The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  I feel that some of your feeling in the matter has been entirely due to a false impression of North America. This is very often the case with foreigners who have been blinded by the money reputation that the country has got, and are absolutely in the dark as regards our methods of doing and living. South America is about as different as the planet Mars, and our actually democratic methods have almost ignored official welcomes to distinguished foreigners.… I hope that with time, a more adequate method of dealing with the problem will be possible, but at present it has to come out of the pockets of individuals or organizations interested in, or enthusiastic about, cultural matters and, as a general rule, these have not got large funds to dispose of.… I hope that you will come to the United States again and that you, as is often the case with foreigners, will enjoy your second trip much better after having seen the country and understood something more than its mechanical and flashy aspects.

  Le Corbusier showed this letter around Paris for some time, advising anyone who would listen that America was the country of the dollar where you never saw the dollar.

  Though Le Corbusier loudly expressed his disappointment in the Rockefellers, he actually has no great interest in money. The fusses he kicks up about it are more the result of wounded pride than a desire to get rich. “Intelligent things don’t make money,” he has said. “Money is the devil and it leads to lies, but it’s good to have some in your pocket. I have a trou de finance in my head, not the bump. I don’t want to be a millionaire or received in the fashionable world. I like friends and a few pleasures—those of the table, and others.” He is troubled by moneyed atmosphere, and he thinks that such weather conditions are more oppressive in America than in most places. “Because of its financial control, the United States is the last country to awaken artistically,” he says. In Quand les Cathédrales Etaient Blanches, he wrote:

  If you are an important businessman…you excite yourself with cocktails at five o’clock and are worth nothing afterward; before the cocktails you were a power in Wall Street or in the midtown skyscrapers—a financial power, with monetary muscles: in that state you buy false Rembrandts.… Everyone knows that American millionaires, victims of the unlimited piles of gold which they have heaped up in the vicious circle of their own bank accounts, wish to raise up on the ossuary of their fated victims a socially useful edifice, a work of altruism, thought, instruction, and relief. During the homicidal battles in the Stock Exchange, relations between men are not involved, but rather the law of money. Money saved up by economies, gathered together in mountains, engaged in the channels of the infernal machine, takes on a movement which is all its own; it becomes a Niagara, drowns, breaks whatever is in its path, absorbs what is around it with the exactitude and fatality of a physical law, straightens up as a typhoon on the edge of the abyss which it has hollowed out. In order to set up a trophy, money makes hecatombs.… A mechanical, automatic, inhuman, cruel, and indeed a sterile game, since Mr. X or Mr. Y, on top of his mountain of gold, can do no more than sit down to a simple dinner of chicken and spinach—or to put it still more exactly, a bowl of semolina and milk. In this formidable game, in which he was victor, he lost his stomach.

  Le Corbusier has rarely accumulated a mountain, or hill, of more than a few thousand francs. He likes to flex his monetary muscles, but only in small ways, and he does not care to be beholden to anyone. Years ago, a friend who had come into a modest legacy and knew that Le Corbusier was hard up mailed him a check. Le Corbusier called on his benefactor the next day and gave him hell. “I can’t take your money,” he said. “You know I can’t stand feeling gratitude to anyone.” This speech apparently having acted as a cathartic, he kept the check and cashed it without suffering any ill effects.

  Le Corbusier’s attitude toward finance, and toward a good many other things, is clearly set forth in “Urbanisme,” a series of articles he wrote in his thirties for L’Esprit Nouveau (a long-defunct avant-garde Paris magazine of which he was co-publisher) and that was later published in book form. After recommending the demolition and reconstruction of the center of Paris, he suggested that part of the reconstructed area be set aside as a sort of colony for foreigners of all nations, “for would they not then take good care that it was not destroyed by long-range guns or bombing airplanes?” Warming to this theme, he came to the conclusion that the presence of this colony of aliens would be an insurance for the entire capital. “If twenty skyscrapers over five hundred feet in length and six hundred feet high were set thus in the center of Paris, Paris would be protected from all barbarian destruction,” he wrote. “That should mean something to the War Office,” he added hopefully. Having thus demonstrated the value of his project, Le Corbusier proceeded to show that it was economically feasible. “If a decree were passed for the general expropriation of the center of Paris,” he began, “the value of the land would stand at a certain figure which we will call A. This figure can easily be ascertained by experts from the contemporary records of sales of land at various points in Paris. The value is thus A.” The chapter in which this explicit passage occurred was headed “Finance and Realization.”

