Le Corbusier

XLVII

For the first time in thirty years, most of what Le Corbusier was designing was getting built. Girders were rising in two cities in India, at Ronchamp, and at La Tourette.

But, just as the League of Nations headquarters and the United Nations buildings had tortured him, so did his bridesmaid’s role in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where, having been ruled out to design it, he was now on the selection committee. While Le Corbusier had envisioned a building of concrete and glass that would use brises-soleil to optimal advantage, a very different structure went up, designed jointly by the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer, the Paris-based Bernard Zehrfuss, and the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi. Le Corbusier was among those to ratify that choice, but was still furious not to have been the architect of this important building not far from his office doorstep.

Meeting with Balkrishna Doshi on the site of the Millowners’ Building in Ahmedabad, ca. 1955

A continent away, however, Le Corbusier’s architecture was triumphant. The Millowners’ Building opened in Ahmedabad.

The Millowners, an association of owners of cotton mills, was the sort of upper-echelon client Le Corbusier adored. Rich and distinguished, its members belonged to one of the highest castes in Indian society and were reputed for their generosity and public-spiritedness. They totally respected Le Corbusier.

Ahmedabad had a population of about one million people. Mahatma Gandhi, who had had a modest compound on the riverbank on the city’s outskirts between 1915 and 1930, had been instrumental in establishing a connection between the cotton mill owners and their workers. Now their organization, which consciously strived for a spirit of goodwill and mutual betterment, wanted a place to assemble that would echo the human harmony they advocated. Desiring a natural setting for their meetings, they had acquired a site overlooking a river. In March 1951, the president of the association, Surottam Hutheesing, had commissioned Le Corbusier to design their headquarters.

From the start, Le Corbusier conceived of a structure with the aura of a private palace. But rather than house royalty and facilitate pomp, this streamlined equivalent of Versailles was to be a place from which people could savor “the highly picturesque spectacle of the dyers washing their cottons and drying them on the sand, accompanied by herons, cows, buffaloes and donkeys half submerged to keep cool.”¹ The building was intended as a platform for viewing; its external appearance was a secondary consideration. Le Corbusier designed the main elements of each floor as frameworks for the panorama. Architecture would organize and compose the myriad elements of the vista and create glassless picture windows for the benefit of the building’s staff as much as for the distinguished mill owners, who would periodically meet there.

Essentially, the form of the building is a cube with complex subdivisions inside it. There are no doors or windows, only openings in the walls. Fifty percent of the interior space is empty, with neither function nor furniture; birds fly across it, and one feels that the building exists for their benefit as much as for that of its human visitors. It is a stunning sculptural object, a lively and rhythmic monument in which gray concrete is intensely animated. As he had in Marseille, Le Corbusier breathed life into inert materials; the ramps and brises-soleil and outdoor staircases and protrusions of every sort give the concrete structure in Ahmedabad fantastic energy.

Millowners’ Building, interior, ca. 1955

These elements were all designed to accommodate the vicissitudes of the local climate, and the building was deliberately oriented toward the prevailing winds. The brisessoleil of both the east and west facades were “calculated according to the latitude of Ahmedabad and the precise solar positioning.”² As a youth, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had learned to position his body on Alpine mountaintops so as to have maximum stability, and he still had his consuming respect for nature.

Le Corbusier saw to it that people could stay as dry as possible during the rainy season, thanks to both the parking spaces right up against the front and the long and gentle ramp running from the more distant parking area to the building entrance. Even if, in Europe, his roofs sometimes let in the rainwater, in Ahmedabad the architect was reverent in his subservience to local conditions.

IT IS an extraordinary experience to arrive at this visual oasis. Inside and outside are intertwined; architecture defines space in unprecedented ways.

Traffic-clogged and noisy, Ahmedabad teems with women in bright saris, with camels and goats and wagons and beggars. Wares are for sale everywhere, and the sights of tin shop signs and feverish industry are constant in the blistering heat. Reaching the haven that Le Corbusier built, we instantly slow down. The noble entrance ramp changes our pace and breathing, no matter how many horns are honking simultaneously in our ears.

The moment we set foot on that ramp, we have arrived in the sacred precincts of a modern temple. Right angles of reinforced concrete become as soothing as the courtyards of a Moorish mosque after the helter-skelter activity of the medina. The oversized brise-soleil of the west facade, which we see right away, has a hypnotic effect, like a machine in repetitious slow motion. It cools and diverts us with its mesmerizing form. By some miraculous act of transformation, the raw, unfinished concrete provides a gentle welcome at the same time that it bespeaks a tough reality (see color plate 17).

