Le Corbusier

In my architectural exegesis, I speak only of music. I don’t know the notes, but architecture, like music, is time and space, an art of successive sensations brought into a symphony.

—LE CORBUSIER TO HIS MOTHER

A photo of the journalist Hedwig Lauber alongside Le Corbusier shows a young, vibrant professional with a radiant smile. She was the same physical type as Marguerite Tjader Harris: broad shouldered and sturdy but not stocky. Wearing smart black-and-white sandals with two-inch heels, the fit and healthy woman is nearly Le Corbusier’s height. She looks blissfully happy in her career-woman suit, her gloves in her hand, a portfolio under her arm, while Le Corbusier, in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, his bow tie unusually askew, has the mischievous look of a little boy up to no good.

Besides photos, the evidence of what went on between them is found in a few letters. While staying at the Grosvenor House in London in May 1947, Le Corbusier addressed a letter to an architect in Lima referring to “Mlle. Hedwig Lauber, a very good friend of mine and a talented journalist” and asking his colleague to help her with her research on an upcoming trip to Peru.¹ Two months later, Le Corbusier wrote Lauber—addressing her as “Chère Mademoiselle”—instructing her never to write him—the demand is underlined—saying that he has a phobia of letters, that he prefers to have memories in his head only. He alerts her that writing things down might prove “fatal.” He goes on to say that he had instructed their mutual friend Justine Fuller to write her; if she insists on writing, she could do so to 35 rue de Sèvres but to no other address. His final instruction is “Don’t be angry with me. I have great esteem for you” the word “amicalement” is inscribed below his signature.²

But, having tried to distance himself, Le Corbusier could not let go of the bright and good-looking Lauber any more than he could accept defeat in an architectural project. Lauber periodically reappeared in his life. As Yvonne, increasingly emaciated and crippled, became more difficult and bitter, the journalist gave Le Corbusier the unequivocal admiration he craved, even if he had to work to keep it secret.

With Hedwig Lauber in the mid-1950s

In 1945, in Marseille, Le Corbusier had met Edouard Trouin. Trouin, ten years his junior, owned one million square meters of land in rocky terrain near the Mediterranean in Sainte-Baume, about halfway between Marseille and Toulon. Trouin was Le Corbusier’s sort of character: “descended from Saint-Malo sailors and pirates and from Provençal peasants.” A beefy man who sported a beret, Trouin spoke with a Marseille accent and had, according to Le Corbusier, “a vitality of ‘God’s thunder.’”³

Trouin was determined to save the countryside from development and had resisted repeated offers for his land from builders of holiday houses. He wanted instead a structure for meditation and worship that would do justice to the natural setting. He decided that Le Corbusier had the enthusiasm, originality, and eye that made him, without question, better qualified than anyone else for the task.

Mary Magdalene had allegedly lived on Trouin’s property, in a cave halfway up the vertical sweep of a spectacular rock face opposite Mont Sainte Victoire. The entrance to the cave was a black hole in the jagged cliff. Le Corbusier believed, or said he believed, that “every morning the angels came for her in front of the cave, and carried her two hundred meters to the top of the mountain known as Le Pilon, where she would pray.” There was, nearby, a basilica, “where they keep in a golden tabernacle the skull of Mary Magdalene, extremely beautiful.”⁴

In 1948, Le Corbusier designed, at Trouin’s request, an invisible basilica to be built entirely within the rock. The subterranean structure was to run from north to south, through the mountainous ridge, from the entrance of Mary Magdalene’s cave to the other side of the rocky cliff, “opening suddenly onto the brilliant light of a limitless horizon toward the sea to the south.”⁵

This was the Corbusean ideal: a feat of engineering that allowed the worship of the sun, the sea, and the distant horizon in all their glory. The cave-like basilica was to be flooded with light, incorporeal and uplifting. Pouring through its northern and southern exposures, sunshine would also radiate through wells cut into the rock. There would also have been electric light.

Had the meditation hall been built, it would have been one of the architect’s most extraordinary achievements. Le Corbusier’s imagination, his true religiosity that extended beyond any concept of traditional religion, in combination with his knowledge of materials that enabled him to make radical concepts into plastic reality, had led him to conceive of a physical space unprecedented in its form and emotional power.

But, again, one of Le Corbusier’s greatest projects was not to be. The officials of the Catholic Church responsible for that jurisdiction rejected it unanimously. They must have known with whom they were dealing; they even specified in advance that no appeals would be considered.

The failures were now tempered by successes. At the start of 1948, Le Corbusier informed his mother, with the words underlined, that he was on the National Economic Council, to which he been named by a decree of the president of the Council of Ministers, and that his title was “representative of French thought.”⁶ As contemptuous as he was of government authority, he became excited the moment he was officially anointed, and he boasted to his mother about a dinner of the council at which he had been seated next to Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a famous scientist married to the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. He also told her that the council’s esteemed members were paid almost as much as parliamentary deputies: “the National Assembly, the Council of the Republic + us.”⁷

Beyond that, he had begun work on a new book, The Poem of the Right Angle—a luxurious volume for the great publisher Tériade that gave him a chance to combine his euphoric sense of language, painting, and architecture. And there was a new book about him in which he was praised by none other than “the Americans.” These people who gave him so much trouble now credited his painting and architecture with having given birth to “a new notion of space in which calm, limpidity, and clarity prevail, affording a certain contrast with the spikiness of Fauvism and Cubism, and the decompositions of post-war Surrealism and Expressionism.”⁸ If that analysis was beyond Marie Jeanneret’s grasp, he still quoted it to her verbatim.