  · · ·

  The complete reconstruction of urban life is a continuing passion in Le Corbusier. Shortly after returning to Paris from his American lecture tour, he drew up a slum-clearance project, never put into effect, that provided for the conversion of a large section of the city into vertical-garden units. Soon thereafter, he visited Rio de Janeiro, where, at the invitation of the Brazilian government, he gave several lectures and acted as consultant to a group of local architects, who closely followed his recommendations when they designed a new Ministry of National Education and Public Health building. “In 1936,” he says, “Brazil awoke after my presence.” He went on to Buenos Aires and devised a master plan for that city, which was not used. Two years later, in Algiers, a city he has visited a number of times since 1930 in futile efforts to have it rebuilt according to his ideas, he worked up another unfulfilled project—a skyscraper office building for ten thousand workers, equipped with a novel form of air-admitting but sun-deflecting shutters outside its windows. This building, by concentrating so many people under one roof, would, he thought, centralize the business community and do away with a vast amount of street traffic.

  Le Corbusier has an intense curiosity. He likes to explore strange cities at odd hours. In 1938, as he was studying a disreputable part of Algiers after midnight, taking illustrated notes on local urbanisme problems, he was so ruthlessly mugged by a gang of thieves that he was unconscious for nearly an hour. “Everything looked golden,” he says. “I thought I was in Heaven.” He dismissed this idea when he discovered that the bandits had removed not only his money, the loss of which he was philosophical about, but also his notes and sketches, about which he was not. For a while, he toyed with the notion that his attackers might have been partisans of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an institution whose architectural devotion to eclecticism he had derided in many articles and books, and of which he had written, two years before:

  The distressing [architectural] ugliness of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries comes in a straight line from the schools. Design has killed architecture. Design is what they teach in the schools. The leader of these regrettable practices, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, reigns in the midst of equivocation, endowed with a dignity which is only a usurpation of the creative spirit of earlier periods. It is the seat of a most disconcerting paradox, since under the ferrule of extremely conservative methods, everything is good will, hard work, faith. The dilemma is in the heart of the School, an institution which is in excellent health, like mistletoe, that lives on the sap of dignified and lofty trees, like cancer, which establishes itself comfortably around the pylorus of the stomach or around the heart. The cancer is in excellent health! Death is in excellent health.

  At forty-nine, Le Corbusier is also in excellent health, but he sometimes jeopardizes this by a physical recklessness as immoderate as his literary style. He lik
es to swim tremendous distances. In the pleasant prewar days in Paris, he would close his architectural office for a month and, accompanied by his wife and his partner, a second cousin named Pierre Jeanneret, go to some seaside resort, generally on the French Riviera. While he was staying at Cap Martin, in the early spring of 1937, he went, on an out-of-season impulse, for a long swim in cold water. The nerves in his neck became inflamed and he was laid up for five months. The next year, at St. Tropez, he was swimming under water when a sizable yacht sailed over him. He saw its hull in time and remained under water until he thought it had passed. As he came up, however, the propeller struck him and one thigh was so badly ripped that it required a foot or so of stitches. One affliction of his, now apparently cured, was the result of a purely aesthetic pursuit. Until he became involved in the United Nations project, he had painted nearly every morning since he was thirty-five, always standing while he worked and resting most of his weight on his right leg. After several years, he developed a painful varicose condition, which he called “the paralysis of the painter.”

