Few architects stir passions as strongly as Le Corbusier. To his fans, he is
the genius whose ideas shaped a vision of 20th-century urban living, the
creator of countless masterpieces, among them the chapel in Ronchamp,
eastern France, whose roof was inspired by a crab shell he picked up on the
beach in Long Island. To others he is the deluded inspiration behind a
million charmless tower blocks, shopping centres and multistorey car parks.
The grim housing projects that ring most French cities sprang from his
ideas, and, as a result, some have pinned blame on him for the rioting and
looting that erupted in France’s suburbs in 2005.
As a man, though, he has remained something of an enigma – until recently. He
zealously guarded his privacy. But the opening of an archive in Paris and
the publication of a new book have shed light on the loves and lusts of
“Corbu”, as he was known to friends, stirring an unusual debate among
academics about his erotic energy and the extent to which it may have been
expressed in his architecture. As the ramparts have crumbled around his
private life, his extraordinarily close relationship with his mother – he
wrote to her each week for decades until her death in 1960 – has also come
under close scrutiny by those trying to determine what drove him. So has his
friendship with Josephine Baker, the dancer – and, as Ernest Hemingway would
have it, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw” – whom he met on an
ocean liner in 1929. “What is emerging is the human side of Corbusier,” says
Tim Benton, professor of art history at the Open University. Benton wrote
the chapter introductions in a gigantic tome about to be published by
Phaidon that includes hundreds of Le Corbusier drawings and letters, many
hitherto unpublished. “He was an architect, of course,” says Benton, “but he
was also a man.”
On his passport he listed his occupation as homme de lettres, but the private
papers reveal a side to the architect far removed from the ascetic, cerebral
image he cultivated with his trademark round black-rimmed spectacles and bow
tie. Not only did he conduct a series of affairs while he was married to
Yvonne Gallis, a fashion model. He also frequented Parisian brothels, taking
evident delight in sketching voluptuous women pleasuring each other. “I
paint filth,” he wrote in his notebook at the time. “My women are bestially
lascivious, prurient, in heat.”
He is sometimes dismissed as being “a terrible groper”, Benton says, “and a
misogynist who just wanted to have sex with women. But what he wanted was
what he called ‘tenderness’. He thought he could be more relaxed and warm
with women. He was much more sensitive to women and had a very feminine
side”.
Publication of the treasure trove held by the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris
has been eagerly awaited: Frank Lloyd Wright, that other 20th-century titan
of architecture, wrote a colourful autobiography, but there has never been a
trustworthy life of Le Corbusier. Four decades after his death, interest is
growing. Next year the architect’s entire oeuvre – including buildings in
India, Argentina, Italy, Belgium, America and France – is likely to be
declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco, joining the Tower of London, the
banks of the Seine in Paris, and the lagoon and canals of Venice.
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in Switzerland in 1887, assuming the name
of Le Corbusier, which was derived from an ancestor called Lecorbésier, only
when he moved to Paris and began writing articles in a magazine he had set
up in 1920 to promote the ideals of “purism”.
His father was an engraver of watch cases, and his mother a piano teacher.
Hopes of success had rested on the elder son, Albert, a composer, in a
family much taken with music but scarcely at all by the visual arts. The
architect was regarded as a no-hoper, particularly when he built a house for
his parents in Switzerland that was so expensive to run, they were obliged
to sell it and move.
“He was considered a failure in his early years,” said Jean-Louis Cohen, a
professor of architecture who wrote the introduction to the Phaidon book.
Later, he “constantly exaggerated what he had achieved, perhaps so that his
mother would finally love him as much as he wanted”.
“The level of intimacy and intense exhibitionism of the letters to his mother
in which he explains his successes and triumphs is extraordinary,” Cohen
said. “It went on until he was 73, when she died in her hundredth year.” In
1926, Le Corbusier wrote to his “dear little mum”, as he always addressed
her, about the triumph of the inauguration of his housing project in Pessac,
southwest France, describing a film in which her “great, awkward boy of an
architect was portrayed in all his aspects”. In a later letter, he
congratulated himself on his relationship with this “honest girl”, as he
called his wife, who was “taking on the generous task of being the companion
of a man who has fads”.
In May 1927 he sent his mother a letter with a sketch of a design he had made
for his father’s grave, which included containers for flowers. “Don’t be
shocked, as you usually are, by its possibly unusual appearance,” he wrote.
“In the middle part… is a big square to be packed tight with tall geraniums.
In other places… I’ve set aside pockets of earth in which you’ll plant here
a little yellow or white poppy, there an alpine pansy, there a primula or
any little plant or moss, modest and timid, any charming little flower dad
liked.”
By then, having survived the bankruptcy of his building-materials business in
1923, Le Corbusier had succeeded in establishing himself as an architect.
