Le Corbusier

XLVIII

Nothing more came of Marguerite Tjader Harris’s dream of her lover creating a little colony for her on the Connecticut coast. But the idea was reincarnated in a surprising way. Nearly two years after approaching Le Corbusier about her wish to build a small artists’ community, Tjader Harris again booked herself into the Hotel Lutétia, a minute’s walk from her lover’s office and halfway across Paris from his and Yvonne’s apartment. She was there in part to discuss her financial support for a development of holiday dwellings Le Corbusier wanted to create up the hill from l’Etoile de Mer.

The initial agreement had been established by a formal proposal prepared by Le Corbusier’s office. It referred to a meeting held at 35 rue de Sèvres on May 3, 1954, in the presence of M. Ducret, the office administrator. Le Corbusier was to construct five holiday dwellings on land belonging to Rebutato. The total costs were estimated at 15,700,000 francs—about $350,000. Tjader Harris was to provide those funds with an interest-free loan. The five units were to be offered for sale before July 1, 1956.

In return for his design services, Le Corbusier was to own one of the five dwellings, with the other four sold to buyers of his choosing. One of those four was to be reserved for Marguerite Tjader Harris. Thus, in their old age, the couple that had seen each other periodically for two decades would be together, living modestly at the edge of the ocean, albeit in separate digs and with Yvonne living with Le Corbusier in their cabanon only a few meters away.

Marguerite Tjader Harris had opened a special bank account in Le Corbusier’s name to facilitate the arrangement. On June 8, 1954, the heiress and the architect signed a document in which she agreed to write to her banker that “M. Le Corbusier is my silent partner in this matter.”¹ They scheduled payments first for the purchase of the property and then for the construction costs, with Tjader Harris providing 14,130,000 francs and Le Corbusier 1,570,000 francs.

E. C. Llewellyn, at the Hanover Bank near the Ritz Hotel on the place Vendôme, acted on Tjader Harris’s behalf in the transaction. The undertaking had the ingredients of a Henry James novel: an elegant banker, a rich American heiress, an artist, and intrigue in the heart of Paris.

Problems soon arose. André Wogenscky, who was the liaison in Le Corbusier’s office with Llewellyn, was notified in December that Tjader Harris was not going to make payments until construction actually began. Le Corbusier, who had been in India, then returned to Paris and tried to smooth matters over by writing her warmly and assuring her that he was achieving miracles in the subcontinent.

At the start of January 1955, Tjader Harris wrote him to say she would immediately authorize payments once she was sure they were for bricks and mortar rather than for something still only on paper. Meanwhile, her son had married a woman she very much liked, and all three of them wanted to go to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Tjader Harris voiced her hope that Yvonne was doing better, and that Le Corbusier’s beloved mother was in form, too. They were like an extended family.

During his period of solitude in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in February 1955, Le Corbusier wrote a long, sprawling letter to his “Chère amie de Darien Connecticut.” Le Corbusier was, he told her, living alone and in total silence, exhausted by “the harbingers of the ‘nervous breakdown’ so dear to Americans.” He was mostly sleeping, he claimed. “20 hours a day my ears ring with the racket of the grasshoppers,” he wrote her.² Le Corbusier observed that both he and she were next to the sea, if on different continents.

He was eager for her to picture his life in detail. He told her with pride how he had built his shack. Tjader Harris was the soul mate who would understand the pleasure the boxy enclosure afforded him: “I work here like a prince, but in possession of my freedom (hence happier than a prince).”³

Le Corbusier assured her that construction would proceed rapidly on the holiday dwellings, which he called “Rob” and “Rog.” Their completion “required the presence, the action, the perseverance of a creature like me. Years of preparation, of focusing. Now everything’s in order. I’m prepared to make a minor masterpiece on that wave-battered rock.” The architect proffered one of his grand conclusions: “Dear friend, I’m blooming or fructifying (as you choose). I prefer blooming. Blooming like an apple tree in spring. For this is just what’s happened: if you live your life severely but strongly, youth comes to you, everything blooms. Not a maturity, a harvest, but an authentic flowering. Of course, this doesn’t keep my hair from falling out.”⁴

The future was bright because “you’ll be there. What a blessed creature you are…. There is no nationality but beings of flesh and blood with a brain and a heart. Be careful! Make no promises. Don’t commit yourself to anything!”⁵

Following that window to his unique mix of faith and confusion, his sincerity and sarcasm in tandem, Le Corbusier signed off by saying, falsely, that he had never before written such a long letter. When he added, however, that with her everything was different, he was being truthful.

Marguerite Tjader Harris responded by return mail. She was now vacating the Connecticut mansion to turn it over as a convent for the sisters of St. Birgitta and would keep for herself a modernized studio in the garage.

A week later, for unknown reasons, Le Corbusier abandoned their plan in France. He asked Ducret to repay, from the account in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where Tjader Harris’s loans had been deposited, the full amount to the Hanover Bank. This was, he had decided, the wise course. He was not in the least bit bitter: “In life one must know how to keep one’s eyes and ears open when it matters and be able to turn the page when that seems important. In any case I want you to know you have all my gratitude and my friendship on the occasion of the gesture of trust you’ve made to facilitate our undertaking.”⁶ Le Corbusier’s only request of Tjader Harris was the counsel he had given to more than one woman: that she be sure to write him at the office and not at home.

The American was gracious and understanding in response, regretting the turn of events but telling Le Corbusier that it made her life simpler. She assured him she was writing and swimming and proposed that he take a vacation with her in Connecticut. Even if they were not working together, they could enjoy each other’s company.

THE FIVE HOLIDAY houses were completed in 1957, but there is no evidence of Marguerite Tjader Harris ever having visited them, and her name appears nowhere in the publications about them. The units are distinctive mainly for their economy and austerity; they comprise a bare-bones retreat hardly distinguishable from other campgrounds. Their romance and charm lie mainly in their history.

But Le Corbusier did give each of these simple dwellings isolation, a view, direct sunshine, and the requisite shade. He achieved those modest goals with simple construction techniques, utilizing aluminum, and he built each standardized unit as a 226-centimeter cube. Putting this low-income housing with rudimentary materials not far from Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici’s luxurious villa, he also had the last word in an ongoing feud—the result of his having painted, unbidden, those murals nearly two decades earlier—by making a statement of moral superiority through architecture.

THE MOST LIKELY REASON that Le Corbusier removed Marguerite Tjader Harris from the project when he did is that he recognized how unrealistic he was to imagine her holidaying there with Yvonne nearby. After Yvonne finally went from her wretched alcoholic state to death in 1958, Le Corbusier would, however, manage to see his lover at least one more time in Paris.