Master Builder
The LC4 lounge chair, a streamlined, “jazz-age piece of furniture.”
Years ago, as an architecture student traveling in Europe, I sought out Le Corbusier’s home in Paris. I had the address from his books, over which I had pored for hours in the university library. Some of his writings were more than 40 years old, but their rousing rhetoric still made architecture seem more like a noble crusade than a mundane profession. Perhaps that’s why I imitated his spidery ink sketches and his military-looking stenciled lettering. I admired Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, but the old man — he had recently died — with his capes and flowery pronouncements, was a figure from another era. I had been taught that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a great architect, but his buildings left me unmoved — Mies is not for the young. “Corbu,” on the other hand, though he was 76, continued to produce designs that surprised and inspired — an unusual, spread-out one-story hospital for Venice, for example, with skylights instead of windows so you could see the sky while lying in bed. For a tyro, such invention was irresistible.
LE CORBUSIER
A Life
By Nicholas Fox Weber
Illustrated. 821 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $45
LE CORBUSIER LE GRAND
By
Illustrated. 768 pp. Phaidon. $200
Le Corbusier lived in the 16th Arrondissement not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in the penthouse of an apartment building that he had designed himself more than 30 years earlier. The facade of the small seven-story building was more restrained than I had expected, mainly glass and glass blocks. The location, facing a sports field, seemed just right for someone who preached the merits of sun, fresh air and exercise. The street — Rue Nungesser-et-Coli — was named after two famous French fliers who had died attempting a trans-Atlantic flight two weeks before Lindbergh. That was appropriate, too, for Le Corbusier was a devotee of all things modern, and more than once in his career he had crashed and burned.
Although I peered into the darkened lobby — round columns, curved walls, colors — I didn’t dare to press the buzzer. Just as well, for as Nicholas Fox Weber writes in his new biography, “Le Corbusier: A Life,” the architect devoted every morning to painting in the studio that took up the front half of the apartment. Still, I should have been bolder. The following year — 1965 — he was dead, drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean. That fateful summer, Le Corbusier, who was starting to feel his age and had recently lost the two people who were in many ways his closest confidantes — his mother and his wife — ignored his doctor’s advice to take only a short dip at noon. Instead, he plunged in at 8 a.m. and swam for an hour or more. He was an experienced swimmer, and Weber cites speculation that the drowning may have been an “elegantly orchestrated suicide.” On the strength of flimsy evidence it seems a far-fetched claim, but by the end of this absorbing book the reader may be convinced that for this proud, solitary and down-to-earth man, such a decision would not have been out of character.
“He’s an odd duck,” is how the famous French architect Auguste Perret described Le Corbusier to a neighbor, “but he’ll interest you.” That was 1917. The 30-year-old Corbusier, who had earlier worked for Perret, a leading exponent of reinforced concrete, had just returned to Paris. Largely self-taught, he had studied watch-engraving, his father’s profession, then turned to architecture and spent a decade designing houses in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. The chalet-like structures are unremarkable, except for the palatial house that he built for his parents; it ate up their life savings, and they were later obliged to sell it at a loss. A detail: the fledgling architect charged them a fee, albeit less than for his usual clients. One senses that it was the embarrassment of this misguided project, as much as a desire to leave his provincial surroundings, that encouraged him to try his luck in Paris.
Le Corbusier’s given name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. In 1920, he and his painter friend Amédée Ozenfant founded an art magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau. The firebrands both adopted noms de plume, but Weber suggests that in Jeanneret’s case, this was more than simply a fashionable gesture. “Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had long sought a means to counter the perpetual vagaries of his own mind,” he writes. “With his new name, he invented a person who had a protective shell.” Jeanneret was a romantic, a painter, a dreamer; Le Corbusier (he claimed that the name derived from an ancestor) was a realist: tough, obsessive, even unscrupulous, if the need arose. “It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought,” he wrote a German friend. “I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms.” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Of course, he could not keep the two identities separate. The public man was always “Le Corbusier,” but letters to his wife and mother are sometimes signed “Edouard,” sometimes “Corbu.” On the tomb that he designed for himself, he is “Charles-Edouard Jeanneret called Le Corbusier,” although his wife is “Yvonne Le Corbusier.”
There have been nearly 400 architectural monographs on Le Corbusier’s work, by Weber’s count, but this is the first full-length biography, and it’s a good one. The author benefits from wide-ranging research. The German friend quoted above, for example, was William Ritter, a novelist and music critic with whom the young Le Corbusier had a long and intimate correspondence. Weber also had unprecedented access to the architect’s letters to his parents, especially his mother, to whom he wrote once a week for most of his adult life (she died at 99, only five years before him). Through these letters we meet a different Le Corbusier, not the hectoring, self-promoting missionary of modernism, but the concerned, dutiful son who describes his projects and achievements, clearly wanting his mother to be impressed — although she never is, quite. Le Corbusier’s older brother, Albert, a musician, remained her favorite.
