Art: Corbu

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In the year 1923 there appeared in Paris a little volume on architecture that seemed written almost entirely in italics and capitals. “There exists a new spirit,” it said. “A GREAT EPOCH HAS BEGUN.” Its title was sweeping: Towards an Architecture—as though existing architecture did not merit the term. The book was signed by a brilliant, owlish young man who called himself Le Corbusier.

Vain as he is, Le Corbusier himself would hardly claim to have invented modern architecture singlehanded, but his slim book and his later work to a large degree plotted its course. “Corbu’s” personality and buildings have at times angered, shocked, outraged and offended people, but by the overwhelming vote of his colleagues everywhere, he is at 73 the most influential architect alive.

Rules of the Sun. Last week he was in the U.S. for exactly three days—the maximum amount of time he could bring himself to spend in a land he has come to regard as enemy territory. His purpose was to receive at a banquet in Philadelphia the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects, and then pick up a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Columbia University. Before accepting, he had made one stipulation: “No press, no TV, no tuxedo.” But as things turned out, the master was charming.

From an opening luncheon given in Philadelphia by the Columbia alumni association, the A.I.A. got its first breathless bulletin on what to expect: “He seems to be in a good mood. He speaks English. He is on his second drink.” That afternoon he paused long enough to speak to a group of architectural students, whom he mesmerized. “I left Paris yesterday morning,” he announced. “It is now bedtime for me. Deja it is one o’clock in the morning. That is why I will be very brief.” He was brief for an hour, rapidly sketching on two large boards covered with white paper: “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and allows less room for lies.” His theme was one he has cherished for 40 years (“I have lost much hair in the meantime”)—the “essential joys of sun, space and greenery. Architecture must put men under the rules of the sun, and under the benefits of the sun.”

At the A.I.A. banquet, he received his medal with disarming modesty. “I make you my last confession,” he said. “I live in the skin of a student.” Then he was off to Manhattan for the ordeal at Columbia. He arrived on campus as sirens wailed for an air-raid drill. Students were all around bearing placards that said, “Shelters are no substitute for Peace!” He got into a coffin-sized elevator that promptly went down instead of up. “It’s like a setting for an assassination,” he muttered. But that night he was all smiles again. To a standing ovation he got his degree, and then headed back to Paris.

Grating but Great. All this bonhomie was rather surprising—but then, Le Corbusier is one of the most contradictory of men. He scoffs at honors but has spent a lifetime grumbling about the world’s neglect. To Manhattan Architect Philip Johnson, who acknowledges him professionally as “without question No. 1,” he is “obnoxious, mean, complaining, bitter and whining.” To his longtime friend. Architect Walter Gropius, he is “full of love; he cares. His wife died in 1957, and I met him in Baghdad soon after. When I walked into his hotel room, he burst into tears.” He is quite capable of firing almost everyone in his office to bring in new blood. But the loyalty he commands is enormous. Says one longtime associate: “There is nothing I wouldn’t take from him or do for him.”

Corbu’s career has been equally full of paradox. He has put up about 75 buildings (Frank Lloyd Wright built 500, Christopher Wren nearly 150). The French government has yet to commission him to design so much as a school or a hospital, and the first Le Corbusier building in the U.S.—a $1,500,000 Visual Arts Center at Harvard—is only now getting started. He began as the architectural prophet of the machine age, the poet of the mass-produced. Yet his recent buildings in India are in a sense almost handmade. He was all logic in his city planning, almost wholly geometric in his early houses; but his newer Ronchamp Chapel and the monastery of La Tourette are romantic sculptural explosions that seem to contradict everything he said before.

First of All: Art. Yet the contradictions are only apparent. His career and work are unified by one concern: to make dwellings and cities that are works of both reason and beauty. At times reason seems to give way to wild fantasy, and beauty seems to surrender to a certain harshness. But always in Corbu it is the ever-widening vision of the artist that leads and dominates the architect.

