Forty-four years after his death, Le Corbusier is still one of the world's
most famous architects. No other architect influenced the 20th and the 21st
centuries more. Look out over a city of towers, crisscrossed by motorways
coursing with cars, and you're looking across a landscape invented in Le
Corbusier's imagination. Every open-plan living-cum-dining room in the land
came from Le Corbusier. If you look about you and see concrete, Le
Corbusier, again, did more than any other architect to make the grey sludge
ubiquitous in modern life. He chucked out the chintz of the old world of his
Victorian parents, with its tassles and curlicues, and ushered in the spare,
untwiddly, minimalist look of the modern world. He was a polymath who
designed hospitals and motorways in the morning, painted Picasso-esque
canvases in the afternoon, sculpted in the evening, and replanned Rio de
Janeiro with his cocoa before he went to bed. And he invented modern life as
we today live it. On Thursday the Barbican Centre - perhaps the most
faithful facsimile of his style that we have in the UK (we possess no
originals) - opens a huge exhibition devoted to this most influential, and
divisive of architects.
Le Corbusier's work inspires extremes of emotion. To many he is architecture's
bogeyman. He was every inch the architect of stereotype - male, of course,
with a bow tie, round thick-rimmed specs and an air of superciliousness. He
wrote thundering manifestos packed with exclamation marks and provocations.
He had a gun-for-hire approach to politics - any client would do, so long as
he got the job. But it is his buildings that exercise his critics most.
When, in the DayGlo Post-Modernist Seventies and Eighties, Le Corbusier's
reputation entered its posthumous dark ages, he was not just considered old
hat, but also dangerous, indiscriminately being blamed by neo-conservatives
for every ill known to Man, from sledgehammer urban redevelopment to the
decline of Western society as we know it. He called a house a machine for
living in - they said that that made him inhuman, a robot.
To others, though, Le Corbusier has always been the messiah, a genius. Le
Corbusier brought architecture kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
And devotion to his work, once restricted to architecture nerds, is
accelerating. So many visitors now throng to his masterwork, the church of
Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, that Renzo Piano is building a
controversial new convent for the nuns to move into and to shush the
snapping hordes into reverent awe. To this day, though, despite hatchets
being buried between detractors and devotees, and a more mature, less
emotional reassessment of his work by a younger generation schooled in
neither slavish love for the man nor rabid reaction, the twain seem doomed
never to meet.
In 1887, Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in the Jura
mountains in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, close to the French border. His
home town is a centre of Swiss clockmaking. He even did a little
apprenticing in the trade. People look at the town's rigorous grid plan and
wonder if the place made the man. They think of Calvinism, Puritanism,
rationality. And, it's true, the town and the man were, often, but not
always, rigorous, haughty, neat and anally retentive. Even his earliest
buildings there, such as the Villa Schwob, built during the First World War,
though comparatively traditional, with nods to Art Nouveau, are neat,
stripped of decoration. This is the image that Le Corbusier created for
himself, during a self-styled reinvention that he underwent as he was
completing Schwob. At the same time he came up with Dom-Ino, a system of
building. Like Ford's Model T, he could mechanically reproduce on a massive
scale modern architecture out of a simple language of slabs and columns; it
would revolutionise thinking about architecture in the 20th century. Soon
after he relaunched himself - as Le Corbusier.
No one knows exactly why Jeanneret adopted a pseudonym, or where it came from.
It seems possible that it was partly borrowed from a distant relative - a
Lecorbesier, but most likely it referenced “corbeau”, French for crow,
though why is unclear. But what matters more is that he adopted a pseudonym
at all. Corb, Le Corbu, Le Corbusier - he styled himself in what we'd call
now a brand. He even used a sketch of a crow as a sort of logo. He was to be
a one-man force in architecture. A loner, he slightly revelled in his
messianic status, loved and reviled. He was, with Frank Lloyd Wright, a
self-styled “starchitect”, and he set about making war on his age using
publicity. Corbusier was a master of PR. He wrote nearly 60 books and
essays, which alone would have gained him a place in history - brilliantly
written and illustrated with modern techniques such as montage, which
juxtaposed the mean, dirty, cramped old world beside the bright, clean
modern world that he would usher forth.
It was this influence, though, this PR, that was in part the problem. By
spreading his influence and ideas indiscriminately around the world to be
put into practice by architects who often lacked the skill of the master,
and for clients - city authorities, developers - who were more attached to
the bottom line than his own humane ideals for space, light and order, Le
Corbusier's high hopes were easily corrupted into those filing cabinets for
human beings that have garnered him such a bad reputation.