Le Corbusier’s generation set out to remake architecture de novo. Most modernist architects were satisfied with following a simple formula: flat roofs, undecorated white walls, pipe railings, that sort of thing. Le Corbusier always went further. His white-box villas sprouted voluptuous curves, colors appeared on walls and ceilings, and he introduced traditional materials like brick and fieldstone. On my European tour in 1964 I saw as many of his buildings as I could. The earlier ones, like the Salvation Army headquarters in Paris and the Pavillon Suisse, a student dormitory, had the features associated with the International Style, but later works, like the chapel at Ronchamp and the vast Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseille, were different: cruder, more sculptural, almost primitive. An endearing rustic simplicity is a big part of Le Corbusier’s appeal, whether he is building millionaires’ residences or worker housing.
Weber’s admiring biography brings Le Corbusier to life, unraveling many obscure aspects of a man who was famously secretive and, though he wrote some 50 books, divulged very little of himself. The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns. We learn about the importance of music when he was a young man (his mother was a piano teacher), and his discovery of Louis Armstrong during a visit to Boston: “It was absolutely dazzling,” the architect recounted, “strength and truth.” Le Corbusier traveled widely for his work, always alone, and while he was an attentive husband, he was not a faithful one. He had several affairs, briefly with Josephine Baker and for many years with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a Swedish-American heiress. (Weber was also given access to previously unstudied correspondence between the two.) His mistresses saw a different man than the pontificating visionary. To Baker he was a “simple man and gay.” According to Tjader Harris, he “was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions.”
Weber, who has written a biography of the painter Balthus and, most recently, “The Clarks of Cooperstown,” a study of the art-collecting American family, allows Le Corbusier to emerge as a fascinating if flawed human being. But Weber is not an architectural historian, and he sometimes has a narrow view of his subject’s work. He devotes four chapters to Le Corbusier’s masterpiece, Ronchamp, whose construction he describes as “impeccable engineering,” seemingly unaware that the hidden and camouflaged structure, no less than the expressionistic form, actually represented a break with — if not a betrayal of — the modernist creed that Le Corbusier himself had proclaimed. Weber’s descriptions of buildings are sometimes over the top. The Villa Savoye is “a temple to the sun”; on the entrance ramp to the Millowners’ Building in Ahmedabad, India, visitors arrive in “the sacred precincts of a modern temple”; the structure of the monastery of La Tourette “echoes the rugged and somewhat secretive lives of its inhabitants.” Weber calls L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille “a turning point in the history of how human beings live,” but fails to explain why, since, even if many similarly enormous apartment blocks were built, such innovations as tiny, 12-foot-wide apartments (!) and an internal “commercial street” of shops never caught on.
When Jeanneret became Le Corbusier, he took on the persona not only of an astonishingly creative architect but also of an implacable, sometimes megalomaniacal city planner. Starting in 1925 with a hypothetical plan for rebuilding Paris that would have required demolishing 600 acres of the city, Le Corbusier spent a large part of his working life traveling the world, imagining, proposing and promoting a new kind of urbanism in which tall buildings surrounded by landscaped open space replaced traditional blocks and streets. He made it sound scientific — “Cartesian” was a favorite word— but the urban plans were no less fanciful than his building designs. Nevertheless, his planning ideas were influential. Unfortunately, as Lewis Mumford once pointed out, in practice, the Towers in a Park turned out to be Towers in a Parking Lot. On the whole, Weber gives his subject a pass on his failed social and urbanistic ideas. “For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence,” he acknowledges. That is putting it mildly.
The wonderfully titled “Le Corbusier Le Grand,” a 20-pound tome put together by the editors at Phaidon,is a giant scrapbook of the architect’s life and work, including photographs, drawings, travel sketches and reproductions of Le Corbusier’s paintings, as well as letters, newspaper clippings, travel documents, ID cards and other ephemera. It sounds confused and confusing, but it’s a remarkably effective way to document the great man’s life and work. Most architectural monographs include only carefully staged photographs of finished buildings. There are some of those here, but construction photos and impromptu views give a more rounded impression. The section on the Villa Savoye includes letters from the client, complaining about leaks and the architect, complaining about not being paid (all French documents are helpfully translated in an accompanying volume). The generous format of “Le Corbusier Le Grand,” 14 by 20 inches, enables even well-known photographs to gain new meaning from being greatly enlarged. There are also many interesting portraits and informal snapshots of the architect, who peers out unblinkingly through his trademark circular glasses (he had monocular vision). The photos also reveal another contradiction: in public, the self-proclaimed bourgeois scourge was always attired in impeccably tailored suits.
The most carefree photographs of Le Corbusier are those taken in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur, where he and his wife spent a month every summer. On a site overlooking the Mediterranean, the most famous architect in the world built a cabanon, or cabin, 12 feet square, a rustic structure that was a cross between a monk’s cell and a mountain hut of his native Jura. This was a home reduced, as Weber evocatively writes, “to diamond-hard truths.” One senses that here, at least, Edouard could shed the protective shell of Le Corbusier, and be himself.
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