His business partner was Pierre Jeanneret, a cousin. He cut a strange figure
in those days, judging by the recollection of Fernand Léger, the painter,
who became a friend.Léger says he saw Le Corbusier approach “bolt upright,
an extraordinary mobile object in a bowler hat, with glasses and a black
overcoat. The object was riding a bicycle, scrupulously obeying the laws of
perspective”.
Le Corbusier’s favourite buildings were simple fishermen’s huts on the coast
of southwestern France: the so-called Man of the Future he wrote about was
depressed by traditional houses with pitched roofs and dining rooms with
fancy chandeliers. As a bedroom he favoured something like a monk’s cell.
The white-walled villas that he built according to his “purist” principles may
have been the height of modernity in the early 1930s but do not appear to
have been very comfortable, judging from the complaints of their
occupants.Pierre Savoye, who commissioned the Villa Savoye, wrote in 1930
that “the rain makes an infernal racket on the window above my wash bowl
which stops us from sleeping in bad weather”. Six years later, little had
changed: “There are still leaks in my bathroom, which floods every time it
rains: the water comes in through the ceiling window. The gardener’s walls
are soaked too. I would really like all this to be sorted out.”
Similarly, his design for Roal La Roche, a banker and art collector, seems to
have neglected the need for proper lighting. On a recent tour of the Villa
La Roche, Tim Benton said: “Bare light bulbs are all Le Corbusier could
manage in this house. La Roche complained about it bitterly.”
Le Corbusier had bigger things on his mind, not least a bizarre scheme to
knock down much of the right bank of Paris and replace it with giant tower
blocks. Fortunately for Paris, this was dismissed as lunacy, but Le
Corbusier was baffled and frustrated by the opposition to his “rational”,
“advanced” ideas for rebuilding the City of Light.
He took to trying to impose his vision on other parts of the world. He would
turn up in foreign cities with an instant plan for improving them, a habit
described in the New York Herald Tribune on October 22, 1935. “Skyscrapers
Not Big Enough, Says Le Corbusier” was the headline. “French Architect, Here
to Preach His Vision of ‘Town of Happy Light’, Thinks They Should Be Huge
and a Lot Farther Apart”.The Argentinians were easier to impress. In a
letter to his mother from Buenos Aires in 1929 he talked about being
“welcomed only by the top brass”. “Here one is respected,” he said. “And
you’re listened to.” The Americans, by contrast, were “utterly backward” in
architecture.
From Buenos Aires he sailed to Rio, and on the ship met Josephine Baker, who
would be a muse for a host of contemporaries, from Pablo Picasso to
Christian Dior. A sketch by Le Corbusier of Baker asleep has been taken as
evidence of a romance, but Benton and Cohen are sceptical. “There is no
proof of it,” says Benton. “And in one passage Le Corbusier makes clear that
when he was sketching Baker, her manager also was in the cabin.”
Le Corbusier is certainly effusive about Baker when he writes to his mother
about the meeting: “Josephine is extraordinarily modest and natural. Pure
good-heartedness, like a kid from a Creole village. Not an atom of vanity,
or posing.”
When he writes to Baker years later, however, he brings up his disappointment:
“I have melancholy feelings because you dropped me so resoundingly,” he
wrote in 1935; “… it grieves me not to be your architect.”
He is greatly cheered by a Christmas card from Baker that year and, in a
letter in January 1936, laments that their paths did not cross the year
before in New York.
In fact, Le Corbusier would not have had much time for Baker in New York in
1935. He was already conducting an affair with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a
Swedish-American heiress and divorcee, which explains why he kept putting
off his return to Paris. “Everything was beautiful and fine and right, and
fitting and loving,” he wrote to Tjader Harris as he finally left in
December. “… Let us imagine, instead of the cold, the heat of the summer or
the warmth of spring. And the gentle sea, the water so close and quickly
deep. Nights in the water and on the sand. Lovemaking. Honest joy and tender
gestures.”
The relationship was to go on for years, mainly by letter. “It wasn’t so much
the sex for him,” said Benton. “He talked about tenderness.”
He made no effort to conceal other affairs from Tjader Harris, writing in 1949
to ask her to arrange a dinner for “The New York women from my 1946-7 years,
to wit… Helena, Barbara and perhaps, if the others will agree, Mitzi the
sculptress (up to you)…” In a sketchbook he wrote: “A gigolo like me (63
years old) doesn’t exist in the USA (or hardly)!!!” The Helena referred to
in his letter is Helena Simkhovitch, the artist. He writes to her from
Bogota in February 1950, referring to “that telephone call, timely and full
of such exquisite friendship” and adding: “I’ll be in New York on the
morning of Thursday, March 9, and free from 3pm. Will I see you?”
