PREFACE

Cézanne at the Lefèvre

But these…qualities (of “varied and inimitable” colour and his handling) do not account for the look of hard and unrelenting authenticity that distinguishes his work from that of lesser men. It is Cézanne’s peculiar determination to pin down his sensation, and the exactness and intensity of notation resulting from this, that made Cézanne pre-eminent…. In a Cézanne there can be no question of juggling with the elements of design, no possibility of glossing over difficulties, no equivocation. With Cézanne integrity was the thing, and integrity never allowed him to become fixed at any one point in his development, but sent him onward toward new discoveries of technique, new realisations of the motive.

—Graham Bell, The New Statesman and Nation

I note the above both for itself and because it adds to subject and manner the thing that is incessantly overlooked: the artist, the presence of the determining personality. Without that reality no amount of other things matters much.

—WALLACE STEVENS

         

Until now, there has been no substantial biography of Le Corbusier. There are nearly four hundred monographs devoted to his work, among them detailed accounts of his early years and some excellent books on specific aspects of his career. There are fascinating volumes on his architecture, several written by people who had the good fortune to know Le Corbusier and had considerable insight into his character. But no single book has given primary focus to Le Corbusier as a human being and provided a comprehensive account of his entire life.

While I subscribe to Mark Twain’s dictum that a person’s “real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself,”¹ I have made it my goal to understand and reveal what this extraordinary architect was like inside, as well as in the eyes of others. In my attempt to gain access to the feelings and desires of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, our subject’s name before he recreated himself as Le Corbusier, I have benefited from access to his copious correspondence with his mentor and confidant, William Ritter. He wrote to Ritter about his fluctuating humors and about everything he saw and did. Jeanneret freely focused on his own sexual obsessions; at about the age of thirty, he directly associated the vigor of his erections (mostly had in solitude) with creative power and the ability to build. Ritter was an intensely passionate novelist and music critic. Overtly homosexual, devoutly Catholic, he lived outside the strictures of Jeanneret’s Swiss background. Ritter exemplified the courage to seek extremes, the independence from Calvinism that Jeanneret craved, which is why Jeanneret opened himself up to him.

I have been even more fortunate in having unprecedented access to the letters Jeanneret wrote to his parents and, following his father’s death, to his mother alone. Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret lived to the age of one hundred—or so Le Corbusier, with his passion for round numbers, made it seem to journalists and the public by moving her birth date back a full year. She was alive for all but the last five years of Le Corbusier’s life, and he revealed himself to her more truthfully than to anyone else, as if he were confiding in a private diary more than to a person with emotions or reactions. The intimacy with which Le Corbusier wrote to her about his taste in women is extraordinary. The intensity of his program to change the world, the leaps and plunges of his spirit, the rapidity of his mood swings, and the relentlessness of his emotional needs and professional ambition: all these emerge unmasked.

I have, in addition, enjoyed the rare opportunity to read letters between Le Corbusier and his wife and have been allowed to see documents—usually off-limits—that recount a love affair of thirty years’ duration between the architect and an American woman. That epistolary narrative, while touching and charmingly erotic, is evidence both of Le Corbusier’s tenderness, a trait he generally concealed, and of his relentless solitude. By compulsively charting the workings of his mind—with an astounding absence of screening, exposing thoughts that most people would keep within—Le Corbusier came close in these various letters to revealing Twain’s “real life.” In public, he propagated his myths, but in private he knew himself well.

Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret, Le Corbusier’s mother, at about the age of ninety-eight

WITH HIS PERPETUAL AWARENESS of the elemental—both in his individual being and in every aspect of the universe—Le Corbusier consciously credited his mother for his existence. He never fully separated from her; nor did he ever have what he wanted from her. He fought, relentlessly and unsuccessfully, to garner the approval she gave mainly to his older brother.