Once we walk in, that resonant opening note is tempered by wooden struts of further brises-soleil and sheet metal on some of the walls. The uniquely Corbusean composition of textures works like the progression of a symphony as the various instruments simultaneously sound their high and low voices. The floors and nonmetal walls are made of Morak stone, brought from Delhi, which provides a delicious coolness against the higher pitch of the wood and metal.

Although we are inside, the many openings make us feel as if we are in a lush park. The surrounding trees and the nearby river are constantly visible. Nearer to us, the bright red, yellow, and black metal walls are like flower blossoms that are the colors of fire and coal. The elegant, graceful architecture forms a dreamscape of surprises.

The empty spaces defined by impeccably crafted shapes provide immense calm in the heart of a teeming city. The voids, some of them vast, are odes to light and space, established by an unprecedented architectural vocabulary in union with the riverscape beyond it.

Every step inside the Millowners’ Building offers a different visceral thrill. Walking along, periodically stopping to take in the constantly shifting elements, we progress from moment to moment on a course of subtle emotional shifts.

Inexplicable pleasures give way to occasional instances of terror. The open stairs indicate a constant possibility of danger and injury. They demand alertness; what would not have been permitted in a western country with stricter building codes here provides an existential experience. Le Corbusier was able to give the visitors a series of tough, challenging, awakening encounters.

The intensity is relieved by moments of calm; in the garden on a balcony, for example, we feel as if we are on a ship on a smooth sea—or studying the horizon from the terraces at Athos. Fluted columns of reinforced concrete rise from the roof terrace, where there are two gardens and a water basin. The columns are an homage to ancient Greece rather than an imitation, respectful of the past but not enslaved to it. They, too, provide a respite of calm and order.

ABOVE ALL, the Millowners’ Building is about the air it encloses. Although built for assemblies and the congress of people, it has few specific functions. There is very little furniture. The walls serve mainly as containers of emptiness; architecture carves out forms in the atmosphere. What a luxury this is—all this openness, this celebration of what is always there but is so rarely sanctified: oxygen and space. Within a crowded and cramped city center, this use of air as an element of architecture is revelatory.

Le Corbusier, fully in power, has assumed his preferred role: leading others into a wonderful territory of artistic pleasure. At one moment we face red stone, then a mass of concrete. Then, suddenly, we luxuriate in a view of the river or confront a black metal wall. The total experience is a wild fantasy designed by conscious plan.

On this journey of surprises Le Corbusier has charted for us, we eventually arrive at the chapel. Officially, it is an assembly hall, but the space is holy. This really cannot exist on the earth as we have known it until now. The concrete ceiling swoops down like a billowing sail, giving us the sensation of being tiny mortals under the wings of a gigantic angel in a gesture of benediction. The curved walls are composed of rows of simple slats, made of molded plywood, stained dark, arranged so that they acquire dynamism and energy. The excitement generated by these undulating panels mounts the longer we look at them.

Light seeps in from the clerestory, as in the Gothic cathedrals Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had discovered in his early travels. Just as we are becoming overwhelmed by the throbbing walls, that narrow band of light provides relief. It moves our vision upward, and again we are hypnotized by the ceiling that reverses the roofline of a Mughal tent. The sagging concrete seems on the one hand weighed down, ready to collapse on our heads, only to soar heavenward on both sides to top the playful windows high above. In Ahmedabad, the sunlight is so powerful that it needs only these tiny openings to stream in brightly; in a larger quantity, it would blind us.

This building that calms and terrifies has the sum effect of being invigorating. It testifies to artistic genius and technical ingenuity, to the marriage of creativity with the discipline of mathematics. It is a mix of knowledge and feeling, each in its extreme. Le Corbusier, whose own inner life was so complex, had the astonishing ability to celebrate and reflect that complexity and his own imposing humors in his architecture.

BALKRISHNA DOSHI had made the initial drawings for the assembly hall. The young architect had proposed a standard auditorium, basically a, rectangle with a fan shape at one end. Le Corbusier said it was fine, and Doshi had worked away at the details for two weeks.

Then Le Corbusier reviewed Doshi’s work. He told his young colleague to imagine coming into the space so that one would know immediately where the speaker was. Equally, Doshi had to give visitors the feeling that they could sit in the back and exit quickly. “Every time he drew,” recalled Doshi, “he would speak about how people live. It had nothing to do with a machine for living; it was a celebration of life. His whole phenomenon was connected with behavior. He knew the psyche of the people. He knew what emotions could catch you. He was a combination of the sensual and the psychic, touched internally and externally simultaneously. When he drew a column, he would talk about the thighs of a woman and how you touch them. When you caress a column, a shiny round column, a voluptuous column, then you must touch the body. Beauty was always there for him. He was on the one side very sensuous and on the other very compassionate. The hen and the cock.”³

During visits to the site when the building was under construction, Le Corbusier cast his eye everywhere in order to ascertain truth, rather than turn from sights others might have deemed disconcerting. He took in the details of the local animals and looked directly at the slum dwellers of Ahmedabad.