He was wrong about many things - particularly, and damningly, about human
nature, and the ability of the world to stick to his perfect standards. An
idealist, an artist, he had no understanding of greed. And his architectural
recipe, when mass-produced, as he wished, but without the quality or the
precise ingredients, easily transformed into the polar opposite of his
intentions: dystopia, not Utopia. His optimistic ideas about social
organisation - that precise balance of public and private life, tinged with
a spot of very Swiss syndicalism - were hopelessly naive. His politics, far
from the communism of which he was, in his early days, accused, dabbled with
slightly dodgy Nietzschian fascism - the strong hand. And the architecture
that he called for to be replicated around the world looked significantly
more alluring in the bleached sun of the Côte d'Azur than under the leaden
skies of Glasgow.
Yet he was right about so many things too. That desire for efficiency and
rationalism is more understandable when you realise, as he did, that most of
the world lived in, and still lives in, appalling conditions. That rabid
polemic to get his message out there is more understandable when you
consider the basic conservatism and frou-frouness of the Establishment. His
call for the “essentials” of life - “sun, space and greenery” - to be made
standard for all, not a luxury for a few, marks him out as a humanist as
much as a fascist. Even his mostly dreadful ideas about planning and the
dominance of the car, while to some unpalatable (the writer Lewis Mumford
sniffed that he had “warped ... a whole generation” with “sterile goals”),
were at least strikingly prescient. Take a look at Dubai, Shanghai and the
suburbs of every town in the West.
The image that he constructed of himself was essentially only half the story.
Beneath the ascetic agent provocateur he always was a more complex man and
architect. Le Corbusier was both bogeyman and messiah. When he was bad he
was very, very bad, given to tyrannical provocation - flatten central Paris!
But when he was good - most of the time - he was great, a dynamic generator
of ideas and architecture both movingly original yet glaringly obvious, the
mark of true genius. He was a rationalist but also a sensualist. Though
devoted to his wife, Yvonne - a model without the slightest interest in
intellectual theories and little love for the asceticism of her husband's
work - he was a serial adulterer - de rigueur, perhaps, among the beau monde
of Paris - most famously, it is said, with the jazz legend Josephine Baker.
He wanted to wipe away the past, yet his architecture is soaked through with
references to history, from the Ancient Greeks to Byzantine vaulting. And
this work, far from the rigid, white, monastic stuff of legend, constantly
changed. Le Corbusier continually reinvented himself. It's impossible to
lump together his geometrically rigid and “purist” early work, stripped of
decoration, with his wilfully, almost decoratively rough-walled, “primitive”
middle period that gave birth to Brutalism, and the sensual curves of his
late work, such as Ronchamp. “Je suis un acrobate de la forme,” he wrote.
Most puzzling of all, I think, is one peculiar obsession. Although, an
architectural celebrity, he was drawn, pettily, to attack virulently - and
in 1938 even vandalise with graffiti - the house called E-1027 built by the
Irish Modernist Eileen Gray. He even built his own retreat next door, his
famous Cabanon, which you can see re-created next month in the Royal
Institute of British Architects. “A kind of watchdog,” Gray called it. In
1965 he died of a heart attack in the sea right outside it. Was this
jealousy? Or because of its sensual, feminine approach to Modernism - “A
house is not a ‘machine to live in',” Gray wrote, pointedly. It remains one
of the most peculiar, unresolved incidents in architectural history.
In the end, though, there is the work: 50 or so completed buildings around the
world. That is what we should judge him on, not his reputation, not his PR.
His work was always nothing less than revolutionary, whether one-off
intellectual tours de force such Villa Savoye (1929), in the wealthier
banlieues of Paris, its ground-floor curves built around the turning circle
of a commuter's car; or the garden city in the sky, Unité d'Habitation
(1952) in Marseilles, that gave birth to the tower block, though rendered
here, with gardens, crèche and rooftop gym, as the humane face of future
cities that he intended it to be; or Ronchamp (1955) - to me, his
masterpiece, its warped planes, pillowy shapes and effortless interlocking
of the abstract, “primitive” shapes that Le Corbusier hoped, like Picasso,
like the Ancient Greeks, would evoke some archetypical, primeval response in
the human mind and lift the material into the spiritual. Indeed, to see, so
fresh, in the flesh, Le Corbusier's work is to be reminded not of Corb the
tyrant, the flattener of cities, but Corb the humanist, the man who wanted
architecture to house us with dignity, then move the soul.
Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture, Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638
8891) Thursday-May 24; The Interior of the Cabanon, RIBA, London W1
(020-7580 5533), March 5 to April 28
