LIII

From his bed, on a sheet of paper, he had explained to me the reasons for the measurements of a monastery in the highest Dominican tradition: “Here, we walk in two rows, here we sing in two rows, here we face each other and prostrate ourselves at full length; it is just such things which condition the form of the premises: walks, chapel, refectory, etc. and their measurements.” He had drawn that. Then he added: “It is for you, Le Corbusier, the finest commission you can ever have, the one which corresponds to your deepest being: the human scale.”

—LE CORBUSIER

1

Father Marie-Alain Couturier had first met Le Corbusier in 1948, when the architect was working on his scheme for Sainte-Baume. He had subsequently been among the architect’s defenders over the design for Ronchamp.

Ironically, Couturier was a member of the Dominican order; Saint Dominic had been engaged by Pope Innocent III to restore Catholicism to the territories controlled by the Cathars, those heretics from whom Le Corbusier so proudly claimed to descend. Nonetheless, Couturier recognized, in the way Balkrishna Doshi did, Le Corbusier’s spiritualism: “Not only did we regard Le Corbusier as the greatest living architect, but also as the man in whom the spontaneous sense of the sacred is strongest and most authentic.”¹

Since 1936, Couturier had been one of the editors of Art Sacré—a publication that put forward his view that “for the rebirth of Christian art, the ideal would be to have geniuses who were also saints. But under present circumstances, if such men do not exist, we believe that to provoke such a rebirth, such a resurrection, it is wiser to seek geniuses without faith than believers without talent.”² This open-minded patron had already commissioned projects by Matisse, Léger, Rouault, and Lipchitz when, in 1953, he gave Le Corbusier the task “to lodge a hundred bodies and a hundred hearts in silence” in a new monastery near Lyon.³ The same architect who could thrill to gongs and drumrolls and to the sirens of Edgard Varèse relished such total quietude. To build a retreat for the cultivation of feeling—at a remove from the hustle and bustle of the urbanism he also loved—was one of his greatest goals. The project for which Couturier enlisted him was to prove to be his final masterpiece.

On May 4, 1953, Le Corbusier, accompanied by André Wogenscky, now in charge at 35 rue de Sèvres, visited the site where the monastery was to be built. It was another hilltop, not quite as commanding as that at Ronchamp but similarly secluded and with a view of rolling fields—near the town of Eveux, in the Rhône-Alpes, about twenty-five kilometers from Lyon. The Dominicans had acquired the property in 1943. It included substantial agricultural lands, an old château, and vast woods. Le Corbusier instantly recognized that the setting was perfect for building the sort of monastic community that had been his ideal from the time of his earliest travels. He made preliminary sketches and asked Wogenscky to question Couturier about details of the monks’ everyday lives so that he could attune the program accordingly.

The reverend father, who was suffering from myasthenia, was then in the Paris hospital of Bon Secours. Le Corbusier regretted that he would have no time to visit this wonderful man himself before leaving for India, but he wrote the farsighted Dominican, “While I’m still here, since you’re not going to be spending your time indefinitely in hospital, it would be a kindness, as soon as you have a little appetite, to telephone my wife and tell her you’re coming to lunch or dinner. The poor girl will be delighted; she’s very fond of you, and you’ll be performing a pious action by going to cheer her up in her solitude.”⁴ He could put two good souls together.

And Le Corbusier was comfortable in the knowledge that on Couturier’s first visit to rue Nungesser-et-Coli, when Yvonne had deployed her whoopee cushion, the priest had reacted with as much mirth as the hosts.

2

Marie-Alain Couturier gave Le Corbusier the freedom and the confidence essential to making his best architecture. In July 1953, the Dominican wrote him, “It will be one of the great joys of my life to have been able to persuade you to undertake this, and even now I know it will be, in its very poverty, one of the purest and most important works of our time.” To this supportive sentence, written with a manual typewriter, Couturier added, by hand in fountain pen, “And I hope that you, too, take joy in it.”⁵

Le Corbusier warmed to the positivity and to the mandate to make a place where, in the Dominican’s words, “the poverty of the buildings must be very strict, which consequently implies that the shared necessities will be respected: silence, sufficient warmth for continuous intellectual work, areas of comings and goings reduced to the minimum…. Our type of life is absolutely shared by all and consequently requires no personal differentiation within groups.”⁶

Couturier was Le Corbusier’s sort of person: straightforward, well grounded, masculine, and professional. Clean shaven, his white hair cut very short, he was modest in his style, inevitably dressed in the same plain black-and-white robe. Whether it was a coincidence or a habit he deliberately adopted, the no-nonsense priest’s only bow to modern style was that he wore eyeglasses identical to Le Corbusier’s.

