Le Corbusier

Hutheesing’s house was not the only villa for a rich client living in seclusion and luxury in Ahmedabad. On his trips to the great textile city, where he was building a local museum, Le Corbusier took on the task of creating a private, modern palace in a lush tropical garden for Manorama Sarabhai. For all the modesty of his taste in his own dwelling and the egalitarianism of his housing complexes, the architect relished the task of building her an exquisite and opulent retreat.

The Sarabhais were a prosperous textile family—cultivated, intellectually avid, and international, while remaining grounded in their local culture. Prominent in the Millowners’ organization, they had been instrumental in bringing Le Corbusier to Ahmedabad initially. For generations, they had had a family compound, called the Retreat. While geographically near the center of the bustling metropolis, this lush garden with family mansions offers the privacy and seclusion of a private park.

Manorama Sarabhai’s husband, one of the heirs to the family fortune, had recently died. Her brother, Chinubhai Chimanbhai, was the mayor of the city. This woman, connected to two important dynasties, was faced with the daunting task of bringing up her children on her own. She had definite theories about the house in which she would do so. She and her husband were both Jains, a sect whose belief system is based on respect for the natural world and the wish to leave it undisturbed. Sarabhai wanted a new residence that would maintain a strong connection to its environment; she also intended it to reflect western modernism. Completely atypical for her generation, this sophisticated young widow had taken her children to New York for two years, where she installed them at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel; with equal audacity, she was now hiring a Parisian architect.

In the enchanted garden of the family compound, Le Corbusier placed her villa in such a way that the structure is scarcely visible through the trees that surround it. The ground floor is open to the outdoors, the only semblance of walls being wooden-slat rolling blinds controlled by ropes. The large-scale living spaces and many terraces provide the rustic luxury of an expensive safari camp. The architecture recedes, completely subservient to the natural setting, providing luxuriousness but not flaunting it.

While Le Corbusier was working on the house, he became close to the Sarabhais’ young son Anand, then about ten years old. Ever eager to swim, the architect borrowed Anand’s school shorts to wear as swim trunks in the pool of the family’s old mansion. Anand Sarabhai had a favorite book, Fattypuffs and Thinifers—about fat people and thin people. Its author, André Maurois, gave the skinnier creatures beds that extended and catapulted them through holes in the floor into their bathtubs every morning. It became a fantasy of Anand’s to do the same, and Le Corbusier decided to realize the boy’s dream. He built a marvelous slide that goes from the bedroom floor of the villa directly into the swimming pool one story below. Water flowed down the slide; Anand could start his days with a refreshing dip. This device was also a means of air-conditioning for the house; the water on the slide was recirculated from the cooling system.

The main units of the Villa Sarabhai are in the style of Catalonian vaults, an architectural form Le Corbusier had come to admire in Barcelona. Half cylinders of rough concrete, they are covered on their tops by earth to form a lawn and roof garden. Unlike normal roofing materials, that sod serves to cool the inside of the house, even when the Indian heat rises to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The insides of these vaults, meanwhile, seem like capacious caves; the barrel-shaped enclosures make the innermost chambers of the house dark and deeply romantic.

However cavelike within, these bays are completely open at the front and back. This has its hazards when it is raining, rendering the villa “very nice to live in, although impractical in many ways.”¹ But the house accommodated the client’s wishes for a direct proximity to nature and also for flexibility of space; Le Corbusier designed a structure that could change as Sarabhai’s use of the place did. In keeping with her request, any wall in the middle could be removed.

Even if a bit of rain gets in through the ends of the bays, the villa coheres in such a relaxed way to its natural surroundings that when you see, on a downspout, a cobweb with a blossoming weed coming through it or a chipmunk running down the pool slide, they become part of the integrity of the experience, not intrusions. This villa built with constant awareness of water and the sun has wide-mouthed downspouts that evacuate the rain. They are big enough for torrential tropical downpours. The sod roof also accommodates rather than fights nature. Le Corbusier was delighted to build for the rich, but what he gave them, while immensely comfortable, was completely lacking in the sort of artifice so often associated with financial wealth. Rather, open to its tropical surroundings, working in concord with the sun, it is reverential of wonders that money cannot buy.