At Ronchamp—the masterful country church of 1955 with which Le Corbusier burst the boundaries of architecture by composing with light and color and by animating a small space so that it is a vessel of both ceaseless motion and ineffable calm—he dedicated one of the three side chapels to the woman who bore him. While Ronchamp is officially a shrine to the Holy Virgin, the brilliant stained-glass window that bears, in exuberant script, the message “Marie shining like the sun” closely echoes the way Le Corbusier often flattered his mother, then in her nineties, in that time period. A triumphant work of pure sculpture, a celebration of red and yellow and blue and white so vibrant as to become audible, a shelter as protective as Noah’s ark and as modern and functional as a spaceship, Ronchamp is a temple to femininity in general and, very specifically, to the person who created him, much as he created it. Le Corbusier revered the sun as the source of all life; Marie was the origin of his Ronchamp, with its womblike hidden chambers, so rich and nurturing, and its organic form and pulsating surfaces. It was, even more than a fabulous homage to the Holy Mother of Christianity, a hymn to the more universal idea of women as givers of life—and to Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret. It is not surprising to discover, half a century after its completion, that its essentially secretive and private maker poured out his soul to his inspiration.

         

IT IS LE CORBUSIER in his own voice who has been my primary quarry. With that objective, I have visited almost every extant building he designed. I have also drawn on testimony from anyone I could find whose path the architect crossed—the waitress at a seafood restaurant in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin who remembered him from frequent encounters in her childhood, the architects who served in his office, his doctor, his banker’s daughter.

Le Corbusier said that his biography could be written only after his death. He would have been dismayed to have it written by an American. At sixty-three, when he felt burned by events concerning the design of the new United Nations headquarters in New York and betrayed by the architect Wallace Harrison, he declared to Marie Jeanneret—in surprising words to address to a ninety-year-old Calvinist lady—

No head

No heart = Harrison

No balls = American²

He considered the United States “a titanic machine out of control: a runaway horse. Dangerous.”³ I will show why he came to feel that way—while demonstrating, I hope, that not all Americans were or are against him.

         

OFTEN ANGUISHED or furious, Le Corbusier was equally given to ecstasy. When he was not despondent, he had an unequivocal confidence that he knew solutions to some of the gravest issues of human existence. He felt he could serve mankind even in its most dire moments—and that through architecture he could counter all evil.

In March 1942, when freedom itself was at the brink of extinction in Europe, Le Corbusier wrote his mother from Vichy that she must share his joy because, having navigated within the cabinet of Maréchal Pétain, he had finally triumphed after twenty years of battle. Seemingly impervious to the realities of current events, he believed that with that alliance he would solve all the problems of Paris—the place he alternately loved and loathed, both paradise and inferno, the center of his universe—and, then, of every other city in France. While free France was shrinking, Le Corbusier was mentally rebuilding the entire empire from his new power base in a hotel room in the former spa town where Pétain’s government held its seat. He had no qualms about being there—so long as he would succeed in “focusing the problem of Paris, the city, and its region. To study, to make propositions, to outline the possibility of major operations under the aegis of the president of the Municipal Council (who is a firm ally) and of the director of the Maréchal’s Cabinet (who has become a great partisan). From Paris our mission will fan out over the other cities and the countryside of France and over the empire.”⁴

Photo taken by Robert Doisneau in 1944

During the previous world war, he had likened neutral Switzerland to a eunuch. He left it to start a factory for concrete blocks in a Paris suburb while the center of the city was being regularly bombed. In the thirties, he allied himself with the Soviet authorities and built in Moscow. He also tried to work with Mussolini, and with two American presidents. His goal was to build—no matter what.

What concerned him was design: of our surroundings—whether the immediate room or the larger city—and of gardens and paintings, the sights of which would penetrate our psyches. Nothing else counted. But if we agree, as Bertrand Russell observed, that “fanatics are seldom genuinely humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a fanatical creed,”⁵ we need to ask if Le Corbusier was primarily fanatical or humane—or if he was the rare person who could combine both traits.

Le Corbusier took a definitive stance about every person, street corner, plant specimen, and idea. He readily unleashed his wrath. He could also express, although less frequently and rarely in public, immense warmth and sweetness. When he let down his guard to verbalize the depths of joy that are so gloriously manifest in the colors and angles and textures of his architecture, he was capable of a subsuming generosity of spirit. Nothing was in half measures: his lust for voluptuous women or his miserable loneliness; his passion for great paintings or his rage at public blindness; his admiration for honest naïve art or his disgust with the academies. When he was not elated, he was pulverized by a sense of failure.

Compassionate, arrogant, generous, selfish, Calvinist, hedonistic, proud, enraged, ecstatic, sad, Le Corbusier the man was as provocative, and unique, as the buildings with which he changed the visible world.