While they were supposed to keep him in line, he would instruct them on how to live. Edouard told his father to hire an assistant and his mother to continue with her music. This was feasible, he explained, because he was earning enough from the fees for the architectural work he was doing at long distance that they could stop setting aside money on his behalf. But if Charles-Edouard Jeanneret believed he was going to lighten his parents’ financial burden for long, he was delusional.
V
1
As a last-ditch effort to find work in Vienna, Jeanneret barged, unbidden, into the offices of the city’s two leading architects, Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann. Twenty-five years later, Le Corbusier claimed that Hoffmann offered him a job for two hundred crowns and introduced him to Klimt and other artists, but in a letter he wrote L’Eplattenier at the time he said that Hoffmann was not even in his office and that they never met.
L’Eplattenier advised his two students to go to Dresden or another major German city; Jeanneret responded, “You’re violent and treat us like ten-year-olds.”1 Jeanneret knew what he had to do: “In order to create a new art, you have to be in a position to calculate arches, large roof spans, bold cantilevers, in short everything our traditionalist ‘masters’ fail to do, for you can imagine that my ambition goes further than making little rental houses and villas.”2 He could not acquire this technical knowledge in the German language; besides, he needed to gain his living. He had made up his mind to move to Paris.
GEORGES AND MARIE were enraged. They were upset both by the idea of Edouard’s going to the French capital and his failure to communicate with them directly. He responded that there had been no point in explaining the decision to them since they did not even know the names of important architects.
He then pinned his secrecy on his reluctance to trouble them: “That would have made a constant disturbance for you, my beloved parents, for you’re so kind, you live so little for yourselves and far too much for us.”3 He explained his choice of Paris with the sort of verbiage of which he became the master: “Whereupon I returned to my bourgeois common sense and once again burned what I had adored; i.e., when one is young one speaks for the sake of speaking, and goes on doing just that, actually, more or less until one dies. (Those who say nothing are the smarties, of course; and I’ve noticed I always had a chattering temperament.) The received opinion is this: that I lack any solid basis, that I don’t know my trade, which is exactly what I must now learn.” The solution was a job in France: “My tastes are Latin tastes…. In Paris (nor does one have to be somewhat cracked to believe it)…they build just as big and with just as modern methods as they do in Germany.”
“One thing you can be at peace about,” he assured his parents, “I’m anything but a ‘vain boaster,’ and I need to muster all my courage in order to face up to the future as it looks to me. I’m too much of a worker, and I make myself stupid because of it. No question about it, I must let the young man in me speak, otherwise I’ll shrivel away to nothing, and I spend my evenings making projects solely in order to do nothing or to kid around…. My trade or my vocation is uniquely or rather must be in art, a young man of my age must keep his artistic fibers vibrating on all occasions. One must have a daily bread in art, an atmosphere of art. Here in Vienna, if it weren’t for music, one would have to do away with oneself.”4 In Paris, on the other hand, he would see Notre-Dame, the Louvre, and other great sights he knew only from photographs.
“Before me stretches the vast battlefield of Art, which devours so many men’s lives but which I must embark upon, and right away. That is why I am going to Paris.” His parents had to understand that he had endured all he could; he begged for their support. “I need your confidence. Above all, my dear good parents, stop saying I make you bitter. Whom else can I love except you?…Trust me, I love you, and you know quite well that all I have is you. I embrace you both, and thank you eternally all over again.”5
To reconcile his need for his parents’ approval with his indomitable will to go his own way was his most urgent task.
2
When Charles-Edouard Jeanneret arrived in Paris, he had all the expectations of a provincial. The disappointment stung.
His train reached the French capital after nightfall. Throughout the long journey, he had been picturing his life in the city of light. When he walked out of the Gare de l’Est on that March evening in 1908, little was as he had imagined. Rain was bucketing down. As he wandered into the aftermath of the celebration of Lent Tuesday, the masks and confetti in the mud struck him as sinister.