He looked into the beauty of the eyes of the Indian woman, the gentle eyes of the Indian cows, the big bosom and body of the Indian woman, the hump of the bull: he would see beauty everywhere.

There was a lot of glory that he saw in the slums—the eyes of the women and children—always he had fascination. He would ask why they were made the way they were made. He believed in eternity in a very different way. He asked questions. Real poverty was the poverty of the mind.⁴

One day, while looking at some of the natives of Ahmedabad, Le Corbusier said to Doshi, “Americans have big bodies but no brains. Frenchmen have large heads; Americans have pea-heads.”⁵ Doshi believed that the forms Le Corbusier made in India could not have come about unless their maker had this fascination with scale and connected physical attributes to qualities of intelligence and wit—however lopsided and eccentric his vision was.

While Le Corbusier oversaw the big concept, Pierre tended to the details, making admirable lamps out of the metal bowls the women carried and fashioning chairs out of bamboo. But, able as he was, Pierre lacked Le Corbusier’s visionary flair, and Doshi noted that Pierre, for all that bothered him about the man who had gone to Vichy, adored Le Corbusier like a guru. The practical aide willingly served the mystic creator.

Le Corbusier operated in another realm of existence. Observing the architect, Doshi recognized the way that the creation of the Millowners’ Building and the other structures in India was an organic, instinctive process; at the same time, it was the result of a subjugation of self to a higher force.

Le Corbusier never theorized about his buildings. He never justified them. Le Corbusier referred to himself in the third person, which is very Indian. It was as if he were saying, “I am not this body.” His approach was very spiritual. When it came to creative work, it was the soul working.

When he did these buildings, Le Corbusier must have discovered that nature has systems, but not identical ones. They are similar, but there are exceptions. Le Corbusier was always playing the game of multiplicity—putting things together in counterbalance. He and his architecture reflect a Hindu temperament, like a Buddhist temple. You can only work with your soul when you’ve detached your body.⁶

Le Corbusier took the otherness of India completely in stride. For all the differences of dress, diet, climate, and language, he had in common with its culture both a spirituality and a strong sense of family. His ease and comfort are manifest in the magnificence of the work.

In the periods of 1954 when he was not in India, Le Corbusier was busy dictating 150 manuscript pages of volume two of The Modulor to his secretary. The first volume had by now been published in five languages, as he made sure his mother knew.

Le Corbusier’s mother was now in her midnineties. Her famous son wrote her that he thought of her every day and that her capacity to absorb new experiences was “magnificent.” He credited her with having imbued him and Albert with the same quality, making them full of life at a time when many of their contemporaries were beginning to give up. Having previously called her “Andalusian” to honor her fiery side, he now wrote her that his book about La Petite Maison was his “homage to the mother and to the powerful woman you always were for us: in other days Spanish y Perez, today Lioness! Le Corbeau embraces you very tenderly.”⁷ In the accompanying self-portrait, he depicts himself with an enormous beak.

TO LA PETITE MAMAN, Le Corbusier expressed himself in a language as singular as the feelings it attempted to convey. In late September 1954, just as Ronchamp and Chandigarh were keeping hundreds of people busy under his steely rule, he wrote, “My dear Maman, you are happy by nature and by will. It is a joy to see you. (And when we are face-to-face…we scold each other!!) Life is a crazy thing! There is, around our thoughts, the network of nerves performing its seguidilla. And the nerves emit waves! As we now know! When it’s the radio that howls, we carefully make the proper adjustment. When it’s men and women, static! Well, let the static go on!! It’s of no more consequence than the discomfort of a storm (more waves!).”⁸

Meanwhile, Le Corbusier wanted to provide Albert with funds that would enable him to cut back on some music teaching he was now doing and to have time to record some of the music he had composed for children. Uncertain if Albert could be coerced to accept the money, Edouard asked their mother to serve as the go-between; he used the reverse tactic when he implored Albert to persuade their mother to hire a maid. As with architecture, willpower and diplomacy were requisite to win the results he craved.

Le Corbusier checked various building sites and made a quick trip to Vevey in the summer of 1954, because he knew he would be immobilized in October by a major operation for varicose veins in his leg. In a letter to his mother and brother, he drew diagrams, labeling his veins A, B, and C; he anticipated the surgery as a feat of smooth engineering that would be a solution to a problem that had plagued him since 1930.