  Le Corbusier prides himself on his will power, and this pride, rather than any apprehensiveness about his health, prompted him, shortly before the last war, to give up smoking. All day long, for two decades, he had smoked cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. He had finally come to own sixty pipes, and he had his suits made with a pocket that would hold a box of two hundred and fifty kitchen matches, of which he used up a box a day. Then, one day, a friend of his, André Jaoul, a prominent French industrialist, told him he had given up smoking. “Very few people could do a thing like that after so many years,” he said. “You think I can’t?” said Le Corbusier. “I doubt it,” said Jaoul. Le Corbusier, who has an idea that big business is inimical to his kind of city planning, is no man to be outdone by an industrialist. He tossed away the cigar he was puffing, put his sixty pipes in a bureau drawer, and telephoned his tailor to omit the special pocket from a suit that was in progress. He hasn’t smoked since. “I was profoundly tempted at banquets on site-inspecting tours I made last year,” he says. “All those excellent cigars we were offered in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco! But I resisted. It’s a joke, in a way, but I don’t treat it as such. Discipline is essential.” Le Corbusier, who was probably the first architect to state the now famous modernist doctrine that building plans should proceed “from within to without,” feels that his renunciation of smoking is in a sense like his lifelong fight against the Beaux-Arts school of architecture. For him to light up a White Owl now would be the equivalent, morally, of putting an Italian Renaissance façade on a building or providing it with a mansard roof instead of a flat one on which to sun-bathe and grow wild flowers.

  · · ·

  Le Corbusier rarely relaxes. His face, mobile and animated when he is speaking, is tense even in repose. He loves to talk to people he feels are responsive. His voice is low, gentle, insistent, and musical; his characteristic expression is one of intelligent observation. He thinks about architecture, or form and color in general, most of the time. Even when he is sitting on a beach, he manages to keep busy. He examines the architectural structure of pebbles, shells, and bits of wood. They often turn up in his paintings, though sometimes in rather abstract form. His interest in food is similarly professional; he especially admires the structure of melons, in which he sees no traces of a regrettable electicism. He also approves of bee cells, since bees, like himself, distinguish between the wall as an insulating factor and the wall as a supporting factor.

  The war slowed Le Corbusier down as an architect, but it provided him, for a while, with extra time in which to examine pebbles. In June, 1940, when France fell, he and Jeanneret were in Aubusson, working on plans for a cartridge factory there. After the armistice, they decided not to return to Occupied Paris, and, accompanied by Mme. Le Corbusier, drove to the Pyrenees village of Ozon, near an electro-chemical plant for which the two partners had designed buildings. The factory was in need of certain alterations, but the work didn’t amount to much and Le Corbusier was soon reduced to bicycling, painting, swimming, and inspecting pebbles. After four months of this idling, Jeanneret went to live with friends in Grenoble. Le Corbusier returned to Paris, and then went to Algiers, where he resumed his studies of the local urbanisme problem. In 1942, he returned to France. The Vichy government, perhaps suspecting that it was dealing with a dissident spirit, told him that he would have to have a new license if he wished to resume the practice of architecture in France. “We’ll consider your case and act accordingly,” an official informed him. “I was not appointed to the Committee to Normalize Building, which the Vichy government set up,” Le Corbusier said recently. “I was given no work in France until the Liberation. I was denounced as a Communist and threatened with arrest, but I never became a Communist, although my city-planning philosophy implies capitalist reforms. The Communists asked me to join their party, but I told them it was they who ought to join me. The Pétain government invited me to go on one of those artists’ trips to Germany, but I declined. I spent most of my time painting. The Germans never touched Picasso or me. It would have made too much of a scandal. The only time I talked to a German was in 1942, when I went to the chief of artistic propaganda to protest against the banning of a Fernand Léger exhibition. He said that Léger had gone to the United States, so they couldn’t show his paintings.” During the war, Le Corbusier was lower in funds than usual, and he was helped out by friends. He had so little to eat that he suffered from two hernias, for which he had to have operations. His wife fared just as badly. Coming home one evening, he found her lying on the kitchen floor with a broken leg. A doctor said that malnutrition had caused a bone in the leg to break.

