It has been reported that when the senate first tried to assemble in Le Corbusier’s new building, logical debate and productive communication were impossible. The architecture was too distracting, the effect on everyone’s mood too tumultuous. That disturbance is understandable. But once the politicians became habituated to the stimulus, dialogue flourished. Just as Le Corbusier had dreamed, a generosity of space, a spirit and energy in the physical surroundings, and a charge of visual rhythm were salubrious, infusing human beings with energy and opening their souls.
ARE WE INSIDE a vast human heart, having entered through an aorta into its throbbing chambers? This space, unlike any that has been made before, inscribed with unique forms, represents an apogee of imagination and courage. Standing at ground level with that whirlwind of shapes above us, we have no doubt that great art is at the edge of madness. The sheer unabashed courage evident in this hall, its Wagnerian emotionalism, the will to do what no one has ever done before are both wonderful and terrifying.
For all of his defeats and bitterness, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had never lost an iota of his youthful intensity. Here, encouraged and supported by Nehru, welcomed by a culture completely different from his own, he expressed all of his rapture. He gave from the same depths with which he responded. Now that he could let loose, everything flowed in a torrent, cacophonous yet coherent.
Le Corbusier managed, on his own, what few people would dare to consider: the expression of psychological complexity in tandem with the logic, precision, and practicality of the sharpest engineer. He found the means to construct a sound and functional being that represents havoc and clarity at the same time. He showed unstinting generosity in making happen for others everything that occurred inside his own fabulous imagination. No wonder the architect was so often arrogant or impatient. How could someone of such breadth be expected to tolerate academic stodginess, bureaucratic obstacles to life, bourgeois timidity?
Speaking of Le Corbusier’s Assembly, the architect Louis Kahn remarked to Balkrishna Doshi, “I have never met a man in my whole life who can freeze his decams.”5 That invented term suggested the power of a rotating cam multiplied by ten. To harness, encapsulate, and generate force was the miracle of this building.
3
Le Corbusier’s enormous office building—the Palace of the Ministries, known generally as the Secretariat—opened in Chandigarh in 1958, five years after Nehru had laid its foundation stone. Initially, the architect had hoped to make it a true skyscraper. The prototype was a structure he had designed for Algiers in 1942, which had not gone beyond the drawing board. That form had in turn led to the ideal secretariat he had designed for the United Nations, which had been kidnapped and disfigured. Le Corbusier hoped that Chandigarh would at last afford him the opportunity to realize his dream.
It was not to be. The engineers and Indian architects on-site told the architect that there was no local concrete strong enough to bear the vertical load of a skyscraper. So Le Corbusier simply turned the form on its side as a great horizontal slab. When the necessity for compromise had technical reasons, rather than being the result of human ignorance, no one could be more accommodating.
Again, one should not picture the building as it appears in many photos: as a purely aesthetic object gently doubled in size by its own reflection in the pond in front of it. The experience of the Secretariat is, rather, quite unsettling. To enter, one has to go through security checkpoints, facing a plethora of machine guns and rifles. Soldiers spit and belch while rejecting the credentials of most would-be visitors. And if photos suggest an orderly appearance to the grid of the facade, in actuality, up close, what is contained in that rectangular block is a frenzy of forms.
Yet there is a system to the madness; the surface and structure of this office building intended to serve three thousand employees is based on the Modulor. Issues of climate and sunlight are addressed by deep brises-soleil to provide shade, floor-to-ceiling window glass to permit maximum light, and narrow metal “aerators” with copper mosquito screens. The facade has rhythmic regularity, like the beat of the metronome atop his mother’s piano. It also depends on the mastery of materials and craft essential to his father’s livelihood, as well as the responsiveness to the sun and direct confrontation with the sky that marked the Sunday outings that were such a feature of family life.
In front of the Secretariat and the High Court in Chandigarh in March 1958. Photo by Pierre Jeanneret
Balkrishna Doshi was witness to the process whereby Le Corbusier came up with the design of this building front. Initially, he had designed the Secretariat to have balconies that stretched across the entire facade. But these long spans were so heavy that they needed to be cantilevered and required supporting elements that were not part of the plan. The contractors and site architects could not figure out how to conceal the necessary armature. Doshi reports, “Everyone wondered where the solution lay, and a lot of work was put in. One fine morning Corbusier arrived at the site, took a look at what was happening and said, ‘No, no, no, not like that. Let the columns go straight down breaking the sun breakers. Don’t make changes in design. Just let them go through.’”6 As is often the case with easy solutions to complex problems, no one else had thought of this idea of keeping the armature visible.