After the procedure took place on October 17, Le Corbusier wrote his mother: “Seventy centimeters of veins as fat as a pencil were at last removed, put into a glass tube, and then thrown into the wastebasket. It was a ‘big boo-boo.’”⁹ He had to stay at home afterward and could not go to the office, although his staff came to him, as they always did when he was ill.

Facing the High Court building in Chandigarh, mid-1950s

He recuperated so rapidly that on November 10 he was back in Chandigarh. It was the ideal season to be there; the flowers and birdsong were sublime. Pierre was hospitable and helpful. The “Open Hand” monument, still unrealized, was under discussion with the authorities. Le Corbusier immediately went to his “palace”—the High Court—in the moonlight at midnight; he was eager to see the building’s surface, which had been formed by having the rough concrete shot through a cannon.

He wrote his mother, “This note to tell you that the Palace of the Supreme Court, where some 1000 workmen and women and donkeys are preparing for the inauguration of January 3 ’55, is quite simply extraordinary—an architectural symphony that exceeds all my hopes, exploding and developing under the sun in an inconceivable and tireless fashion. Close to and far off, it is a surprise and a provocation of astonishment.”¹⁰

Yet again, he was reborn. He wrote, “Dearest Maman, this present letter, free of any worldly modesty but filled with pride, I send so that you may know that at last the architect, the urbanist, the painter and the sculptor have here given birth…to poetry—the raison d’être and the reason for living of those who are well born!” He needed to imagine her experiencing equal pleasure: “Be happy all this day. I see you in my mind’s eye waking up in the morning, eyes glistening and lips stretched in a smile.”¹¹

A month later, when Le Corbusier was flying between Delhi and Bombay on the start of his homeward journey, the person seated next to him was reading a magazine. The color photo to which it was opened caught his eye. He asked, “Do you know who that is? It’s my ‘petite mère.’”¹² Two days later, on a plane from Bombay to Ahmedabad, the flight attendant showed him the same publication, an issue of Esquire. On his flight to Cairo on the sixteenth, the stewardess offered him yet another copy. From the stopover in Egypt, he reported to his mother these incidents of her fame thanks to him, embellishing the details and also making a rapid sketch of the magazine image, accentuating her mane of white hair and her noble face. How much clearer could Le Corbusier make it that her glorification accompanied his own?

When Le Corbusier arrived back in Paris, Yvonne was in even worse shape than when he left. Beyond being completely housebound, she could hardly function within the confines of the apartment. The accordion player was little compensation. Le Corbusier wrote his mother that he would have liked to have gone to Vevey to be with her for the holidays, but it was impossible; with Yvonne immobilized, he could no longer leave her on her own for Christmas, as in the old days.

They could not even go to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin; beyond Yvonne’s situation, he was swamped with work. But Le Corbusier arranged for his mother and brother to have chicken, cakes, the best wines, and flowers for the holidays, and on New Year’s Eve he managed to get Yvonne to a restaurant. It was the first time she had gone out for dinner in four months.

It was during this time period that a beggar began to appear regularly on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli and hold out his tin cup to passersby. Having observed him from a front window on a couple of occasions, Yvonne called out one day and told the beggar to take the elevator to the seventh floor. She handed him some cash and urged him not to bother to continue panhandling on the street. Instead, he should simply come up to see her every Wednesday and could depend on receiving his payments on a regular basis.

Jacques Hindermeyer had taken charge of Le Corbusier as well as Yvonne. At the end of January, the doctor insisted that the architect go for complete silence and solitude in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin to recover from the exhaustion induced by the combination of Yvonne’s health problems, the bitterness and anger he was feeling over the UNESCO debacle, and general work fatigue. Moreover, Le Corbusier had had further surgery to treat varicosity, this time in his femoral vein.

Once the architect was on his retreat, in spite of the rain and February cold, he unwound completely and slept, he wrote his mother, between eighteen and twenty hours a day. In his few hours of awakeness, he read fiction; Albert had sent him a novel by Ernest Hemingway that he found “magnificent and sympathetic, simple and without fussiness.”¹³

In his solitude, Le Corbusier found that the cabanon and the studio were ideal for living and working; at last, he had in his own life the “perfect refuge” he had long been trying to create for others.¹⁴

In high spirits, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, in anticipation of the end of winter, “In a month’s time you’ll have sunshine. That will be the vernal equinox. You’ll open your laughing eyes of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl in your bed one morning, and you’ll smile at life.”¹⁵ He was back on a high; Roquebrune-Cap-Martin was proof that good architecture in combination with nature was the perfect medicine.