Georges had dropped out of school at the age of twelve but never stopped learning. Having immersed himself in history books and atlases, he was a man of few words but great knowledge. To Ritter and Czadra, Le Corbusier now recalled his father as his greatest soul mate and champion. Behind his taciturn facade, Georges had a passion for all that his son had undertaken, and he demonized anyone who stood in the way of his success; Le Corbusier appeared to have forgotten all their differences.
The architect in particular admired the grace with which both of his parents had faced the certainty of death: “My mother has been admirable, violent and passionate as she is. This death has made her gentle and smiling, with a childlike soul, timidly beginning a new life.” He, too, had passed to another level of his existence. “One no longer has the right to remain a boy,” he wrote.14
For years he had chided his parents for their rigidity and insularity. Now he focused only on how much they had given him: “What happiness to have had a father and a mother whom you can somehow idealize; from whose example you can summarize qualities and constitute rules for your own life. About whom you feel that since the day of your first responsibilities they have guided you on your path. You pursue a tradition they have established. A line of conduct. Your life has a direction.”15
Having fought everything he found deadening in his hometown and in the profession of his father and ancestors, Le Corbusier now considered Georges Jeanneret his human equivalent of the Parthenon. “He knew so many things, divined and perceived by judgment, appreciation. An autodidact all the way. Where you had best take him was at the end, when he gave his opinion. One realized then that he knew. Bold, libertarian, whatever, but always so polite, so fond of politeness, and having the sense of the value of traditions. Did you know that by closing your eyes in order not to see, letting yourself go in imagination, you become proud to be from the Neuchâtel mountains. But when the distance is great enough, and your forgetting complete enough, then you construct a ‘type.’ I have that weakness of wanting to attach myself to something, for I should prefer that my ideas had a consequence rather than being my exclusive and personal property.”16
Now, rather than destroy the past, Le Corbusier was determined to harness the best aspects of his heritage, to go farther yet in giving his ideas worldwide consequence.
5
Fourteen days after the evening when he witnessed his father die, he wrote his mother, “So, to keep up with everyone, I spent the last 15 days on my feet from 9 in the morning till 2 hours past midnight without once sitting down, moving from one desk to the next.”17 His mother, who knew he had been back in Paris for only half that time, was used to the exaggeration. The important thing was that there was a flurry of activity at 35 rue de Sèvres and a wonderful team to produce all the square meters of plans; things were so good that Edouard let her know he would be able to buy her a new gas oven in Vevey. For Le Corbusier, the supreme antidote to bereavement was work, and he was convinced that with his success he could offer his mother the greatest possible comfort.
6
Henri Frugès asked the architect to build a new city on the outskirts of Bordeaux. Le Corbusier worshipped the industrialist’s intentions of showing his countrymen the best way to live. Frugès’s goal was for Pessac to have a standardized form of housing that would be life enhancing for the inhabitants and completely contemporary. It was to be well built and efficient, utilizing streamlined forms constructed of modern materials engineered according to the latest methods. “The purity of the proportions will be the true eloquence,” Frugès advised Le Corbusier.18
Le Corbusier had envisioned such a seer and patron in The City of To-morrow. Now he had found the real thing. Frugès was his idea of a hero out of Balzac: rich and idealistic, and not only a businessman but a painter, sculptor, writer, architect, pianist, and composer. At the same time, he understood the limitations of his own artistic talents and ceded to Le Corbusier the task of designing the workers’ housing they both hoped would become a prototype all over the world.
For Pessac, Le Corbusier devised a standardized home easily constructed out of reinforced concrete. Similar to the Citrohan and L’Esprit Nouveau structures, it had a bold, blocky exterior and an interior with a two-story living room and a neat warren of carefully prescribed spaces, as well as generous roof gardens. There was an ambient whiteness new to domestic architecture but also a radical use of color. Pale-green and dark-brown walls and an occasional light blue were deployed as vibrant accents in the whiteness. Le Corbusier believed that these aesthetic choices would lead the masses toward greater health and happiness and lend order to their lives.
