In his “Climatic Grid,” Le Corbusier had tried to find the means of mastering one of the major, insoluble issues of his life: the effects of weather change. Adequate protection against the variables depended on brises-soleil to provide the functions of both the umbrella and the parasol, creating simple shelter against rainfall and baking sunlight. Like his father, Le Corbusier had long been obsessed by fluctuating temperatures, the impact of extreme cold or heat, and the range of sky conditions. He believed deeply in the direct influence of climate on one’s work and emotional state. With his new device, he had used the order and systematization of his childhood to cope with extreme conditions in India.
9
In much of Chandigarh today, the geographical flatness, the sameness of the architecture, and the division into sectors create an overall regularity. The intense heat and the arrangement of blocky buildings make it seem similar to the vast suburban sprawls of Texas and southern California—except for its extraordinary public buildings, which are without equal.
The comparison to American suburbs belongs to the eyes of an outsider, however. Indians who come from Chandigarh or who choose to move there (of whom there are many) feel for the most part that it is the promised land. From the moment Le Corbusier set foot on the terrain of his future city, he had a spectacular vision for it, and to most of its inhabitants that dream has become reality.
Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh resulted from goals which he articulated, at the start of that first trip, in a letter to Yvonne that he intended to be read by his mother as well: “Chandigarh will be the city of trees, flowers, and water, of houses as simple as those of Homeric times, and of some splendid edifices of the most extreme modernism subject to mathematical rule and a proportion to be verified in everything here by the poor as by the prosperous.”35
In this place he associated with both ancient Greece and the vanguard, nature’s marvels would exist in all their glory. By utilizing modernism in its purest form and relying on the best available technology, he would realize human habitation in its most rudimentary and elegant sense, both as a shelter that provided life’s necessities and as a platform for worship of the universe. What he gave the Indian population was, in those respects, exactly on a par with the way he housed himself and his immediate family.
From the start of that first trip to India, Le Corbusier woke up in sunshine; the air was fresh; the birds were singing. This was what counted. He was in a state of total ecstasy. Fry was “a fine man.” Varma was “an angel of gentleness.” Everyone he encountered was blessed with humility—“quite touching in contrast to the arrogance of Wall Street.”36 The sophisticates of the world, the powers of the UN, could all be damned.
XLIV
1
In August 1951, Le Corbusier and Yvonne returned to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin for their holiday. He and Yvonne again slept in the small house surrounded by olive trees a short walk from l’Etoile de Mer. “Mr. and Mrs. Le Corbusier” were so happy that they hardly ever left the premises. Twice a day, Le Corbusier walked down to the ocean for a vigorous swim, but otherwise they lived between their modest room and the restaurant. The architect’s schedule on holiday was as orderly as it was unpredictable during the rest of the year.
The location could not have been more perfect for him and Yvonne. The land sloping down to the sea was covered with thick vegetation. Although Monaco and Monte Carlo were visible across the vast inlet, the property was as rough and savage as that tiny principality was built up and manicured. The spot had some of the barren simplicity of Mount Athos. The ocean was perpetually in view, the rocks and flowers and dense foliage fixed by a crystalline light. The Mediterranean coast was both Le Corbusier’s and Yvonne’s nirvana—his because it was everything he loved in contrast to his childhood, hers because it recalled the joys of her youth.
Jean Petit, a young architect at 35 rue de Sèvres, had become Le Corbusier’s Boswell, recording every statement and trying to retain the master’s words for posterity. Le Corbusier told him, “Over the years, I’ve become a man of…everywhere. I’ve traveled across the continents. I have only one deep attachment: the Mediterranean. I am, intensely, a Mediterranean man. The Mediterranean Sea is the queen of forms and of light. Light and Space…. Mountains I probably grew to dislike in my youth. My father loved them to excess. They were always there: heavy, stifling. Then, too, they’re monotonous. The sea is movement, endless horizon.”1
At Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Yvonne spent her days happily on a chaise on the veranda of the little bistro or in the shade at the shoemaker’s. The shoemaker’s wife kept chickens, rabbits, and a goat. To the noise of this menagerie and the shoemaker’s many daughters, she and Le Corbusier slept especially well, just as they had the previous summer.
Every day, Robert Rebutato, now fifteen years old, brought Yvonne six dozen sea urchins he had fished out of the sea. In the winter, the boy had taken to writing to her often—in neat schoolboy script, not so different from hers. His respect for the couple approached worship. That Easter, at Robert’s request, Yvonne had been the patroness of a light Easter meal for the local children. With his work habits and her drinking, Le Corbusier and Yvonne never seem to have considered having children, but at l’Etoile de Mer they enjoyed a connection with a child that fulfilled a need in them. Now more than ever, Le Corbusier was determined to make this spot an integral part of his existence.