HE NEEDED SUCH BOOSTS, for he had embarked, yet again, on “the battle for the United Nations. The Americans behave like gangsters: ambush in the woods, murder and pillage of the victim. However I manage to reply with sang-froid and considerable strength.”⁹

What gave Le Corbusier that will to fight was his belief that the French government was intervening on his behalf. The backing of the country where by choice he had become a citizen was pivotal. He needed nothing less to counteract the way America was trying to push its own architects. “‘The nation of the timid’ takes its revenge and seeks to dominate the world. Today: superiority complex.”¹⁰

In contrast to the moral corruption and greed of human beings, Le Corbusier’s pets offered immense solace. They were also the mutual terrain of his relationships to his mother and Yvonne. He reported to his mother that his new dog, Laky, would go for a thirty-minute walk and, only after returning to the apartment, would scratch to be let out on the balcony to “piss and shit” at long last; Le Corbusier was more amused than annoyed.

Le Corbusier counted thirty sparrows who depended on Yvonne to feed them three times a day. It was Yvonne’s instinct to be generous in illogical, eccentric ways that Le Corbusier proudly reported to his mother. Whenever anyone showed up at the penthouse apartment, be it a delivery person or someone to make a repair, she offered the stranger cigarettes and, depending on the hour, a glass of wine or an aperitif. And then there was Le Corbusier’s and Yvonne’s adopted fly. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “During December and the first days of January, Yvonne has raised and fed Titine, the only fly to have survived; dying of hunger and thirst, she visited our plates at every meal. We gave her powdered sugar and poured out a little lake of water onto the table. At every meal Titine is there, but she must have split lately through the balcony door.”¹¹

LE CORBUSIER now told Marie Jeanneret that architecture was like music. His profession depended on timing and weight and rhythm, much as hers and Albert’s did. She should realize that he was the equal if not the better of his brother in having taken after her professionally, even if Albert was the one living with her.

But the battles he was forced to fight required his being constantly on the run. The official architects of the French Academy—those who had a diploma awarded by the “Beaux-Arts”—had tried to put a complete stop to all activity on the new building in Marseille. They were convinced the design would destroy the Marseille skyline; for similar reasons, his old mentor and friend Auguste Perret had “declared LC public enemy number one.”¹² His foes were everywhere: “America über alles, your money or your life!!—or: your life or your money!”¹³ Marie needed to understand that this was why he was so frantic and could not spend more time at her side.

On June 11, he flew to and from Marseille in the same day to be on the construction site of his new building; during the few hours he spent there, he sent his mother a postcard: “I’m very proud, and received like a lord.”¹⁴ In mid-August, when most Parisians were on their annual summer holiday and Le Corbusier was still in the office, he wrote her, “All the humans here are like ants, very busy—or imagining they are! For me, life is pitiless and I drink deep.” While most people were scurrying around to no good purpose, he was changing the world: “It’s an enterprise which, in principle, is linked to the Middle Ages, a vast and rigorous Cartesian enterprise each detail of which is an ineluctable part of the whole.”¹⁵ Having conceived the Marseille project, he now had to consider every detail down to the door handles.

His able crew was working so hard on the large apartment house in order for 1,600 people in the south of France to look at the mountains in one direction and the sea in another. Their new dwellings would enable these lower-middle-class people to live, like Yvonne feeding birds on the terrace, with access to the cosmos. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “Already from the first apartments, extraordinary landscapes appear, animating each room. This will be a great, magisterial work. We are laboring here, 30 technicians in the rue de Sèvres, with complete faith.”¹⁶ She of all people should understand the symphonic effort to give access to views that recalled the mountaintop outings of a mother and father and two little boys.

Le Corbusier followed this encomium by saying, “From the exterior, the Academy, the Society of Architects, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts are attacking with a violence that is quite simply scandalous, shameless. They are in their death agony, we are on our way to victory. But what an atmosphere of continuous contention!”¹⁷ Opposition was, of course, a requisite in the life of a martyr.

“Every day Yvonne is exhausted, overcome,” Le Corbusier wrote his mother that August. In the absence of a maid, she struggled to clean and do errands, and her “dragging foot” bothered her even more in the brutal heat. Le Corbusier then hired an Annamite to help at home, telling his mother these Indochinese were “serious people.”¹⁸ He also let his mother know that he was having de Montmollin send her extra money so that she could hire the best possible maid for herself as well.

