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As long as the name of the country could be skirted, Le Corbusier emphasized that he came from a mountain paradise inhabited by strong individuals. Three wooden farmhouses built by his ancestors and still called “Les Jeanneret” embodied that fine tradition. As a boy, Charles-Edouard often opted to stay in these rugged dwellings rather than his parents’ apartment. Dated 1626, they bore the family’s name and coat of arms. The future architect credited his distinguished ancestors with having brought to the high Jura region the “style languedocian” they had known in southern France. It showed up especially in the overpowering sloped roofs of these chalets. Their disproportionate scale and profound pitch—they resembled giant, wide-brimmed hats—served effectively to shed snow and assure warmth inside.
The three farmhouses were destroyed by fire in 1910, but Le Corbusier often voiced pride in the role of his relatives in developing such splendid domestic architecture. He also emphasized, in various statements and texts, that the Jeannerets in Languedoc descended from the Albigenses—those Cathars who came from the south of France, primarily the Languedoc and Provence. The Cathars were a heretic religious sect who demanded that the pope and the archbishops forsake all worldly riches, and who were therefore vilified by the Catholic Church for six centuries. They favored an austere and humble way of life; the simplicity of their rites eliminated the need for elaborate churches, liturgical vestments, and all manifestations of ceremonial pomp. Le Corbusier was proud to claim them as his spiritual ancestors.
IN A HISTORY of La Chaux-de-Fonds published in 1894, which Le Corbusier kept in his personal library years after he escaped Switzerland and had achieved international importance, he annotated various passages and drew arrows to others.9 He fastened on to every hint of passion and rebellion. In feverish pencil strokes, he called attention to a maternal great-grandfather who had died in prison for his role in the unsuccessful Swiss revolution of 1831. The architect’s paternal grandfather did even better seventeen years later by descending from La Chaux-de-Fonds on foot to help take the château of Neuchâtel. Le Corbusier bragged, “In 1848, the revolution succeeded. My grandfather was one of the leaders…there is nothing to blush for or to hide about bearing this past of freedom, ingenuity, free will, stubbornness, and guts in one’s own blood.”10
The toughness and willpower Le Corbusier acquired from the milieu of his youth were at his core. At an altitude of one thousand meters, La Chauxde-Fonds had a rough climate that taxed all who lived there. In the course of a year, there was an average of only five hours of sunshine a day; 173 days had some form of precipitation, 65 of them with snow. One learned to endure. For all the misery Le Corbusier would suffer as an architect, he had the strength to withstand the most challenging conditions. Nothing ever prevented him from taking the next step—even if it was toward his own death.
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Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s education at home and school emphasized solitude and observation. Drudgery was prized; so was the search for higher spiritual truths. The motto of the Jeanneret-Gris family was
Though silver I possess and gold,
Convinced that this life is a fever,
To my God and his Heaven I pray
The whole thing will last forever.11
Le Corbusier remained faithful to his ancestors’ skepticism about the value of money and focus on that universal timeless sky that precedes and outlives us all.
He also took pride in the qualities he felt he inherited from the competent craftsmen, skillful businessmen, and noblemen from whom he descended. Le Corbusier made much of the qualities that endowed him with intrinsic abilities and reflected favorably on his own endeavors. His father and grandfather had been “skillful enamellists of watch-dials and clock-faces,” while his mother’s family included successful merchants.12
Among his few truly prosperous ancestors was a Monsieur Lecorbesier, a Belgian wed to a Spaniard, whose daughter, Caroline Marie Josephine Lecorbesier, married Louis Perret, a Swiss seller of bed linens who lived in Brussels. M. Lecorbesier’s portrait had been painted by Victor Darjou, a court painter of the Empress Eugénie’s. That cachet inspired Charles-Edouard Jeanneret ultimately to give himself a variation of the man’s name.
Le Corbusier also let it be known that Marie de Nemours “has accorded patents of nobility to Jonas Jeanneret,” while another branch of the family was “confirmed in its nobility by Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia.”13 He did not value anyone more or less because of family background—he married the daughter of a gardener and a flower seller—but he gladly stressed his ancestors’ prestige in the belief that any sort of connection with the people who ran the world might help him achieve his goal of making invigorating architecture for all humankind.
Edouard, age three, and Albert, five (1890)
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The meaninglessness of artistic phenomena obsessed the minds of our fathers.
—LE CORBUSIER, The Decorative Art of Today, 1925
The prosperous merchants, titled noblemen, religious heretics, and political radicals in the family’s past had little to do with the reality of life in the three small, cluttered, overstuffed apartments in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s family lived during the future architect’s first fifteen years.
Georges Jeanneret-Gris was a competent craftsman, clear thinker, and true devotee of the great outdoors. Marie was sufficiently talented at the piano to teach it. They both esteemed artistry and diligence. But they were above all hardworking middle-class people who had no interest in budging from the society they knew or in transforming it. We can find hints of what seeded Le Corbusier’s mind, but he was one of those rare people whose fire and genius developed inexplicably. How did he emerge from a morose and stultifying milieu with the lust to reshape the world, a generous instinct to improve all human lives, and the creativity to take color and form in unprecedented directions?