“This is a success story,” wrote Editor Reyner Banham of the British Architectural Review, “that will need Todd-AO, Dynamation, Warnercolor, Billy Wilder and a cast of millions to film, but there is one thing very odd about it. He has not gone on doing the same thing until the public has caught up. He has gone right on developing, never backtracking, rarely standing still, and quite suddenly he has met the public taste coming round the other way.”

Since he is painter, sculptor, writer, and a poet of sorts as well, his colleagues are apt to wax rhapsodic over him. “He is the Leonardo of our time,” says Michigan’s Eero Saarinen. “He has provided enough for a whole generation to live on,” says Walter Gropius. “The world’s greatest architect,” says Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer. Adds Arthur Drexler, director of the Department of Architecture and Design at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art: “I go through phases in my thoughts about his work. In these, I sit back and think Corbu is even greater than I thought he was.”

“Be a Genius.” The recipient of these accolades was born to the name of Charles Edouard Jeanneret in the dour Jura mountain village of La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a few miles from the French border. His parents were Protestants, descendants of the heretical Albigenses who took refuge in the town in the 13th and 14th centuries. His father, a stolid leader of the local Alpine Club, was an enameler of watch faces. His mother, who died last year at 100, trained her oldest son, Albert, to be a musician, and told Charles Edouard: “You will be a genius.”

He was a studious, awkward boy whose glasses were forever fogging up, so that on skis he was a menace to everyone around him. But his talent for sketching was obvious, and at 14 he was admitted to the local Ecole d’Art. There he fell under the spell of a “delightful teacher” named Charles L’Eplattenier, who was the idol of his pupils. L’Eplattenier would take them into the woods to draw, and say: “This is classic beauty. Learn every possible form of classic art—and forget it as quickly as possible in order to create something new.”

Washbasin Roof. By the age of 30, when Jeanneret was ready to leave La Chaux-de-Fonds for good (“The Swiss are cleanly and industrious and to hell with them”), he had put up a couple of chalets, an exotic dwelling of screaming yellows called the Turkish Villa, and a movie house with a bare concrete facade trimmed with blue mosaics. When the municipal authorities complained that his Turkish Villa did not go with its site, young Jeanneret retorted: “It is the setting that does not go with my house.” In his chalets he scornfully abandoned the traditional Swiss peaked roof (“All you achieve is that the snow comes crashing down in huge packs on unsuspecting pedestrians”), boldly invented a practical, washbasin roof of concrete warmed by the central heating of the building just enough to melt snow and let it run off.

Earlier, with knapsack on his back and a sketching pad in his pocket, he had traveled to Prague, through Serbia and Rumania, to Istanbul and Athens. He spent six weeks examining the Acropolis, and in his autobiography, in which he grandly refers to himself in the third person, he told what those six weeks meant. “The columns are still lying on the ground. Touching them with his fingers, caressing them, he grasps the proportions of the design. Amazement! Reality has nothing to do with books of instructions. Here everything was a shout of inspiration, a dance in the sunlight. Such was L-C’s school of architecture.”

Temples & Palazzi. For almost every other young architect at the time, about the only school that mattered was the Beaux Arts in Paris, which in the age of the machine was dutifully teaching the new generation how to put up Greek temples and Renaissance palazzi. But beyond the walls of the Beaux Arts, a few men were stirring restively. Among them was a gifted builder named Auguste Ferret, who was the first to prove convincingly how effective the plebeian material of reinforced concrete could be. Another was Architect Peter Behrens of Berlin, whose glass-and-steel industrial buildings were pioneers. Jeanneret worked for both. He found Ferret’s reinforced concrete studio in Paris, with its glassed front wall, “a manifesto” in itself, and harked to Ferret’s belief that “decoration always hides an error in construction.” At Behrens’ studio, Jeanneret was apprenticed with the self-effacing son of a poor masonry contractor in Aachen. His name: Mies van der Rohe, who is now the U.S. mas ter of the spare glass-and-steel skyscraper. At length Jeanneret opened an office in Paris “in a beastly little street, seventh floor, over a yard, in the servant’s room.”