These bold, continuous columns on the exterior of the building, blatantly there to provide support, had, Doshi observed, an aesthetic consequence as well: “The sun breakers changed and a totally new pattern emerged, most interesting and very beautiful because you never anticipated the strange rhythm that would occur. Le Corbusier was always able to give us the unexpected. In his desire to be formal he got into difficult situations in which there was no alternative but to land in a mess. But like an acrobat, he always managed to emerge unscathed.”7
Le Corbusier spoke about what he had done with the building’s circulation system in his most straightforward language: “The two large ramps in front of and behind the building, connected to each floor, are also made of raw concrete. They provide the three thousand employees an attractive means of circulation (morning and evening). The mechanical vertical means is provided by banks of elevators, in addition to a double staircase set in a vertical spine rising from the ground floor to the top of the structure.”8
Depending on whether employees arrived by foot, on their bicycles, or by bus, they approached the Secretariat from either the Boulevard of the Waters or the Valley of Leisure Activities. Amusing vestiges of his early romanticism, the terms reflect Le Corbusier’s attempts at poetry, which might have better suited a retirement community. In spite of those calm descriptives and the ordering role of the Modulor, the building itself is intensely animated. Both the southeast facade reflected in the water and the northeast side, which one approaches from the large area of land defined also by the High Court and the assembly, are highly charged.
Each facade is an amalgam of solid and void, of closed and open shapes. There are even more ins and outs and unexpected twists and turns than the Perret brothers’ building at 25 bis rue Franklin had had. These facades are completely asymmetrical, each as impossible to absorb or understand in full detail as the workings of a human mind, conjuring Kandinsky’s statement, “There is always an ‘and.’”9
4
The roof of the Secretariat is even livelier. The forms that rise out of the flat terrace atop the building resemble plants growing out of the sea bottom. Perhaps Le Corbusier was indirectly influenced by what he saw when he was swimming in shallow water along the Mediterranean coast. Or maybe, like the cloudlike reliefs floating around the ceiling of the Assembly, these organic shapes are simply the product of the architect’s imagination. Whatever the source, a Corbusean playground of forms teeters on madness. Antonio Gaudí’s Casa Milà and Church of the Sagrada Familia are among the few architectural equivalents to this multidimensional free-for-all.
As on the roof of l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, on top of the Secretariat Le Corbusier has put you under the
hot sun, facing the mountains in one direction and flatness in the other. When you look from that roof in the direction of the General Assembly and the High Court, you see an architectural landscape unlike any other on this earth. But, oddly enough, the High Court, so thunderous up close, from here reads as a series of graceful arches, a bit like the calm and orderly facade of the first Renaissance building, Brunelleschi’s Hospital of the Innocents in Florence. The High Court is not governed by the same precise system of equals as the Brunelleschi, but a harmony and a sense of measure and logic prevail, thanks in part to the Modulor. With Le Corbusier, however, where there is order, there is also madness. You are surrounded by a lush frenzy on this eagle’s nest, and you face the assembly’s extraordinary tower—as well as the completely unusual monument to the Open Hand. One understands why Doshi was so struck by the architect as a man of counterbalances.
Today, on top of the Secretariat you might find tents or colorfully dressed bakers frying pastry balls. It is a floating village—like the roof at Marseille with its nursery school and playground, a place to be used, a gathering point where people can breathe good air. As always, Le Corbusier’s architectural machine accommodates endlessly varied living.
BALKRISHNA DOSHI does not dissemble about the flaws and shortcomings of the Secretariat: “Everyone knows of course that the Secretariat fails, fails totally, as an office building. It doesn’t take into consideration the requirements of an Indian office…. The people involved were over-awed by the fact that he was a genius and also a foreigner and therefore thought that nothing could go wrong; they were hesitant to discuss functional issues with him. He didn’t ask, they didn’t question, so the blame lies with both. Indians are generally too subservient to foreigners.”10
Charles Correa, another architect who built in India, points out other inherent problems, putting a very different slant on Le Corbusier’s beloved brises-soleil: “they are really great dust-catching, pigeon-infested contrivances, which gather heat all day and then radiate it back into the building at night, causing indescribable anguish to the occupants. They are not nearly as useful as old-fashioned verandahs, which are far cheaper to build, protect the building during the day, cool off quickly in the evenings, and, furthermore, double as circulation system. Neither have the great parasol roofs (as in the High Court) proved much more useful. Was LC perhaps more concerned with the visual expression of climate control than with its actual effectiveness? In any event, his enthusiasm seemed to lie not in solving the problem but in making the theatrical gesture—assuming the heroic pose—of addressing it.”11
To the architect Paul Rudolph, on the other hand, the Secretariat was an aesthetic wonder, whatever its flaws: “In every way it opposes the mountains; the angled stair way, the ramp on the roof…all these angles are obviously and carefully conceived to oppose the receding angles of the land masses.”12
Finally, there was the evaluation of Nehru: “It doesn’t really matter whether you like Chandigarh or whether you don’t like it. The fact of the matter is simply this: it had changed your lives.”13
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The Governor’s Palace was never built, and the Open Hand rose only later, but most of Le Corbusier’s buildings, as well as his overall scheme for Chandigarh, had come into being as he intended. In March 1959, Prime Minister Nehru declared, “I have welcomed very greatly one experiment in India, Chandigarh. Many people argue about it, some like it, and some dislike it…. It hits you on the head, and makes you think. You may squirm at the impact but it has made you think and imbibe new ideas, and the one thing which India requires in many fields is being hit on the head so that it may think…. There is no doubt that Le Corbusier is a man with a powerful and creative type of mind. For that reason, he may produce extravagances occasionally but it is better to be extravagant than to be a person with no mind at all.”14 Because Nehru considered the architect a demigod in his lifetime, appreciating and supporting his creativity—even if he did not construct the Open Hand—Le Corbusier had blossomed and made some of his finest architecture.