Marie Charlotte and Georges-Edouard Jeanneret, ca. 1900
Marie Jeanneret, who ran the household competently, often repeated the motto of the Gallet family (her mother’s side): “What you do—do.”14 Never procrastinate, even for a second. Although the message eluded Albert, Le Corbusier periodically reminded his mother that these words were his constant gospel. Georges embodied that same principle of concentrated labor. He worked long, hard days, enameling watchcases, writing in his diary with the same order and discipline he applied to his profession. He was so frugal that he recorded the slightest fluctuation in cheese prices in his daily journal. His only break from routine came on weekends when he headed off mountaineering with the Alpine Adventurers’ Club, or took day trips and summer vacations when he led his family on hikes.
Albert and Edouard spent their free time practicing music or drawing or reading. Birthdays and holidays were celebrated as orderly rites.
Jeanneret-Gris’s unmarried older sister, the very pious “Tante Pauline,” lived with the family of four, making the ambience all the more sober. She credited God for everything that happened in people’s lives. But the solitary spinster offered rare playfulness as well, teasing the boys with nicknames they relished. Edouard was delighted with the terms that likened him and Albert to characters from Rabelais. To be a “braggart,” “slattern,” “saber rattler,” “boaster,” “rogue,” “dandy,” “runt,” or “loser” certainly beat being anyone’s idea of an angel.15
FROM THE TIME Edouard was six until he was nineteen, the family lived in a fifth-floor attic apartment at 46 rue Léopold-Robert. The street’s only charm was its name, which was for an early-nineteenth-century painter, Louis-Léopold Robert, who had demonstrated the possibilities of leaving La Chaux-de-Fonds; Robert became a student of David’s in Paris and gained renown all over Europe for his highly colored mythological scenes. One of the main thoroughfares of the city, the avenue was a divided boulevard that, like a river, ran through the base of the valley in which brick buildings and cross streets had been built, sloping upward from it in both directions. Number 46 was pressed
between two other identical structures and did not have much of a garden in the back. The Jeannerets’ windows overlooked their neighbors’ massive rooftops.
Inside, the apartment was comfortable enough, cluttered with the trappings of bourgeois life. A fringed valance hung over the dark and lugubrious draperies that were pulled back by ornate cords with large tassels to frame the living-room windows. Lacey casement material muted whatever sunlight might find its way in. The heavy, carved furniture was stained dark brown. Plants in ornate pots crowded the metronome on top of a flower-patterned cloth on the upright piano. Wall hangings flanked Darjou’s portrait of Marie’s grandfather alongside narrow shelves packed with curios. What was absent was any place to rest the eye.
The only weightless aspect of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s childhood was music. The piano was almost constantly being played. Marie gave lessons to her students at it, and, starting at a young age, Albert began practicing intensely. Edouard himself began to play the piano at age seven, although he was not nearly as serious about it as his older brother was. The sound of Mozart, universal, light of foot, may have been the first hint of an alternative to the dreariness of the family’s apartment.
Part of what made Le Corbusier extraordinary is that all that he later designed for himself and others provided what his childhood home lacked: visual lightness, playful rhythms, the proximity to nature. Greenery and the sky would be brought into settings full of whiteness, light, and visual calm that would be the antithesis of that hodgepodge of ornament and antimacassars. Once Le Corbusier took charge, the gloom and clutter of 46 rue Léopold-Robert would be eradicated.
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Study your Physics well, and you’ll be shown
In not too many pages that your art’s good
Is to follow Nature insofar as it can,
As a pupil emulates his master.
—DANTE, The Inferno, CANTO XI
The young family escaped the dark domestic clutter on their Sunday expeditions to the open spaces and uninterrupted whiteness of the high Alps. On hikes that tested Marie and the boys to the maximum, Georges brought them to ravishing vistas. Shouldering backpacks, the family explored the gorges of the Doubs and ascended to marvelous views of the Tyrol and Mont Blanc.16 The devoted father taught his sons rudimentary facts about flowers, trees, ice, clouds, and other aspects of the natural world. Years afterward, Le Corbusier fondly recalled that these lessons in botany and geology were followed by “calm discourse, more abstract but no less respectfully heeded, for favoring one’s neighbor as well as for justice.”17
In adulthood, once he became an avid painter and designer, Le Corbusier considered knowledge and appreciation of nature to be indispensable. In his 1925 The Decorative Art of Today, he wrote, “I knew flowers inside and out, birds of every shape and color. I understood how a tree grows and why it remains standing, even in the midst of a storm…. My father, moreover, had a passionate love of the mountains and the river which formed our landscape.”18 He discoursed romantically on the process of plant growth: “In slow motion, you have observed the poignant, hasty, irresistible drama of buds which unfold, twist with passion, frenziedly gesture toward the light, a veritable rut of plant life, a mystery hitherto sealed which the impassive eye of the lens and inexorable machinery of time-exposure have revealed.”19 When, after World War II, Le Corbusier developed his concept of the Modulor—an organizing unit for all of architecture—he included in his explanatory text one of the drawings of a young pine tree he had made as a child. Like the Modulor, the well-structured tree offered an antidote to disorder. It embodied regularity, a system of governance, and an organizational scheme with the logic of its patterns; nature was a source of balance and control.