Once the villa was complete, Manorama Sarabhai found her new home equally suited for sumptuous family get-togethers or quiet moments reading in a corner. For affluent people in the tropics, Le Corbusier had achieved much the same thing as at the modest house in Vevey by making the exterior and interior interact. Here, too, there is constant rhythm and a vitality to the forms. One of these celestial residences housed an austere piano teacher living at the edge of a cold lake, while the other was for an international arts patron with bright-green wild parrots in her garden, but the values were consistent.

It was the specifics that were different. Le Corbusier had applied himself to the task of Sarabhai’s villa with a keen awareness that he was constructing in conditions unlike those for any of his other houses except for Hutheering’s. This was one of his few private residences where he did not also have to factor in the need for heat in cold weather. His primary goals were coolness, shade, and the ability to capture air currents; the heat of the sun had to be minimized or avoided. Since mosquitoes were a significant factor, he incorporated screens and netting.

Knowing that a glass wall could become an enemy in the summer heat, Le Corbusier again utilized brises-soleil. He also situated the house so that it would be traversed by the prevailing breezes. He used bricks and rough concrete, the latter often coated in white to induce coolness, both physical and psychological, with bright colors creating elements of joy. The results were salubrious.

From the start, however, Le Corbusier’s relationship with his client was contentious. After the initial contracts had been signed in the summer of 1953 and plans were under way, the architect found it necessary to have Ducret write to his patroness to say,

I beg to insist quite particularly on the character of the role taken by M. LE CORBUSIER.

M. LE CORBUSIER is not a businessman. He is an artist and, the world over, he is regarded as such and surrounded by consequent respect.

It is extremely disagreeable for him to discuss questions concerning the rates of remuneration for his services, and he is especially unhappy to have received the impression that he might be regarded as attached to financial considerations.²

Le Corbusier had by then made several trips to Ahmedabad. His draftsmen had done considerable work on the plans, and he had commissioned expensive surveys requiring him to lay out considerable funds. He had received only a pittance in payment. His office manager insisted that the architectural fees and travel costs to date be paid immediately.

During the construction process, relations improved. The architect collaborated quite easily with Manorama Sarabhai, acceding to her views on many issues. He shifted from a black stone for some of the walls to a lighter-toned brown, as she requested. However, when Sarabhai requested a reduction in the size of the swimming pool, Le Corbusier made it clear that he had gone as far as he was willing to go. To make the pool any smaller would put Anand at risk of losing his life by striking his head on a pool wall. “I’d look like an idiot if I made a pool 24´ by 24´ at the end of a slide 46´ long!” the architect wrote his client.³ Here, he prevailed.

WHILE THE BUILDING PROCESS was taking place between 1952 and 1955, Le Corbusier visited Ahmedabad every November. When he returned in the spring of 1956, the house was complete. This was when the trouble really began.

The architect was furious at Manorama Sarabhai’s treatment of his creation. He wrote his client, “You’ve got a lovely house. But you can Kill it!” He informed her that the work of her gardener, along with her old furniture and decorative, tasteless art objects “will have soon annihilated the ambiance, the atmosphere, the spirit of the house.”⁴ While couching his critique in polite language, Le Corbusier warned Sarabhai that she had better take care; she needed to make an effort to keep from disappointing visitors. He suggested that Doshi, who was at this time in Ahmedabad and had his full confidence, could help rectify the mistakes she had already made.

Sarabhai justified some alterations as being for her son’s sake. Le Corbusier replied that the boy, while charming, was still young and had not seen a lot of the world. It was a grievous error to pander to his whims. Instead, she should tell Anand to make an effort to adapt to the spirit of his new home. If handled accordingly, Anand would adjust.

Sarabhai was intensely annoyed. She let Le Corbusier know that, while she had fulfilled every point of their contract and had followed his advice by painting the upper floors and doors his chosen colors and had been a good sport when she had problems with one of the open arches during the heavy rains, he still had not done his promised garden layout or designed any of the customized furniture she wanted. This is where their correspondence ended—with both parties feeling wounded.

Le Corbusier spilled out some of his problems with the Sarabhai commission to Taya Zinkin, a journalist from the Manchester Guardian Weekly, whom he met at a party in Bombay. Zinkin’s account, which was published only after the architect died a decade later, has entered the Le Corbusier mythology, but it is of questionable validity.

