother, “The blackest state diplomacy is at work. I’m quite informed. Will such intrigues prevail against public opinion? It’s all becoming very emotional. I’m flinging my last reserves into the front lines these days. We’ll see! If we’re defeated, it’s still not over. In any case it will be a fine spectacle!”³⁰

The struggle was of originality versus conventionalism, courage versus timidity, and bureaucratic rigidity versus a logical variation of the rules. He did not allow that there might be intellectually honest reasons to oppose his ideas.

While thrilling, the imbroglio was taxing, and he was contending with the change of season: “As always I dread winter, death dealer in days gone by.”³¹ Yet the magnitude of the controversy, the richness of the stakes, and his belief in his own rightness in a battle of good versus evil were the perfect antidote to end-of-the-year blues. “Whatever happens our defeat will ignite the powder, and there will be a great demonstration on the part of the elite,” he wrote his mother on December 16.³²

         

ON DECEMBER 22, 1927, the jury for the League of Nations complex rendered its final decision, declaring as the winner a scheme that had been designed by four academics: two Frenchmen, an Italian, and a Hungarian. Seventy-four-year-old Henri Paul Nénot, who for more than thirty years had been chairman of the architecture department at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was appointed director general for architecture.

Le Corbusier did not give up. He and Pierre rapidly came up with a second set of plans, which they submitted in the correct ink. When those revised documents failed to sway the jury, the architect asked Hélène de Mandrot, an influential Swiss with a passion for modern architecture, to intervene on his behalf. The Jeanneret cousins were encouraged when ambassadors from five of the member countries pointed out the many flaws and shortcomings of the winning proposal. The spaces for storage and the garages were inadequate; the lighting would not work; there were problems with the design of the facade; the scale of the staircases and elevators was not correct.

The victorious architects, Le Corbusier insisted, were guilty of plagiarism, neglecting to give him the credit he deserved for the many elements of his own scheme that they had stolen for theirs and now botched. He believed that it was “incontestible [sic] that this joint design was directly inspired by the design of MM. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,” and asked for a further meeting of the ambassadors.³³ But for the jury the competition was over.