His wife’s and mother’s everyday chores obsessed him. “It is absolutely essential that women be freed from the domestic drama (which involves so much discomfort for men)…. But Marseilles is the solution of modern life,” he wrote Marie Jeanneret.¹⁹ In his design for l’Unité d’Habitation, housekeeping tasks would be simplified and streamlined. Women—it did not occur to Le Corbusier that married men might cook—would be able to prepare food in the presence of their families, with a minimal number of steps required to serve it. The open kitchen he designed has become so universal today that it is hard to recognize how innovative it was then.

FOR NEARLY TEN YEARS, Le Corbusier had been sporadically consulting with authorities in the ancient Greek city of Smyrna—now in Turkey and called Izmir—about an urbanization plan. He finally went there in October 1948. Officially, it was the realization of a long-held dream; in private, it was a hardship.

On October 7, from what he called Smyrna, he wrote to Marguerite Tjader Harris, “How stupid life is and how hard!”²⁰ On Tjader Harris’s last stopover in Paris, they had had only ten minutes together. Now she was again in France, but because he was in Turkey he was missing her completely. He recognized this as the price of success, but it stung.

The pull in every direction was, however, Le Corbusier’s intoxicant. Now designing tapestries to be made at Aubusson, he reveled in the foray into another medium. As he created oversized images of robust figures composed with woven thread, he felt a new burst of creativity. He would make large wall hangings for many of his major buildings of the next decade; in their nonstop rhythm, these colorful tapestries add vitality and exuberance to his interiors, even if they lack the subtlety and refinement of his architecture.

In the fall of 1948, there was another official attempt to put a halt to l’Unité d’Habitation, this time from the Council on Hygiene. Le Corbusier was convinced that the council was a part of a cabal and was using hygienic problems as an excuse; the real reason for their demanding the cessation of work was the style of his building.

Yet his ideas were finding wider acceptance. In 1948, he published the first volume of The Modulor. Le Corbusier’s standard in it is the six-foot-tall man he had observed in America: he calculates that, with his left arm fully extended upward, the distance from the man’s navel to the soles of his feet is 113 centimeters, from his navel to the top of his head an additional seventy centimeters, from the top of his head to the fingertips of his raised left hand a further forty-three—adhering to the anthropomorphic principles developed by Matila Ghyka in 1931. These measurements are, he explains, to be applied to all of architecture and in particular to l’Unité d’Habitation.

The focal points of the human body chosen by Le Corbusier suited his personal hierarchy. The essential element was the navel: the link of nourishment between the embryo and the mother, a perpetual reminder of the attachment to the female parent. The top of the head suggests the greatest achievements of the human mind. The bottoms of the feet represent the physical basis of our positioning on the earth. As for the fingertips, with one’s arm shooting upward, these are as close as one can get to the sun, linking Le Corbusier’s universal creature to the miraculous core of the solar system that is the primary source of human energy and growth.

The book was the result of more than four years of collaborative effort, with some of the participants having worked full-time, but Le Corbusier published the book in his name alone.

IN HIS FIFTH VOLUME of The Complete Work, which covered the years 1946 to 1952, Le Corbusier proudly wrote about the findings of the Congress on Divine Proportion, an assembly of mathematicians, artists, and architects held at the Milan Triennale in September 1951. The names under discussion included Vitruvius, Dürer, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, and, with no one in the void of the four intervening centuries, Le Corbusier. The architect was elected president of a new organization that grew out of the conference and was called the Provisional International Committee of Studies of Proportion. Le Corbusier summed up his achievement by declaring, “At a given moment in the threat of disorder, certain ideas may reach the level of a principle.”²¹

Over the years, the many images Le Corbusier painted and sculpted of the Modulor make clear that his objective was to ennoble man, to make him strong and broad shouldered, standing erect on muscular and sturdy legs with his arm raised in a gesture of victory. His illustrations divide the figure into a bold red and a light-infused blue that convey pure vitality. For Le Corbusier, who struggled for optimism even when feeling defeated, the Modulor fixed man forever in a state of confidence and empowerment.

In December 1948, a session of the United Nations took place in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot. Le Corbusier invited the delegates, as well as selected journalists, to a cocktail party at 35 rue de Sèvres. The architect had violated his own role of keeping the atelier off-limits so that he could publicly give his version of the history of the UN project and his own seminal role.

Le Corbusier showed his audience photographs of a maquette he had constructed to demonstrate his original scheme for the complex in New York. It was, he explained, a natural outgrowth of projects he had done in Geneva, Moscow, and elsewhere over the previous twenty years. He also distributed to his guests a sheet of paper, printed front and back, that presented the UN building complex as he had initially designed it—elevations and bird’s-eye views—with a text explaining that these drawings were evidence of the role he had played designing the building now attributed to Wallace Harrison and Oscar Niemeyer.

For the rest of his life, Le Corbusier believed that the origins of the UN as it was built could be traced back as far as his 1922 City for Three Million, which he had subsequently improved in other projects. But the crux of his anguish was not the lack of credit; it was the absence of aesthetic quality and life force in the end result.

On future trips to New York, whenever Le Corbusier looked at what he called “my skyscraper,” he felt palpably violated. Yet within the next decade, he was to succeed, on the other side of the world, in making a spectacular “General Assembly” and “Secretariat” exactly according to his own design. The martyr was to find his pulpit.