He had in his pocket the address of a hotel where one of his classmates from art school was staying. It was on the rue Charlot, a narrow street populated mainly by wholesalers and small businesses, not far from the sprawling place de la République. Finding his way on foot, Jeanneret encountered none of the monuments, bridges, or parks that composed his image of Paris. Even at night, the rue Charlot was commercial and noisy. The hotel itself was a disgusting hovel. As it would be told in the biography he masterminded a quarter of a century later, “His first contact with Paris—the Paris of fiacres, buses, double-decker trams—far from affording him the anticipated amazement, filled him with sadness and caused him something very like anguish.”6
In Paris, ca. 1908
Two letters awaited him at the front desk. One, from L’Eplattenier, chastised him for this rash move. His former master and guide warned him that Paris had become a hotbed of artistic decadence. The other, from his father, alerted Edouard that he would receive no support in this “modern Babylon.”7
At least that is how Le Corbusier spun the tale via Gauthier—in whose book he arrived in Paris a month earlier than was the case. The reprimands had actually reached him when he was still in Vienna. But it makes a better story this way. The image of the solitary survivor, braving opposition with only a few sous in his pocket, was embellished by making those hostile letters part of his greeting to his new life. Similarly, Le Corbusier removed Perrin from the picture, although his old friend was with him; it’s a more dramatic tale if Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was entirely alone.
3
What Le Corbusier later presented as a struggle against all odds, with a prolonged stay in the hovel, actually took an upward turn the day following his arrival. In his contemporaneous letters to L’Eplattenier, his spirits lifted as soon as he saw Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. Almost immediately, he took a pleasant room in a small hotel on the rue des Ecoles, in a charming neighborhood on the Left Bank.
The architecture of this area, on one of Paris’s highest hills, was on the same scale as in La Chaux-de-Fonds. But while the Swiss city was a rigid grid of rows of unvaried five-story structures, this corner of Paris consisted of ancient townhouses abutting more recent Art Nouveau facades on angled byways that together resembled a spider’s web. A vitality and playfulness replaced the dour elevations of Jeanneret’s hometown. Now he was surrounded by both grandeur and intimacy—from the massive Ecole Polytechnique, completed in the aftermath of the French revolution, and the imposing Pantheon, to picturesque squares and narrow streets with a proliferation of food shops and fine bakeries. From the solitary window of his attic room, he could “contemplate at the same time the gilding of the Sainte-Chapelle and the whiteness of Sacré-Coeur.”8 All of Paris, from Vincennes to the Arc de Triomphe, opened before his eye.
On one of his long daily walks, Jeanneret accidentally found himself at the Salon des Indépendants. A large canvas by Henri Matisse made him stagger backward in consternation over “enormous women with skin that looked boiled.”9 The young Swiss who in those days was painting small-scale, tame watercolors could not fathom Matisse’s distortions of form and color.
When he audited a course at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, however, he loathed the academic style it promulgated. What mesmerized young Jeanneret, rather, were the qualities of freedom and inventiveness he discovered in the glasswork of Lalique, the sculpture of Rodin, and the buildings of Art Nouveau a
rchitect Hector Guimard, for whom his companion Perrin went to work. Unlike Vienna, Paris had artistic practitioners with taste and imagination.
4
Jeanneret soon began to bang on the office doors of Paris’s best-known architects. Frantz Jourdain, architect of the Samaritaine department store and founder and president of the Salon d’Automne, liked the drawings the audacious young Swiss had made in Italy. Jourdain paved the way for him to meet others in the Salon hierarchy, who asked him to work on a polychrome decorative frieze for a cornice. Jeanneret deemed the task beneath him and went instead to see Eugène Grasset, whose book on ornament had obsessed him in art school. Armed with his new Parisian cartes de visite, he talked his way into Grasset’s office and got the master to look at the same drawings that had won over Jourdain. Grasset’s response was to rail against the current Parisian architecture scene: “complete decadence, inveterate academicism, the low bourgeois utilitarianism of the rental-warren.” Jeanneret asked the oracle if there was any hope whatsoever, which prompted Grasset to make a pronouncement that changed his young listener’s life: “Everything can be saved by a method of construction which is beginning to be widespread: you make board boxes, you put iron rods inside and fill them up with concrete…. The result: pure forms of coffering. It’s called reinforced concrete. So go and see the Perret brothers.”10
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret followed the advice without a moment’s hesitation.