Although some of Le Corbusier’s designs at Pessac were executed, the scheme was never completed. Early in the construction process, local builders became defiant because of the unusual ways of doing things and had to be replaced by a crew from Paris. The new team finished the first phase of the project in less than a year, but until 1929 the city remained uninhabited. Le Corbusier blamed the authorities, whom he considered to be the typical bourgeois bureaucrats who always impede progress.
Others faulted the architect and his patron for having cut corners: “The houses were created before a complete dossier was submitted to the Mayor’s office and a construction permit obtained,” according to Brian Bruce Taylor’s excellent history of Pessac. Additionally, Frugès and Le Corbusier had ignored French laws requiring “appropriate installations for providing and filtering water to be made at the promoter’s expense.” The project had been completed too quickly, in blatant disregard of those regulations, and the houses could not be sold until Frugès established “streets, water mains and drainage at his own expense.”19 By the time this was done in November 1928, momentum was lost for finishing the new city.
DETRACTORS COMPARED the architecture of the partially completed Pessac to Frugès’s sugar cubes. They maintained that the new housing had everything to do with the efficiency in manufacture and packaging that had made a fortune for the industrialist—and nothing with the charms of life. But even if it appalled its adversaries, it was spectacularly inventive and beautifully intentioned.
Visiting Pessac today, one sees both how Le Corbusier succeeded and how he failed. On the three streets he completed, the houses, in various states of repair, are jewels: superbly optimistic, clean, crisp, and bright. External staircases and balconies make lively rhythms against the smart, compact forms; the right angles and grids and parallel lines are like the drumbeat in a jazz orchestra.
At Pessac, ca. 1926
Yet these structures are mostly faded and ravaged by time, or else repainted and changed so that their purity is gone. This is not happenstance; it occurred because the architect’s ideal was not what people wanted. And however charming the little community, it is nearly drowned by the mediocre architecture all around it. One must penetrate acres of desultory building to get to Le Corbusier’s and Frugès’s marvel. When one reaches it, it suggests the future—a future that, although constructed eighty years ago, seems bright but that was not realized as dreamed. Le Corbusier made a rarity; he did not affect the quotidian as he hoped. He created something enchanting and full of hope, but he did not come close to his intention of transforming the appearance of the larger world.
THE WRITER BLAISE CENDRARS, born about a month before Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, was another local to take a new name, replacing “Frédéric Sauser” with an appellation that suggested fire rising from the ashes. On November 15, 1926, after a visit to Pessac, he, wrote Le Corbusier. “The ensemble is gay and not drearily monotonous as I thought it would be. I also thought that given your conception of a house, you were addressing yourself to a certain French elite rather than to the working classes. That is why your ‘villa’ type will succeed more readily than the ‘cité.’”20 It may not have been the total adulation Le Corbusier wanted—people from the Swiss Jura were not known to mince words—but the trenchant analysis from a fellow sufferer and escapee of L
a Chaux-de-Fonds moved Le Corbusier greatly.
7
At the same time that he was making houses for factory workers, Le Corbusier completed one of his most impressive private villas to date—the Maison Cook in Boulogne-sur-Seine, a suburb just at the edge of Paris. With this bold and handsome house, the architect took the flat face of a basic La Chaux-de-Fonds apartment dwelling—honoring the line of the street it parallels, providing shelter within a dense urban setting—and gave it tensile elegance, lightness, and esprit.
Working as a team, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret realized the five salient points that were the goals of their new architecture. Foremost, the Maison Cook was built on pilotis: simple, untapered columns that elevate most of the structure above the ground, so that the level one floor up is where the house begins. In romantic voice, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret wrote, in a jointly signed text, “The house on posts! Reinforced cement gives us the posts. Now the house is up in the air, off the ground; the garden passes under the house, the garden is also above the house, on the roof.”21 The goal was increased awareness of the earth itself, as well as of the sky and sun; these pilotis invited a closer rapport to what is natural, universal, and timeless.