The writer says that when she was introduced to him, she knew only that he was a “tall, handsome, elderly” Frenchman who was standing by himself drinking cognac, and that he spoke no English. This was a fallacy: by then, Le Corbusier was able to converse in English and often did so in India, as in the United States and Britain.

Zinkin wrote that Le Corbusier was in a rage because he was having trouble transferring funds paid him by Sarabhai to France. He was, the journalist claims, on his way to Delhi to urge Nehru to intervene. She says he also told her that Sarabhai had implored him to install railings or a low wall around the balconies of her villa. Zinkin quotes Le Corbusier as saying, “The good woman was afraid that when her sons get married their children would fall off and kill themselves, as if I cared. As if I, Le Corbusier, would compromise with design for the sake of her unborn brats!” Zinkin also quotes Le Corbusier as calling Yvonne “pretty stupid” and saying, “Madame wants children! She keeps pestering me for children. I hate children. She already has a little dog, that should be good enough.”⁵ In spite of The Guardian’s reputation for the highest journalistic standards, a lot of this is implausible. Le Corbusier was not publicly disloyal to Yvonne, and he had many successful connections to children even if he had none of his own.

Zinkin had an apparent reason for wanting to skewer Le Corbusier. The day after they met, they were on the same flight to Delhi. She claims that, as they were leaving the plane, he asked what she was doing that night. When the journalist replied that she had a train to catch, he said, “Pity. You are fat and I like my women fat. We could have spent a pleasant night together.”⁶ She claims not to have been offended, and when, a few days later, she was given the chance to interview him in his office in Chandigarh, she eagerly accepted.

She arrived for that meeting armed with questions about his work. Before she had even asked the first one, Le Corbusier said, “We are not going to discuss architecture. I hate talking shop to a woman.” He told her to come the next night to his room at Maiden’s Hotel in Delhi and said he would give her her choice of his drawings of bulls. “Now run along, don’t stand there wasting my time,” he then instructed her.⁷ She walked out, never to see him again.

This, anyway, was Taya Zinkin’s report on their relationship, published for all the world to know, becoming one of the staples of the architect’s reputation in his dealings with women.

Though he locked antlers with the rich and imperious Manorama Sarabhai, in Chandigarh Le Corbusier got along well with his client base. What he built brought delight and pride to the hundreds of thousands of people who were flooding into the new city. The thousands involved in its construction were also, in general, content. The workers considered Le Corbusier demanding but respectful, aloof but amiable. He was a visitor from the west who, rather than impose his ways, responded to theirs. And he was admired for the courage and genius that resulted in such remarkable architecture.

One of the people who worked closely under Le Corbusier, M. S. Sharma, was among the many who found the architect unlike anyone else he had met. Part of what struck him was the architect’s essential unknowability: “Nobody knew Le Corbusier in all his aspects. The only one who might possibly have known most sides was Pierre Jeanneret.” What Sharma did know with certainty was what it meant to work for Le Corbusier. “He was a very hard taskmaster. Each time he came, people were eagerly awaiting, and didn’t know what to expect. He himself didn’t have a moment to spare and expected everyone else to be very serious.”⁸

One day, the younger man had a meeting to discuss the new Post, Telegraph, and Telephone Building with top officials in the telecommunications industry. The project was to be the tallest in the city center, eleven stories high. Sharma was to take the bus to the site. Le Corbusier, noticing that Sharma was late to leave for his appointment, told him the hour—three times, in rapid sequence. Georges Jeanneret’s punctiliousness was inviolate.

Le Corbusier’s sheer brilliance, however, made Sharma feel it was a privilege to do as he beckoned:

He was the most observant man I’ve ever seen. Always with a small sketchbook and pencils bound in an elastic. Wearing a khaki safari jacket with big pockets. A most elegant person; at meetings, he had his bow tie and impeccable suits. And when he sketched a bull that was just outside his office window, it was a very elegant bull.