  Even before the war, Le Corbusier, although he was better known than any other French architect—and probably than any other architect—had never been given government work in France. He attributes this neglect to the hostility of academicians high in the government. After the Liberation, he began to come into his own, and it was not long before he became a bureaucrat himself. In 1945, he founded a new, cooperative architectural firm, Atelier des Bâtisseurs, or Atbat, but he did not invite his old partner, Jeanneret, to join the firm, apparently because he felt that Jeanneret’s decision to leave him to go to live in Grenoble during the war was not the act of a friend. Jeanneret, who eventually became active in the Resistance movement in France, is now designing furniture in Paris. Le Corbusier is president of Atbat, with which twenty-five young architects and engineers are associated. “For thirty years, I’d been a consultant talking in the desert,” he has said. “Since 1945, I’ve led the architectural movement in France. I arrive at a stage where many things in my life flower, like a tree in season.” This sense of burgeoning was induced by his assignment to plan the reconstruction of La Rochelle and La Pallice; by his appointment to head a governmental Cultural Relations mission to the United States in 1945 to report on the progress of American architecture since 1939; by his being chosen, in February, 1946, the French delegate to the United Nations Headquarters Commission; and, a year later, by his elevation to membership in the United Nations Board of Design Consultants.

  In these last three capacities, Le Corbusier has spent most of the past fifteen months adjusting himself to New York. His wife, who is not in good health, did not accompany him here, and he flies back to Paris every three or four months to visit her. He is living in the Grosvenor, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, where he has converted his bathroom into a painting studio. He sometimes feels lonely, a sensation that he hints at in a passage that occurs in the Headquarters Commission’s official report, a section of which he wrote:

  Whether his stay be long or short, the [transient United Nations employee] is a traveller; that is, a man snatched from his usual habits, uprooted from his home. The major part of his day is taken up by his mission. But, as all travellers, he will fall upon many empty and often depressing hours. This man must be taken care of, appropriate facilities must provide for his well-being
and for proper mental stimulation. The success of his mission will in great part depend on his physical and mental equilibrium. When his daily work is over, he must not be left derelict.

  Le Corbusier, who was born Charles Edouard Jeanneret, didn’t bother to provide himself with a first name when, some twenty-five years ago, he decided to adopt the name by which he is now famous, so he just signed this report Le Corbusier, but he has permitted himself to be identified as Charles Le Corbusier on the rosters of the Headquarters Commission and the Board of Design Consultants. His pleasure in being a bureaucrat got a big fillip last October, when he received a letter from the Biographical Encyclopædia of the World, saying that it would like to include him in the “Who’s Important in Government” section of its next edition. The encyclopedia, it appeared, also contained a section on “Who’s Important in Art.” He was delighted at being tapped for the bureaucratic category of the book and didn’t mind being left out of the art section. He filled out the necessary forms with alacrity. His well-being and mental stimulation have been somewhat provided for by a number of friends here—notably José Luis Sert, an architect and city planner who once served an apprenticeship with Le Corbusier & P. Jeanneret, and Constantino Nivola, a young Italian painter who lives on Eighth Street. Sundays, when Le Corbusier gets tired of painting in his bathroom, he sometimes drops in at Nivola’s studio and spends several hours painting there. The first time he went around, he examined his host’s work and then launched into a thirty-minute exposition of what he thought was wrong with it. He made notes and sketches as he talked, and presented them to Nivola. Nivola decided, after some contemplation, that there was a good deal in what Le Corbusier had said. The Nivolas and the Serts frequently dine with Le Corbusier at the Jumble Shop, an Eighth Street restaurant, or at the Monte, an Italian eating place on Macdougal Street. The Monte is in a dark and windowless basement, a setting as remote from Le Corbusier’s favorite architectural concept—a glass-walled structure set above the ground on pilotis—as anything could well be. “My God, a cavern!” he exclaimed the first time he was taken there. He felt better after eating a plate of excellent spaghetti. “It’s strange,” he said. “I should be against this place, but it’s really not so bad.”