That roof garden addressed the second of the five objectives. Again, the architect cousins were focused on the use of new technology to celebrate the glories of eternal nature: “Sand covered with heavy cement tiles, with wide joints seeded with grass, rainwater filtered through terrace gardens that were opulent: flowers, bushes and trees, lawn.”22
Inside the house, there was a third innovation: the free plan. Reinforced concrete eliminated the need for each story to be divided in accord with what was below, allowing the architects “rigorous use of each centimeter. Great economy of money.”23
The fourth great leap was evident in the long window band, of the type already seen in Ozenfant’s studio and La Petite Maison, realized here in two handsome stripes, one on top of the other. Point five was “the free facade,” which was feasible now that “the facades are no more than light membranes of dividing walls or of windows.”24
William Cook, an American journalist of independent wealth, was a friend of the Steins—Gertrude, Michael, and other members of that family of adventurous arts patrons who had come from San Francisco and settled in Paris. Cook was interested in the avant-garde and gave the architects unprecedented freedom. “We are no longer paralyzed,” rhapsodized Le Corbusier. Of the Maison Cook, he declared, “The classical plan is reversed; the area underneath the house is free. The reception area is at the top of the house. One exits directly onto the roof-garden, which overlooks the vast groves of the Bois de Boulogne; one is no longer in Paris, one seems to be in the country.”25
In his own life, Le Corbusier was content to walk the narrow streets and lively boulevards of the sixth and seventh arrondissements between office and home and climb the seven flights of the oval spiral staircase to the nest where, through the mansard windows, he and Yvonne could look at treetops and historic gardens. But in his work for a wealthy and adventurous client, he made architecture without historical precedent in its unadorned geometric pleasures, the sheer élan of thin pilotis supporting a noble mass, and the tactile delights of glass and steel and white concrete arranged to facilitate transparency and opacity so as to reveal, in an urban setting, some of those marvels to which his late father had led him on mountaintops.
8
On March 31, even though they were living in the same couple of rooms, Le Corbusier wrote his mistress a highly official letter with instructions to guard it carefully. For this document, he used her full name, “Mademoiselle Yvonne (Jeanne Victorine) Gallis.” As if addressing a docile schoolgirl, he told her that as her Easter present he had opened a bank account on her behalf.
Le Corbusier spelled out to Yvonne the terms of the account. The money he was to deposit would belong to her, but the account was to be managed by Jean-Pierre de Montmollin, and she could touch the funds only with his agreement. To prevent her from spending this money, Le Corbusier had instructed de Montmollin to keep the funds in “deeds” rather than cash; the reason for the account was that he wanted her taken care of in case something ever happened to him. One never knows what will occur in life, Le Corbusier cautioned.
With his usual meticulousness, the architect instructed his mistress which entrance to use for the branch of the Crédit Commercial de France on the Champs-Elysées. He also gave her the phone number of the bank. She was to meet with de Montmollin there. But “you are hereby informed that the shares of this account cannot serve to buy trifles, but to be useful to you, truly useful when the time comes.”26 He was starting it with a deposit of 2,500 francs—which had a buying power of roughly $2,245 today—to which he planned to continue to make additions, gradually but well into the future.