Except for Leonardo and Michelangelo, I’ve never known of anyone so deeply immersed in life—and so versatile. Everything has the master’s touch. Every work he did reflects his greatness.⁹

SHARMA OFTEN HAD DINNER with Le Corbusier and the other architects and builders at Pierre Jeanneret’s house, where they drank Pierre’s homemade wines. Le Corbusier talked nonstop, dashing from subject to subject and addressing minute details and major philosophical issues in the same breath. One never knew in what direction his discourse would go. He would be carrying on about one subject while clearly thinking of something else, formulating an answer while speaking about an unrelated matter, as if he could operate simultaneously on two different levels. Sharma was once aware of the master digressing completely from the theme at hand for a full seven minutes, only to return to the initial topic and provide a precise answer to the question that had been posed.

One afternoon, Le Corbusier had a small seashell in his pocket that, for no particular reason, he gave to Sharma’s four-year-old son, Manu. “Do you see how beautiful it is?” the distinguished architect asked in Swiss-accented English. Manu Sharma, more than forty years later, still has that small shell as a precious relic.

For Sharma, Le Corbusier, despite his occasional cantankerousness, remained an idol: “He walked straight. He talked straight. His attitude was so masculine. There was nothing feminine about it. This was not a man who could be humbled by any power. He was the embodiment of the spirit that Lord Krishna preached—Karma theory—you have to work for any achievement. Deep concentration on the work at hand, devotion to a building project, was akin to worship, to religion.”¹⁰

Le Corbusier knew that the “Open Hand,” the monument that would be the crowning element of the capital, still required Nehru’s endorsement. P. M. Thapar advised him on the best moment to turn to Nehru with the proposal for this gigantic thick-fingered hand—its form simplified and generalized but still recognizable, elevated on a sort of stand, symbolizing a new, more generous approach to human existence. Le Corbusier set up a meeting in Delhi during a visit in the late 1950s, when Chandigarh was well advanced.

To persuade the prime minister, Le Corbusier told a cautionary tale. He explained that at the World Congress of Peace Supporters, six years earlier, the judges of a design competition had made the mistake of rejecting his proposal. Le Corbusier provided Nehru with a document, as well as its translation into English, presenting his philosophy on politics. Nations and their differences, he explained, were minor issues by comparison to certain universal needs.

Le Corbusier informed Nehru that not only was this document of great intellectual value, but it had led to a development of even greater importance than the words themselves: an open hand floating over the horizon, symbolizing the universality about which he had written. It would reach a height of twenty-five meters, would be built out of “enameled wrought iron,” and would move according to the wind.¹¹

Le Corbusier told Nehru that Varma, the chief engineer of Punjab, was already prepared to build the Open Hand. The architect also informed Nehru that he had presented the concept to the Cabinet of Ministers in November 1954 and had completed all the technical studies to make the monument work. Two French manufacturers were willing to make it; Le Corbusier cheerfully let Nehru know that he was “stupefied” at the bargain price they offered.

Le Corbusier finished by declaring that if the prime minister authorized the building of the Open Hand, he would be making a major step toward the achievement of world peace: “I am certain that by raising the ‘Open Hand’ in this location, India will be making a gesture which will confirm your decisive intervention at the crucial moment of machine-age evolution and its dangerous implications…. I shall end these remarks with that declaration I made in one of my books: ‘Architecture is the expression of the spirit of an epoch.’”¹²

The monument was to be positioned precisely in the center of the most public part of Chandigarh, with an adjacent amphitheatre where the public could sit and face it. The architect made a plaster maquette of the form, with its large thumb thrust at a right angle, slightly resembling a flying bird. The three middle fingers, stubby and of equal length, were a sort of cockscomb, and the wide pinkie, angled backward, the tail. The finished work was to be made of metal and enameled in bright red, white, green, and yellow. Le Corbusier issued further statements about its importance, saying it represented abundance and was open to receive the bounty of the earth and to distribute it to the people of India and other countries. It affirmed the beginning of “the era of harmony.”¹³

However buoyant and optimistic the monument’s spirit, it required all the hyperbole and justification because it failed without them.

In spite of the propaganda campaign, the Open Hand fell into the category of Le Corbusier’s unrealized dreams; Nehru did nothing about getting it constructed. But unlike the League of Nations and a range of other projects, it eventually rose after its designer’s death. Today, it floats over the land amid the architectural masterpieces of Chandigarh. Although it lacks the force of those buildings, one imagines that Le Corbusier would only have been pleased.