AUGUSTE PERRET was forty-four years old, Gustave forty-one. The sons of a Belgian building contractor, they had developed a speciality in reinforced concrete and were engaged in unprecedented feats of construction. Four years prior to the arrival of Jeanneret at their door, they had completed a bold reinforced-concrete apartment building in the sixteenth arrondissement on the rue Franklin, near the Trocadéro, which served to demonstrate the technology and their quality of workmanship.
Coming up from the Seine, looking across the rue Franklin, Jeanneret faced a lithe yet massive seven-story structure visibly standing on tall, narrow concrete legs. The lively facade presented the structural skeleton unclad, as one would normally find it only in buildings still under construction. The candor was unprecedented.
Instead of flowing smoothly along the line of the street like its neighbors on either side, the front of 25 bis was a sequence of deeply cut recesses, bold iron railings, and large-paned windows. Because the narrow site did not permit an interior courtyard, an equivalent courtyard—sliced by the line of the sidewalk—was moved to the front. In this three-quarters court, the upbeat apartment house embraces the daylight.
On its slope facing the Eiffel Tower, the building was—as it still is—more energetic and animated, as well as taller and whiter, than its nineteenth-century neighbors. A panoply of decorative coverings made it the machine-cut descendant of Jeanneret’s beloved cathedral facade in Siena.
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret absorbed all of this as he walked into the Perret brothers’ offices on the ground floor. He was stunned even further by the absence of internal structural columns—possible because the entire building was supported on external concrete posts. The effect was liberating.
Again, the young man presented his Italian drawings as his entry ticket to the office of an important architect. Auguste Perret took one look at the sheets of Italian scenes and announced, “You will be my right hand.”11
The four months of searching had paid off. In his new workplace, the cocky young Swiss was at home as never before. The Perrets’ courage to buck the artistic tide, their intelligence and honesty, and their technical sophistication were unlike anything he had encountered in so-called modern Vienna.
Auguste and Gustave Perret believed that the design and appearance of a building should honor its function and program. It was also vital to build with accessible materials and to utilize current technology. Jeanneret thrilled to their startling insistence that building design cease inserting antiquated forms and obscure substances into our lives. They offered the voice of truth.
5
For fourteen months, Jeanneret worked five hours every afternoon for the Perret brothers, doing drafting and preparing blueprints. He earned six francs per day, which enabled him to move into nicer digs, another single room tucked under a mansard roof, but now at 3 quai Saint-Michel, overlooking the Seine. When he wasn’t working, he went to museums and sketched. He focused mainly on vernacular art: Greek and Etruscan pottery, Egyptian and Persian painting, medieval tapestries and statuary, and Chinese and Hindu bronzes. In the dusty and obscure rooms of the Musée d’Ethnographie at the Trocadéro—a place to which he often repaired with great pleasure, relishing the solitude—he succumbed to the enchantment of Peruvian pottery, Aztec sculpture, and African textiles and wood carvings.