With Yvonne at a masked ball, late 1920s
HE WAS his mother’s caretaker as well, though Marie Jeanneret was doing her best to cope with her solitude in the lakeside villa. Le Corbusier counseled her to be strong, not to cry too much, and to see friends. Addressing “Ma chère petite Maman” two months after Georges’s death, he wrote, “I think so often of dear, gentle Papa and his last childlike voice, so faint, so charming. Our good Papa.”27
He and Albert and de Montmollin visited Marie at the start of April. Afterward, he advised by postcard, “Happy to keep with me the young, ardent, intelligent memory of you. Sustain your mission among us, the disinterested love of beautiful things.”28 For the rest of her life, which was nearly the rest of his, Le Corbusier obsessed over his mother’s youthfulness. He followed the postcard with a letter: “Ma petite maman, you must not say you feel like an old woman. You never wanted to be such a thing and you have been able to keep yourself young. So, no moral capitulations now. You are strikingly youthful. You delight me each time I see you, so apt to respond with generosity and enthusiasm. It is the proof you have never closed your heart or your mind. It is a joy for us to find you thus.”29 To remain fit and healthy, she had to stay active, accept social invitations, and, he instructed, resume her teaching, even if it meant giving piano lessons free of charge.
Edouard had assigned himself the position of family sage. He reported on a recent evening at Albert and Lotti’s villa in Autheuil: “Madame is very well, and very affectionate with Albert, to whom she gives evident signs of esteem. It is true that Albert is kind, lovable, and affectionate. He seems to have inherited the best of his father and his mother.”30
By that spring, Marie had met Yvonne. Soon after his father’s death, Edouard had begun to mention his living companion, describing her as a good but fragile soul, pure of heart but also at the edge of being out of control. The first encounter went well enough, but it would be an uphill battle for his mother to accept his unlikely choice. Le Corbusier did his utmost, writing, “Little Yvonne tends on the mantelpiece, under Papa’s photographs, a little altar covered with fresh flowers. Today they are wallflowers and lilies-of-the-valley. This mantelpiece covered with all of Yvonne’s souvenirs and knickknacks is a touching index of her taste and sensibility; she keeps an affectionate and respectful memory of you.”31
SENDING HIS MOTHER a long letter every four or five days, he began to act as if they were one big family: “Try, Petite Maman, to live this solitary life of yours stoically and serenely. We don’t forget you for a moment.”32 Then he told her about a dream that he said had lasted the entire night and was haunting him. In it, she was anxious and too thin. As if to relieve that worried state in which he saw her when he slept, he informed her that he was trying to help people he knew buy property adjacent to hers, so as to protect the neighborhood.
The architect implored his mother to write down, on a daily basis, all that was happening in her mind and heart, and to send it to him at the end of each week. “I think of you often,” he wrote, “realizing with true anguish how alone you are…. Your letters are so alive. We preserve an image of you as someone young and lively, strong in your
faith. The sweet memory of papa prevails, a true poem in our emotional life, and there you are, so eager beside him, inseparable from him, purified by him; how eager you are to live, to know, to act, to love. I want you to realize that there is no barrier separating us, we are on the same footing, and there is no difference in nature or quality between us, save to your advantage. And so you are with us, the friend, the good comrade, in complete and mutual trust.”33
9
In May 1926, in Neuilly, Le Corbusier found a dog for his mother. “The puppy mutt, a thoroughbred police dog, is very likely to become another Jeanneret,” he wrote.34 His spirits were high. Important clients—American, English, and French—were pursuing him; he felt a sense of wind in his sails and of doors opening. (The clichés are his.) The novelist Colette told him she wanted to live in a “Corbusiere”—a term of her invention. They had dined together; Colette was, he told his mother, “an extremely captivating woman with magnificent eyes, painted from head to foot, and very garçon; she knows admirably—just like a cat—how to furnish a house which is a box of goodies.”35
Dog formed by words in a letter to his mother, July 5, 1926
Le Corbusier lectured in Brussels about the Plan Voisin, reporting to his mother, “I was swimming like a fish in water, very much at my ease, even brilliant(!).” He let her know that, at a subsequent dinner for forty people in his honor, six speakers sang his praises. But what counted most was that when he was projecting images of La Petite Maison to his audience, he was overcome by visions of “dear Papa. Poor Papa!” And now, back in Paris, where he was writing the report from his bed, the thirty-eight-year-old Le Corbusier told his mother, “my first thought was for you.”36
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