Once Le Corbusier considered someone a friend, there were no limits to what he might do for him. Unknown to the priest, the architect desperately sought information on a more effective treatment for myasthenia, for which Couturier was enduring twenty-five injections per day. That fall, Le Corbusier took his Chinese-medicine specialist to his new friend; the results were miraculous, and Couturier again became master of his movements while stopping the shots. But Couturier then suffered a relapse.

Le Corbusier devoted himself to pursuing other treatment options. He had an American friend, Pauline Shulman, an architect who lived in Bloom-field, Connecticut, who told him that Prostigmin, the most effective medication for myasthenia, was now available in France but should be administered only by a doctor experienced in its use. Shulman knew a doctor who in turn consulted Dr. Henry Viets, the world’s greatest authority on myasthenia and an advocate of Prostigmin in Boston. Le Corbusier and Shulman organized a chain of communication from Viets to translators to French doctors to create a team to help Couturier—with encouraging information about nearly miraculous remission for certain symptoms of the incurable disease.

At the same time, Le Corbusier plunged into the monastery project. On his first visit, he had made a drawing of the road and the horizons and had studied the orientation to the sun. He treated each act concerning the position and form of the monastery as an existential experience: “In choosing the site, I was committing a criminal or a valid action…. Let us take the upper layer, the horizontal line of the building at the top, which will harmonize with the horizon. Starting from this horizontal line at the top, we will measure everything from there and will reach the ground at the moment we touch it.”⁷ The reason for starting the design with the roof and working downward was to connect the monks to the universe.

Le Corbusier also immersed himself in the rules that had been practiced by the Dominican order since the thirteenth century. He submitted completely to a program based on the many requirements of their monastic life. As much as the desires of his bourgeois clients upset him, he found the needs of these worthy monks of irrefutable merit.

3

On January 30, 1954, Father Couturier would complete an essay on Le Corbusier. After singling him out as the greatest living architect and a man of authentic feeling, Couturier continued, “We shall repeat this and insist upon it. And we shall add that it is a pleasure to say such things, in the face of the conspiracy of the mediocre (and, alas, it is sad to see included among these certain great names) which unceasingly calumniate him, spy on him, pillage him: ‘they shoot us, but they empty our pockets,’ as Degas used to say, fifty years ago…. With a very great architect like Le Corbusier, the freedom of forms and of certain audacities is a prerogative and probably a duty. His admirable rigor, the innate sense of proportion in realizations allow him a lyricism by which he completes his expression…. Things which are true and pure are always the dangerous things. One must run the risk, or else resign oneself to inaction. But fools must be warned.”⁸

It was the last thing Marie-Alain Couturier ever wrote. Only two weeks later, Le Corbusier, who was in Chandigarh at the time, would get word that his friend and champion had died on February 9. This was one occasion of his being less resigned than usual to someone’s death. Devastated, the architect immediately issued a statement:

I’ve come here to Chandigarh, in India. And now a brutal telegram tells me he is dead, though both of us had believed he had overcome his sickness. Alas! It is an intense sadness we feel. Around his idea, his dream, his mission, he had gathered the adherence, the devotion, and the activity of remarkable people, those of wide-ranging views, people who, to his own youth, conferred their “youth” of a maturity rigorously conquered by perseverance, courage, invention.

Father Couturier was our friend, a friend to what is most sacred to us: the faith in our art. But he was a friend of our hearths as well. His company was agreeable, alert, and there was a certain ease in his remarks. He seemed to me a historical figure who in giant strides had traversed certain books where “men” recognize one another in conscious action, living words, an infallible trajectory—through winds and tides.

And his black-and-white robe, that majestic uniform, suited his brush-cut hair so suited to soldiers. There he was! It is very sad.

The work of Father Couturier was in full spate.⁹