A letter in July refers to one of their trysts. It includes a sketch of a
lighthouse and the words “Technical incident delayed our broadcast; please
accept our apologies”. Benton believes that “broadcast” is a reference to
ejaculation, since the French word, émission, carries a double meaning.
Another woman who entranced him was Taya Zinkin, a journalist. According to
Charles Jencks, author of a book on Le Corbusier, he told her: “You are fat
and I like my women fat. We could have spent a pleasant night together.”
Jencks believes Le Corbusier’s drawings of voluptuous nudes explain a change
in his style in the 1930s and ’40s. His architecture began to reflect “the
meander of rivers and the fat thighs of women”.
For Benton, Le Corbusier’s sensual side is reflected more in his painting,
particularly after his marriage. It was also reflected in his penchant, when
younger, for occasionally dressing in drag. “I don’t think he was a
transsexual,” says Benton. “But he recognised in himself aspects of
personality which took a feminine form.”
It is not known how much Yvonne knew of her husband’s philandering. On the
surface their relationship appeared perfectly happy, even if at times he
seemed more in tune with his mother. Even when he was seeing other women, Le
Corbusier kept up a correspondence with his wife, calling her his “little
Vonvon”. He ends one letter to her saying: “Hey, my little Vonvon baby, big
kisses from your sweetie!”
In 1934 the childless couple moved with Pinceau, their schnauzer, into a flat
on the top floor of a building Le Corbusier had designed on the edge of
Paris. Initially, Yvonne did not like it and, in a letter to his mother on
May 28, the architect compares her affectionately to a cat and a donkey:
“After grumbling, Yvonne went round and round in her new box and now she’s
purring,” he wrote; “… broom in hand and polishing endlessly, she’s running
her house with the jubilation of a conqueror. She won’t say so, because
she’s as obstinate as a little donkey…”
He was apart from Yvonne for long stretches, such as when he and his cousin
Pierre went to India to design much of the city of Chandigarh in the late
1940s. There he met Minnette de Silva, a Ceylonese architect in her
twenties, with whom he is said to have had an affair for years.
“Dear Corbu,” writes de Silva in 1955. “I very much hope to visit Chandigarh
in February – the latter part – and you? Will you be there too at the same
time? Afterwards, maybe, Ceylon for a few days? Write to me soon, Corbu.”
To his mother, years before, he had justified his travels as a way to make
money. “If I put up with this wandering life, it’s because I think maybe
I’ll get the money to make life easier for those around me, for my family
who haven’t had the same chance to make ‘big money’,” he wrote.
When the second world war broke out, Pierre went off to join the Resistance.
Le Corbusier, who had offered his services to Mussolini’s fascist government
in Italy, spent 18 months trying to curry favour with the Vichy regime,
hoping to become involved in post-war reconstruction projects. It was not
the most glorious part of his career. “I gave your offer of collaboration
the greatest attention,” the French minister of munitions wrote in 1942. “At
the moment, we are limiting ourselves to industrial buildings already
designed in peacetime.” After the allies liberated Paris, Le Corbusier tried
to make it appear as if he had taken part in the Resistance.
A distinguishing feature of Le Corbusier’s life is the sheer volume of his
output. Besides creating more than 60 buildings in different countries – a
fraction of the 500 projects he designed – he wrote 34 books and even
designed furniture to convey the excitement and glamour of the modern,
technological world. Students of his output have wondered how he fitted it
all in. The truth, says Cohen, is that Pierre, the “heart and soul” of the
architectural studio between 1922 and 1940, did a lot of the heavy lifting.
This left Le Corbusier time for his extensive correspondence. No subject was
beneath his attention. He even had time to pester Philips on the subject of
televisions. “The luxury I’d like to offer myself,” he wrote to L C Kalff,
the company’s general art director, in 1957, not long after the invention of
the remote control, “is that my wife or I should be able to shut the
television up at will from the nuptial bed, or modify or intensify the
voices, etc, etc…”
When he died in 1965, while on his morning swim in the south of France, his
funeral was one of the first globally televised events. Admirers say that
his ideas, intended to make cities more human, are as relevant as ever, and
one of the greatest tributes paid to him was the completion in 2006, by one
of his pupils, of one of his final designs: a concrete church like a giant
ship’s funnel in Firminy, a small industrial town in the Massif Central. The
number of tourists to the town has been slowly increasing. The discovery of
Le Corbusier, it seems, has only just started.
Le Corbusier Le Grand, published by Phaidon Press (©2008 Phaidon Press
Limited, £100, www.phaidon.com )
is available at the BooksFirst price of £90, including delivery by courier
to the UK and Northern Ireland. Tel: 0870 165 8585