“What Shall We Do?” One day in 1914, Jeanneret drew a skeletal plan for a two-story, prefabricated house of reinforced concrete that was so simple it might have been the design for a child’s toy. It consisted of six columns, three horizontal concrete slabs, a cantilevered staircase—and that was all. But the simple plan for the Domino house contained a principle that was to be basic to all of his planning thereafter. The six-column skeleton relieved the facades and the interior walls of support functions: they could thus be moved and molded at will, giving the architect all the prerogatives of the sculptor. The Domino houses were never built, but they “enabled us to say: ‘There are no walls in the house. What shall we do?’ ”

In the U.S., Louis Sullivan had long since pioneered the skyscraper, and his famous “Form follows function” was the slogan of a new “democratic architecture” that wanted to do away with classic façades, which had nothing to do with a modern building’s purpose. His young associate, Frank Lloyd Wright, was already famous for low-slung geometric prairie houses that were so carefully wedded to the landscape that building and nature seemed one. In Germany, 28-year-old Walter Gropius, freshly graduated from Peter Behrens’ studio, had put up his steel-and-glass Fagus factory, which was the most daring example so far of the now standard “curtain walls”—the skin of glass stretched over a steel frame. All this affected Jeanneret, but in the first years after World War I, it was painting that preoccupied him.

He had become the inseparable companion of an artist named Amédée Ozenfant, and at the advanced age of 31, Jeanneret began to paint too. The two friends published a manifesto called After Cubism—”an optimistic, lyrical song on the beauty and lesson of machines, on buildings for use, and on the part played by science in an art worthy of our time.” To spread their new credo of Purism, Jeanneret and Ozenfant started the magazine L’Esprit nouveau. The most important pieces were those on architecture, on which the two editors often collaborated and which Jeanneret signed with an old family name, Le Corbusier, in order to acquire a separate identity as an architect. The articles were the basis in 1923 of Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture.

Feather on a Head. What is architecture? It was, said Le Corbusier in his book, something that went far beyond style. “The styles of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, or Gothic, are to architecture what a feather is on a woman’s head.” Essentially, architecture was the “masterly, correct, and magnificent placing of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage.”

In the machine age, said Le Corbusier, the architect must take his cue from the engineer. “We have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent First Fruits of the new age. The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture.” He drew observations from everywhere: “The airplane shows us that a problem well stated finds its solution,” but the “problem of the house has not been stated.” Then, in his most famous dictum, he said that a house “is a machine for living in.” The statement was not so inhuman as it sounded. Only architecture of “passion,” he added, could live and last. “Passion can create drama out of inert stone.”

A Very Odd Specimen. Even in his person, he tried to be true to the “new spirit.” One day in Paris, a friend of the painter Fernand Leger said to Leger: “Just wait. You’re about to see a very odd specimen. He goes bicycling in a derby hat.” Leger waited. “A few minutes later,” he recalled, “I saw coming along, very stiff, completely in silhouette, an extraordinary mobile object under the derby hat with spectacles and a dark suit. He advanced quietly, scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective. The picturesque personage was none other than the architect Le Corbusier.”

At that point the picturesque personage had built hardly anything at all. But Le Corbusier’s reach was always to exceed his grasp. He was thinking of architecture not only in terms of this or that building, but of everything within the building— ‘every detail of household furnishing, the street as well as the house and the wider world beyond.” With an artist’s bland disregard for the inertia of others, Le Corbusier drew up a master plan for a “Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants.”