On those Alpine outings, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had felt pure elation: “We were constantly on the peaks; accustomed to the enormous horizon. When the sea of fog stretched to infinity, it was like the real sea (which I had never seen). It was the ultimate spectacle.”20 That attraction to the larger vista later inspired architecture that insists that you know where you are on the planet and guides you to feel the orientation to the sun. Le Corbusier configured the outdoor pulpit at Ronchamp to face the hillside and devised the vast terrace at the Villa Savoye as a command post of the surrounding fields.
Young Edouard watched with fascination when his father went off in climbing clothes to ascend treacherous rock faces on Mont Blanc and sleep in natural enclosures formed by boulders. These rudimentary mountaintop shelters, open to infinity, were lifelong models.
The mundane had its impact as well. Edouard’s grandfather made “dials covered with painted flowers or wisps of golden straw” while his father, “under the buyer’s imperious pressure, found himself obliged to make an entirely new effort: to achieve the impeccable enamels, their background of a perfect whiteness.”21 The need to conform to the latest trend in taste bothered Edouard, but he considered craftsmanship and diligence as vital as the freedom of the Alpine crags. Necessity, skill, and the sense of wonder could all function in tandem.
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It was, for the most part, a predictable Calvinist childhood, except for one unusual element of Edouard’s early education. When he started school at the end of August 1891, more than a month before his fourth birthday, he attended, as did Albert, a private kindergarten that based its methods on the ideas of the early-nineteenth-century German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel. Froebel had invented special wooden bricks and balls, as well as prescribed activities, to encourage playfulness and practical knowledge of materials. His objective was for children at this vital moment of their psychological formation to acquire skills and a way of life in harmony with the larger world and with God. Froebel’s methods may be among the origins of the seemingly carefree arrangements of brightly colored forms with which Le Corbusier would invigorate and give spiritual life to his chapels at Ronchamp and La Tourette.
In 1893, after two years at the Froebel kindergarten, Edouard switched to more humdrum learning at the primary school, where he remained for the next six years. His life took on a clockwork order except that it was often interrupted by bouts of sickness. Edouard was of frailer constitution than Albert and notably thinner. Aside from the usual measles and chicken pox, he had long-lasting head colds and chronic coughs. His parents tried to keep these at bay with cod-liver oil, but the health problems persisted throughout Le Corbusier’s life, with his search for cold remedies obsessing him almost as much as his quest for clients.
At Le Corbusier’s beckoning, Maximilien Gauthier wrapped up his description of Edouard’s ten years at primary and high school by saying that the boy was “noted as a hard-working and talented student.”22 These are the exact adjectives that Le Corbusier repeats in the first person in Corbusier Himself. It was not so. When nine-year-old Albert delighted his parents by passing his spring exams with flying colors, Georges Jeanneret-Gris wrote in his journal, “The boy gives us much pleasure. His brother is less conscientious.”23 In spite of such a crippling stutter that made it difficult for even his parents to understand him, Albert was considered the easier brother. At age thirteen, now playing the violin, he publicly performed a Mozart trio with his mother and his music teacher. Jeanneret-Gris reported, “The dear child gives us great pleasure, whether in his musical or his scholarly studies…. His brother is usually a good child, but has a difficult character, susceptible, quick-tempered, and rebellious; at times he gives us reason for anxiety.”24
Initially, Edouard had regularly been one of the top three students in the class, and, like Albert, often ended his school year by taking first prize, but the problems began in secondary school, where he began to slack off in general studies, while doing well in languages and the arts. In this French-speaking school, he succeeded in both German and English; in math, however, he never progressed beyond algebra, where his grade was 41/2 out of a possible 6—or a flat C.
As reported by Gauthier, though, he was diligent with all his schoolwork; beyond that, �
�after class and on Sundays, his lessons learned and his homework done, he drew passionately for his own pleasure.”25 His family often found him drawing at the dining table in his spare time. Sometimes he copied illustrations from children’s books. Rodolphe Töpffer’s Travels in Zigzag, an 1846 account of a walking trip in Switzerland, was a favorite, imprinting notions that affected his subsequent ideas of urban design. He was also a voracious reader, enthusiastic about Old French and passionate about Rabelais, as well as Cervantes, whom he read in translation.
Regardless, it was Albert who won his parents’ approval for pushing himself hardest. While the fifteen-year-old practiced the violin for up to six hours a day, Edouard disappointed his father by making “much less effort than his brother.”26 Le Corbusier never succeeded in dispelling that impression; for the rest of his mother’s life, whenever she was congratulated on the achievements of her son, she purportedly thought that it was Albert to whom the speaker was referring.
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