2
Henri Matisse’s chapel in Vence, a forty-five-minute journey by car from Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, had recently been completed. Le Corbusier would not have been pleased if he had known the history of its construction. In 1948, when Matisse had undertaken to do the art and windows and liturgical garments for the small church, the enlightened Dominican father Marie-Alain Couturier had proposed that Le Corbusier be its architect. Matisse had refused; he chose Auguste Perret instead, claiming, “He’ll do as I say”—which the painter knew would certainly not have been the case with Le Corbusier.2 Knowledge of that piece of history would have prevented Le Corbusier from going to see Matisse’s chapel that August 1951, one of the few times he left his retreat during the holiday.
The building had been consecrated two months earlier. The plain structure with Matisse’s black-and-white mural, bright abstract windows, and boldly refined crucifix and other fittings was even better than Le Corbusier anticipated. He now reversed himself even further about the artist’s work. After the visit, he wrote Matisse, “I visited the chapel at Vence. Everything there is joy, limpidity, youth. The visitors, by a spontaneous triage, were dignified, delighted, and charming. Your work has given me an impulse of courage—not that I am lacking in that department, but at Vence I renewed my supply. The little chapel is a great testimonial—of truth. Because of you, once again, life is beautiful. Thank you.”3
Originality, creativity, and honesty were his own goals as well. On August 27, the architect wrote his mother, “Forgive the vacuity of this letter. Happy men tell no tales. And my notion of a vacation is to make things which are difficult to invent.”4 This was his time to escape the rat race, to allow himself the void that facilitated being creative rather than reactive, and to use his imagination to its utmost. He had taken his painting and sculpture in unprecedented directions.
Then architecture beckoned. On September 2, Le Corbusier and Yvonne took the train for Marseille. At last, they could sleep on the site of his new apartment complex. Staying overnight within the walls of his creation, he was more convinced than ever of his own magic.
3
The only thing he believed was still missing in his life was sufficient attention from his mother and brother. When Le Corbusier returned to Paris in September, there were business letters to read and answer, visitors calling on him in droves, and endless telephone calls. The barrage of communication was because people needed him all over the world, yet there was not a word from Vevey.
As important as he was globally, he always found the time to write his mother and Albert long letters. This was more th
an they did: “And you—do you write much? Not that I know of. I have the feeling I write more than you do—and do you have any idea of the work I have on my plate?”5 He provided his mother and Albert with a numbered list that included the projects in Nantes, Marseille, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, and Ronchamp, various villas, a house for the industrialist André Jaoul, a tomb for a general in Caracas, and the urbanization of Bogotá (as if that project were still alive). He also summarized the books he was planning to write and let them know he was preparing a major exhibition of his work to be held in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952 as well as an important show of his paintings at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris the following year. He would probably receive a significant commission for UNESCO in Paris, and had met with Claudius-Petit in Strasbourg to plan the construction of eight hundred dwellings. Not that his mother and Albert could have been ignorant of any of this information, which Le Corbusier had repeated time and again to them, but he wanted to emphasize the juggling act by which he concerned himself with the most minor details of their lives while they neglected him totally.
They must know the ordeals he had been through and the horrible people with whom he had to put up. They had, after all, seen the “snotty nose” of the “mayor of Marseille’s chef du cabinet.” Le Corbusier had been forced to take the government official and the adjunct mayor around the construction site and explain himself to them—which made him feel completely “done in: that kind of asshole digs perpetually deepening ditches under my feet. Such creatures are stupid, fatuous, cowardly, disgusting.”6 At least “this callow fool” had said that he had never seen a woman of the caliber of his mother, a compliment Le Corbusier was happy to pass on.
His workload was “crushing,” he repeatedly told his family members. “But the work under way is assuming an unheard-of proportion, linked to the great moments of the history of architecture as a revolutionary social phenomenon, opening paths beyond the present methods of east or west. A spiritual conquest that scares some and brings tears to our eyes time and time again. We’re achieving something truly superior!”7
Not that the conquest would be total. Strasbourg was yet another project that would fail to materialize. The studio had drawn 120 meters of plans for two rectangular housing slabs that between them contained eight hundred dwellings; with its park and swimming pool and appealing housing that could be built at an unusually low cost, it had unparalleled charm for a new city. But Le Corbusier, allowed only eight meters on which to present the project to the jury, was forced to overlap the drawings and blueprints in thick bunches. The jury of twenty, ten of them architects, said it could not even be considered. Le Corbusier was convinced that the perpetrators of this crime had conceived of the size restriction and then caused the consequent rejection of his scheme as a deliberate act of vengeance, at a cost to his studio of five million francs.
The seesaw of success and defeat within Le Corbusier’s mind caused him in the next breath to instruct his mother, “Ultimately, happiness is within, in ourselves, so that dear Maman need not offer the Villa Le Lac to her guests as anything more than it is: a living-space with endurable faults.”8
4
As Marie Jeanneret approached what was now claimed as her ninety-second birthday, Le Corbusier drew her another vertical graph. The scheme is divided in units like a thermometer, with each horizontal dash across the spine marking a decade. Le Corbusier shaded in the area above ninety, making it clear that one hundred, a perfect globe at the top, the essence of roundness and symmetry, was not so far away (see color plate 10).