“Towers in a Park.” It was the first of many plans for cities—plans that called for the redoing of Barcelona, Algiers Antwerp, Buenos Aires, and the war-destroyed French city of Saint-Dié. None were built, but they still marked him as one of the most audacious city planners of his time, the man who more than anyone else foresaw the age of the traffic jam and the exploding slum. At the center of his City of Three Million was a group ot cross-shaped skyscrapers, 50 to 60 stones high, placed far apart in expanses of greebery like “towers in a park.” “These skyscrapers,” Le Corbusier airily explained, “will contain the city’s brains. Everything is to be concentrated in them: banks, business affairs, the control of industry.” Beyond the central ring was a civic center, and then a series of belts of apartment houses, with a garden for every apartment. Factories and utilities were relegated to the outskirts, for “in a decent house, the servants’ stairs do not go through the drawing room.” There were different levels of traffic, ranging from an airstrip to superhighways for vehicles of varying speeds to walks reserved solely for pedestrians.

Le Corbusier made another plan for Paris, but since it presupposed demolishing a good part of the existing city the Parisians did not take to it at all. “Megalomania!” screamed the weekly Arts-Vandalism! Vanity! Monotony!” “In Paris,” sighs Corbu, “prophets are kicked in the rear.”

Madmen! He built a studio and house for his friend, Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, which Lipchitz recalls somewhat plaintively as “a good studio, but he would not allow me to put any of mv sculptures along the walls. He was such a Calvinist in those days.” He managed to put up a model Workers’ City near Bordeaux, but the buildings so offended the local authorities that they refused to furnish them with water for six years. In 1927 Corbu, with his cousin and partner Pierre Jeanneret, submitted a plan for the League of Nations. As he bitterly wrote of the incident later: “After 65 meetings of the jury in Geneva, the project of L-C and Pierre Jeanneret was the only one of 360 schemes (seven miles of plans) that received four votes out of nine. It was at this point that the delegate from Pans pointed out: ‘This scheme has not been drawn in India ink. I insist it be disqualified, and it was.” Huffed Corbu of his critics in those years: “Madmen!”

In 1930 Corbu became a French citizen and married Yvonne Gallis an earthy, black-haired young woman from Monaco. Yvonne had little use use for the walls of glass he built into their Paris apartment. (“I’m tearing my hair out of my roots. All this light is driving me crazy!”),but she knew hot to soothe her volatile husband better than anyone. Things began to go a bit better for Corbu from then on. The next year,on a broad green site in Poissy, he built a residence called Villa Savoye. Like his other buildings, it was basically a “pure prism” raised on stilts (pilotis), banded horizontally with long ribbon windows and topped with a roof garden. But its geometry was pure liquid, withevery room and level flowing into the next as if the walls and floors could be dissovled at will, until the villa itself has become an “architectural promenade.”

In 1932, at University City, Paris, there rose a dormitory called the Swiss Pavillion-a great slab on stilts with a front that was mostly of glass, and blank end walls. One Swiss newspaper predicted that it would corrupt the youth who lived in it, but to architects it was a milestone; it became the model for countless other slabs before and since the U N Building. In all his work, Corbu had lifted his prisms on high to reclaim the land underneath. His columned structures had freed the façade for inventive sculpturing, opened up interiors, surrendered the long dark walls to light. And as a grace note, he had added the roof garden. These devices,which he imperiously declared to be the basis of a “fundamentally new esthetic,” seem simple in retrospect-but then, so does the arch.

Captivated Audience. As Corbu built, he also wrote. In the U.S., Frank LloydWright thundered his contempt for the French “painter and pamphleteer,” but one by one, young architects were captivated by him. “There were no teachers to teach us the new architecture,” says the Chinese-American architect.I. M. Pei, “so we turned to Corbu’s books and these were responsible for half our education.” In Greece, a young student named Constantinas Doxiadis,who was to become famous in his own land, got a Corbu book as a gift on Christmas Eve in 1932. “I glanced through it,” he recalls, “then I read it through the night.In the morning I knew Corbu had opened my eyes.”