Almost everyone living in Chandigarh says the same sort of thing: “It is the best organized city in India.” “The nicest city to live in.” “We have family in Delhi, but could only live here.” “Things are near to each other and easy to find.”15 Its residents are glad to be there, and if outsiders see it as a down-at-the-heels, polluted, unkempt metropolis, Chandigarh still beckons with some of the most exhilarating buildings on earth.
LII
Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.
—LE CORBUSIER AS PARAPHRASED BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 1
1
In his chapel at Ronchamp, Le Corbusier transformed rough concrete into an expression of bounteous hope. He made stone seem weightless and captured pure light as if it had mass.
Ca. 1950
When the idea for this hilltop chapel first made the miraculous leap from Le Corbusier’s brain to a hasty pen-and-ink rendition, it was an act of pure creation. One can identify the influences on Le Corbusier’s vision just as one might detail the genetic makeup of a newborn, but the conception of Ronchamp remains in a realm beyond total comprehension.
Le Corbusier had the vision in his very first sketches; only the means to realize it had to be found. His initial conception resembles an ancient megalith, an imaginary mix of dolmen and stone circle from the Bronze Age where so-called primitive people assembled and worshipped the forces of the universe. The finished building that opened a mere four years later on that hilltop in the Vosges remains faithful to that image, while it is at the same time a complex structure of uniquely modern form that looks as if it has descended from the heavens. From its earliest inception to its completion, Ronchamp belonged equally to the ancient mythic past and the unknown future.
2
The cathedral of Chartres had had the effect on me of the most terrible battle. Never say that the Gothic is serenity. It’s a poignant and gigantic struggle, and of the nine towers, only two rise up into the air of the hillside. Chartres is a life of deliberate forces and demoniac optimism, of clenched fists and clenched jaws.
—CHARLES-EDOUARD JEANNERET TO WILLIAM RITTER, 1917
The rural site where Le Corbusier built his masterpiece is in the hilly part of the Vosges region of southeastern France, adjacent to the Swiss Jura. It is 110 kilometers from La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a sparsely populated region of quiet, undulating hills.
“Ronchamp” comes from the Latin “Romanorum campus,” meaning Roman camp or field. The town, at the base of the steep hill, was near an old Roman road. A pagan temple, said to be for the worship of the sun, had been erected there. According to some sources, in the fourth century A.D. a church dedicated to the birth of the Virgin was built on the hilltop, while others date the first Christian church on the site to the twelfth century. By the thirteenth century, it began to attract pilgrims, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the ancient sanctuary was rebuilt in a form that combined an octagon and the Greek cross. In 1873, on September 8, the date on which the Virgin’s birth is celebrated, more than thirty thousand pilgrims from Alsace and Lorraine, their lives changed two years before by the Franco-Prussian war that had made their homeland part of the German empire, flocked to this corner of Franche-Comté to ask Our Lady for their deliverance.
In 1913, the church burned to the ground after being struck by lightning, and in 1924 a neo-Gothic structure was built around the ruins. The new structure was destroyed in 1944 when the German army bombed it during an attack on French soldiers gathered on the hilltop, just as France was being liberated.
In 1950, two officials from the Commission of Sacred Art from Besançon, where the regional government was located, asked Le Corbusier to build a new church where all these earlier structures had existed. The architect turned them down.
As with his spontaneous rebuff of his visitors from Chandigarh, there are various accounts of why Le Corbusier said no to that first a
pproach. Some claim that in his modesty the architect felt he was not ready for such an undertaking. Such humility, however, seems unlikely. Officially, Le Corbusier declared that what he would propose would be yet another source of controversy and would certainly be rejected. He was still smarting from the halt brought to his idea for the underground church at Sainte-Baume. Yet while he pretended to be unwilling, he would certainly have been miserably disappointed if his suitors had not continued their pursuit.
Canon Lucien Ledeur, one of the two officials, begged Le Corbusier to consider the beauty of the site. The distinguished clergyman issued an irresistible mandate: “You will be given free rein to create what you will.”2 Father Marie-Alain Couturier also implored him to consider it.
In mid-May 1950, shortly after saying no to the project, when Le Corbusier was on a train between Paris and Basel, he sketched the site and the rough form of the church ruin. He visited Ronchamp itself for the first time on June 4 and made further drawings in a little sketchbook as he sat on the hilltop for several hours. Canon Ledeur observed that the architect seemed to feel an immediate connection to the landscape as he studied the rolling hills and looked at the views of plains and distant peaks.
In 1951, walking through the ruins of the chapel that had been destroyed by German bombs seven years earlier, on the site of the future church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp
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