Architecture: The Revolutionary

Sitting outside the famed Rotonde café in Montparnasse in 1921, the late Abstract Painter Fernand Léger spied what he described as “an extraordinary mobile object” bicycling alone, dressed in clergyman’s black and a derby hat. Wrote the painter: “He advanced quietly, scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective.” It was Le Corbusier.

Léger later had good cause to recall this first meeting with the angular man in black, who died last week of a heart attack at 77. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret to a family of Swiss watchmakers, Le Corbusier adopted one of his mother’s family names as an artistic signature and set out to become an architect and painter. He embraced the cult of purism, an art style so puritani cal that it purged even the strict geometries of cubism of any traces of anecdote or decoration. And he became a student of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of building with reinforced concrete. Two years after meeting Léger, Le Corbusier turned out a slim, cocksure manifesto entitled Towards a New Architecture — as though he had decided to do away with all architecture that had gone before. The manifesto was as revolutionary as its basic dictum: “A house is a machine for living in.”

Cities on Stilts. It was a dictum much misunderstood. Le Corbusier loved the machine not for its function but for its economy of form. He preferred American grain elevators to Gothic cathedrals, but only because they were trim manifestations of a man-made world long removed from the saintly preoccupations of the medieval age. He ridiculed the beaux-arts esthetic that caused designers to disguise railway stations as Roman temples and believed that art nouveau’s attempt to doll up houses with plantlike curlicues was a sham.

This belief changed man’s walls. In fact, at first Le Corbusier eliminated walls. His Domino house schema used floors like open terraces connected by cantilevered stairs and supported by interior columns. No longer load-bearing, walls could become curtains of glass; interior partitions could fall where whim or esthetics wanted them. Said Léger: “Corbusier made us a present of the white wall”—the perfect neutral setting for art. He hung stairs outside to leave interiors uncluttered. He lifted buildings on stilts, or pilotis, to free pedestrian space underneath, then doubled the available ground plan by building sheltered gardens on the roofs.

Battlements on the Plain. “Corbu” tackled city planning before anyone dreamed that cities should or could be planned. He designed elevated freeways to make downtowns more accessible when Los Angeles was still getting used to stop lights. He envisaged cities with skyscrapers set in green spaces. He developed the original slab building that inspired the 1952 United Nations Secretariat but gave it character by breaking façades with what he called brise-soleils or deeply set sun-shaded windows.

The shock of his innovations bred rebellion and outrage. Nevertheless he got commissions. His 1952 Unité d’Habitation in Marseille lifted 337 apartments on stilts to give them a view of the Alps. On its surface of rough poured concrete, the marks of wooden forms remained like a touch of man’s hand—a touch that so many modern glass-and-steel structures lack. At Chandigarh, the new governmental seat of the state of Punjab in India, Corbu set about making battlements on a plain. Rendering to God as well as man, he designed a chapel at Ronchamp, France, with a roof shaped like a nun’s coif (the shape also helps to project a preacher’s voice). His only U.S. building is at Harvard, a Visual Arts Center perched on pilotis, with a wing shaped like the body of a guitar. His last project was a design for an $11 million hospital that would fly on stilts over the lagoons of Venice.

Although Corbu became the most influential, and possibly the most irritable architect of the 20th century (TIME cover, May 5, 1961), he could only bear the friendship of down-to-earth people, such as his Monaco-born wife Yvonne Gallis, who died in 1957, and the Sardinian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola, for whose Long Island house he did murals. Mainly, he took refuge in solitude. For the past 15 years he summered in seclusion at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin-on the French Riviera. There he avoided autograph hunters in a 6-ft. by 15-ft. two-room cabin with a corrugated iron roof. Every day he sketched and exercised. Last week, while taking his twice-daily swim, he was seized by a heart attack and died before anyone could reach him.