In Stuttgart, Germany, another young man named Sep Ruf went with hisfirst employer to see two houses that Le Corbusier had designed. The employer declared them a “blasphemy”; the employee thought they were great. “We argued,” says Ruf who is now president of Munich’s Academy of Art, “in the long, open, austere living room, and my boss got so angry that he fired me on the spot.”

In Moscow, Corbu built a ten-story glass-walled office building that survived two decaded of Stalinist criticism as anti-esthetic to become, now, muchadmired. Then Le Corbusier flew to Brazil (in the old Graf Zeppelin), toadvise a team that included Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa on the designing of Rio’s 1936 Ministry of Education, a slab on pilotis with a new feature: a honeycomb of sun-shading breeze-admitting vanes at the windows, called brises-soleīl. That single example spread togive all the major cities of Latin America, notably Brasilia, their present lookof clean, high, colorful, modern business buildings.

Keep Out. Le Corbusier’s whitewashed studio at 35 Rue de Sévres, which he has occupied for almost 40 years, had become a magnetfor apprentice architects from Japan, England, the U.S., South America.It still is, for no week passes without its qouta of admiring visitors. A long, dusty corridor leads them up a winding staircase to an odd wooden door. Theypause in a tiny waiting room, and finally a small gate with a ferociousKEEP OUT sign opens. Past the gate is the cramped office of the master-a lonely, childless widower whose office is dominated by a big blow-up photgraph of children on his Marseille roof.

His moods are as unpredictable as his talent is unlimited. He can whisk off a sketch on something that seems little bigger than a postage stamp, and it will turn out to be almost exactly in scale. He has few close friends, and though he says he enjoys having people around to talk to, it is always a rather unilateral affair “Talking stimulates,” he once explained. “You develop ideas when you have an audience. And anyway, you don’t have to listen to what the others say.” As for money —here the master is even more impossible. He is as miserly as a Swiss shopkeeper, while remaining as ingenuous as a child, and he has long been certain that the whole world has been out to rob him.

Most of the robbers, he eventually decided, live in the U.S. In 1935 Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art organized a major exhibition of work by Le Corbusier, and he came across the Atlantic to see it. From the early days when he had sung the praises of American engineers and envied American skyscrapers. New York had been “the fantastic city, the temple of the New World.” The disillusion was total. He took one look at the crowded canyons and announced: “Your skyscrapers are too small!” The East and Hudson rivers were hidden; the mighty Atlantic was lost. Instead of innumerable “towers in a park,” there was a jungle of masonry gouged out at the middle by the “no man’s land” that New York prizes as Central Park.

Without Pity. A subsequent trip was an even greater disaster than the first. In 1947 he was invited to serve on an international committee of architects who were to design the U.N. headquarters. Setting up shop on the 21st floor of the RKO building, he threw himself into the job with his accustomed vigor; but Corbu was never a man to work with a team. From the beginning the direction of the project had been given to the more diplomatic Wallace Harrison, designer of Rockefeller Center. When the U.N. Building was finished, Corbu wrote: “A new skyscraper, which everyone calls the ‘Le Corbusier Building,’ has appeared in New York. L-C was stripped of all his rights, without conscience and without pity.” True enough, the building was a somewhat compromised version of Corbu’s plan, but no one ever thought of calling it the “Le Corbusier Building.”

Corbu was to suffer a further disappointment in 1952, when the UNESCO headquarters in Paris was placed in the hands of Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer of the U.S., Bernard Zehrfuss of France, and Pier Luigi Nervi of Italy. Despite all this, Corbu was in fact entering the richest phase of his career. Plans that had been locked in his mind for years began tumbling out like coins from a treasure chest. Now came the Marseille apartment block of raw concrete (béton brut), on which the marks of the form boards were left visible. The Society for the Preservation of the Beauties of France denounced it; a large hardware firm refused to sell it locks or hinges, for fear of tarnishing the firm’s name. But the experts knew better. “Any architect who does not find this building beautiful,” said Gropius, “had better lay down his pencil.”