Jeanneret took it upon himself to go to the Ministry of Beaux-Arts, the administrative office for Paris’s monuments. There he managed to obtain a bunch of keys that opened locked gates and doors within the great Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame. He had often studied its exterior from his apartment window; now he explored the tops of the steeples and climbed the pinnacles and buttresses. The structure and construction thrilled him, but the decorated surfaces were an irritant. “The plans and the Gothic cross-section are magnificent, full of ingenuity, but their verification cannot be achieved by what meets the eye. An engineer’s triumph, a plastic defeat.”12
He continued to write regularly to his mentor L’Eplattenier, but the more colorful, worldly Auguste Perret was becoming his new role model. “Auguste Perret has a nabob’s tastes,” he wrote. “He would like to sit enthroned while grinning in secret; he loves things preciously made, a Japanese netsuke, a piece of woven Moroccan leather, a shapely sword, delicate cookery…he’s sublime with clients. He holds his head high…chooses his neckties very carefully…. His worktable is always impeccably arranged…. He’d have liked to be the shah of Persia, but he’d have decapitated his enemies with a wooden sword and offered his victims cigarettes after a session of torture. He liked to consider himself a revolutionary figure, and in fact he carried out his revolution meticulously, with deep love, respectful and assiduous in his vocation, which is to build. And to build meticulously with reinforced concrete, in this period of utter decadence.”13
Meanwhile, Don Quixote and writings by Nietzsche, both of which he read continually, corresponded to his own experience of the world. In July, he wrote L’Eplattenier, “Life, at this particular period of my existence, is a grueling combat. If every day I see new difficulties cropping up, if I find they are more numerous than those which my colleagues working toward the same goal must overcome, it is because I feel I’m an ‘outlaw.’”14
As if he were his own advisor and pupil at the same time, the young man laid out his goals to his old teacher: “I’m attempting to establish a rational program for myself, one which will gradually allow me to learn the tricks of the trade. Every day I do my work, and I frequently catch myself getting excited over a difficult, mysterious problem, enthusiastic when I’ve found the solution. For the rest, aside from the abstraction of pure mathematics, I read Viollet-le-Duc, a man so wise, so logical, so clear, and so exact in his observations. I have Viollet-le-Duc and I have Notre-Dame, which serves as my laboratory, so to speak.”15
After conjuring for his parents the nineteenth-century French architect who had led the Gothic revival and restored Notre-Dame, Jeanneret put himself down: “I feel deeply disgusted with myself. No, honestly, I am horrified every day by discovering my inability to hold a pencil; I don’t feel the form, I can’t make a form revolve: it drives me to despair.” The self-denigration sparked an intense drive to do better. “I try to control myself these days, to wrench myself out of this disgust: I seek geometrically the principle of the model, the decomposition of light and shadow on a sphere, an oval, a vase or some other object.”16 That rapport with light effects was to be Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s salvation and a fundament of Le Corbusier’s genius.
6
At the start
of July 1908, Jeanneret wrote L’Eplattenier, “What constitutes the great disaster, or perhaps the great success—disaster because synonymous with struggle, success because it is a thirst for ideals, for aspiration—is that the critical faculty grows sharper, becomes imperious, decisive, commanding. It turns you into a painter, an incompetent, a fraud; it says to me: ‘You’re nothing but an imbecile, and I never would have thought such a thing of you. I had illusions about you, fantasies, I saw you heading for triumph, swimming through clouds of glory.’…How severe the critic becomes, a fellow who doesn’t mince words…. But God has made us in His image and He remains the great face, the great passion to make the Good and the Beautiful, and at times that power prevails over all else, which is why at this very moment I am not a clerk in an office or a grocery clerk!”17
Aspiring toward the “beautiful” and trying to cope with his meandering mind, he tried to pare down his life to the rigor and bare simplicity of a tent in a battlefield. Jeanneret embraced a leaner, purer, tougher existence. “I am sometimes invited into bourgeois homes, which awakens tremendous exasperations,” he wrote L’Eplattenier.18 Middle-class life was a trap, dominated by heathens who mocked Rodin and did not understand Wagner. Superfluous comforts and material well-being were deadening. Even Jeanneret’s fellow students drove him to despair with their false values and lack of idealism. “Oh, how eagerly I wish that my friends, our comrades, would discard that mediocre life with its everyday satisfactions and abandon what they hold most dear, supposing as they do that such things are good—if only they realized how petty their aims are, and how little they’re thinking,” he wrote.19
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