Alongside the diagram, Le Corbusier wrote, “Dear Maman, as you proceed one step farther into the high attitudes, your children congratulate you, surrounding you with their admiration and their affection and wishing you a wonderful and simple life.” Then he proffered some of his usual advice: “Look ahead and above. And learn to love the weeds (which the Good Lord made as well as the flowers!).”9 He had not cut a thing out of his own garden since 1939, he explained.
He continued with the botanical analogy. As she approached her centenary, his mother should be less judgmental, forgive him for the leaking roof, and accept him and Yvonne as she did Albert—the first seed of her garden. She must embrace all that was natural, even if it was not tidy and orderly.
5
Le Corbusier returned to India that fall. This time, he was stationed in a luxurious hotel suite in Simla, looking out on the mountains. At an altitude of 2,600 meters, he had a glass veranda, a large bedroom, a boudoir, and a spacious bathroom. He could see the higher reaches of the Himalayas toward the north and, to the south, the foothills sloping down toward Chandigarh. Every day, starting at 6:00 a.m., the sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky. The architect savored the good mountain air and complete silence that made his “hermit’s life” ideal for hard work.10
On the site in Chandigarh, construction was under way. The radiant city was, at long last, going to become reality. Pierre, Fry, and Drew were working well together. The Indian crew was splendid. And a powerful government was endorsing it all.
Even if he now claimed himself as a Mediterranean man, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, from Simla, that he remained guided by the lessons of his childhood. He never allowed himself to procrastinate; to postpone any task would have violated the maxims on which she had raised him. “But dear Maman’s precepts do not attain the peaks of her bright young cheeks and her smile, so magnificently confident, total, and optimistic,” he added, in his voice of unequivocal adoration.11
ON NOVEMBER 22, Le Corbusier had an appointment in New Delhi with Prime Minister Nehru. The meeting was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. The architect respectfully arrived at 10:30. He paced back and forth for fifteen minutes and then could no longer restrain himself from approaching the office. In the waiting room, he had glanced at the day’s newspapers and discovered that there had been a plane crash in Calcutta the previous night. A, number of leaders of industry and government officials had been killed. It did not even occur to Le Corbusier to dissemble when describing his reaction to that tragedy. “Now is my chance,” the architect thought.12
Plunging in—at least according to his account, no one tried to stop him—Le Corbusier immediately offered Nehru his condolences, in the best English he could muster. After the prime minister invited him to speak French, he continued, “May I present my respects and declare that I bring and shall bring all my intelligence and also all my sensibility and my heart to this task which delights me as the crown of my career: in humility, even in poverty, to free architecture from its dead crust, to express it and give it the greatness of youth.”13
The Swiss architect, his receding white hair brushed back from his forehead, stood confidently in his white linen suit and bow tie before the distinguished world leader. He continued on the theme of life and death, announcing that the tragic deaths that had just occurred made it an opportune moment for resurrection and that architecture was a living force that could replace the unexpected void. He urged Nehru to make his colleagues’ fatal accident further reason to do the unprecedented and startfresh. Le Corbusier considered building a process of birth. It was the solution to all hard-ship—the means to overcome torturous rejection of the type he had experienced, even by his own mother—and a compensation for death.
With Nehru in India, mid-1950s
The architect continued, telling the prime minister that Thapar and Varma were both excellent at their jobs. He also reminded Nehru that he had declared that “Chandigarh should be a symbol of the Freedom of India, unfettered by the tradition of the past.”14
If Le Corbusier’s report is to be trusted, Nehru looked at him gravely when he urged that a sculpture of an open hand should stand at the edge of the city, in front of the Himalayas. The architect told the prime minister that “with the modern world flowering into limitless intellectual and material riches, the hand must be open to receive and to give.”15 Nehru’s serious expression was transformed into a gentle smile, and the two left
the office together in a spirit of complete rapport, the prime minister en route to his colleagues’ funeral.
Le Corbusier was certain that he had touched Nehru. He may have been delusional, but to an unprecedented extent he believed himself completely understood and welcome in the halls of power. At last, Le Corbusier had found a world leader who—unlike Mussolini, Stalin, Pétain, the heads of the League of Nations and the United Nations, and the president of Bolivia—had hired him to do the job.
6
Le Corbusier returned to Paris on Thursday, December 6. The following Tuesday, he was on-site in Marseille. The crew was already at the point of working on the roof lighting. The mock-up of that illumination was, he wrote his mother, “a great song”—remarkably like the lights that were to flood the night sky over the Cour Carrée du Louvre fourteen years later.16
One of the purposes of his trip was to determine the illumination at the entrance level. He reported to his mother that, underneath the pilotis, “the lighting was ‘rarefied.’ I say rarefied because everything here requires, demands of us a deeper search: the structure is becoming magnificent, the roof is an acropolis. All this amid struggles. But also amid the sympathy of the workmen and the foremen.”17
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