Worthy of Homer. It was 200 ft. long and 18 stories high—a huge filing cabinet in which 337 apartments could be placed like drawers. Part of the way up was an “internal street” of shops, and on the roof was a garden made up, not of plants and trees, but of sculptured shapes surrounded by a parapet that shut out all but the sky and the mountaintops. Corbu called the building a “Radiant City,” its garden “a landscape worthy of Homer.”

It had its faults. The corridors were bare and forbidding, and the apartments rather wild in scale. A room might be only 12 ft. wide but soar 16 ft. high. Nevertheless, major housing projects all over the world, including Corbu’s own at Nantes-Réze and in Berlin, have borrowed from Marseille.

Square Spiral. In the Indian cotton center of Ahmedabad he built two graceful villas, an office building for the Mill-owners Association, and finally the “endless museum” he had thought of 30 years before. Its plan, which was to be repeated in Tokyo, was a sort of square spiral or maze that could be expanded at will. Today he is still working on his biggest commission of all: Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab. The Indian government hired Corbu for 4,000 rupees ($840; a month to build a whole new city to replace the old Lahore, which had been turned over to Pakistan.

Corbu was all set to go after only one week on the site. He started building with nothing more than half a dozen concrete mixers and one crane. Says British Architect Maxwell Fry, who helped with the job: “We had 20,000 women and children, oxen and donkeys by the thousand. We got the big concrete structures up with a mess of cockeyed scaffolding. We really built it like the Pyramids.”

A Ragbag. There are critics who argue that the buildings are so far apart that they lose all relationship to each other. Corbu replies that he designed it with the measure of man in mind. One unit of measurement was the distance that a man can walk in an hour. For the interiors, he used his mystifying modular—a personal improvisation on the ancient Greek Golden Section based on the harmonies of the human body. This is one Corbuism that even his admirers find difficult. Says Editor Banham of the British Architectural Review. “It is a ragbag of ideas of the 18903, represented with such seductive force that for a decade they have seemed as modern as tomorrow’s Sputnik.”

In time, the buildings will be brought into closer relationship, when the pools, the clumps of trees, the sculptured hills between them are finished. But the buildings will never be Indian, for they were not intended to be. “No idea belonging to folklore or to the history of art,” said Corbu, “can ‘be taken into consideration in such an enterprise.” The city is universal, ancient, and wholly modern; its major buildings are orchestrations of pillars and brises soleil, of soaring archways and intertwining ramps, of random openings and tense façades that dance like notes on a musical score. They are princely and crude at the same time—both beautiful and brutal.

From a distance they are magnificent, but on closer inspection, some observers find them disturbing. Says Michigan’s Architect Minuro Yamasaki of the High Court Building: “In India, I thought, everything is elegant and refined; but here was something crude. I thought this building should have elegance and be proud, too. But it is a fist instead of a hand.” Architect Paul Rudolph of the Yale School of Art and Architecture disa grees. “As time goes on,” says he, “everyone will understand the importance of Chandigarh; people will go there as they now go to the Piazza San Marco.”

Timeless Image. People already go by the thousands to another Corbu master piece: the Chapel of Ronchamp, which crowns one of the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. It is a place for pilgrimage, a looming form that commands the entire countryside from horizon to horizon. Ronchamp is architecture as pure image, and few images more powerful or more timeless have ever been placed before the eye. It is strange that a man who has shown so few signs of religious feeling should have produced so awesome a place of worship. But this is no odder than the fact that the loneliest of men should have dreamed of Utopian cities, or that one so dedicated to the machine has, in the end, produced an architecture that scarcely depends on the machine at all. Corbu turned his .paintings into architecture, his architecture into sculpture, until “the body of the building is the expression of the three major arts in one.”

He may be the coldest of the titans of his time, but he will perhaps have left the warmest legacy. “Architecture,” he once said, “goes beyond utilitarian needs. You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart. You do me good and I am happy and I say, ‘This is beautiful.’ That is Architecture. Art enters in.”