Appetite for Construction: Le Corbusier
Deeming space, light and order ‘the things that men need like bread or a place to sleep’, Le Corbusier’s life goal — to improve the human condition — was a deeply held one. So why has his work remained so polarising?
A common refrain among creatives has it that, if your work pleases all who consume it — or even most — you’ve failed. Unequivocal applause from a majority of subjective individuals, the reasoning goes, can be inspired only by banality.
It makes sense. What becomes of progress if the instinctively avant-garde, cowed by fear of negative reactions, fall into line with the regular troops? Cultural stagnation must surely result when human expression goes A.W.O.L. on its role as a driver of social evolution. Imagine the French Decadent poets of late 19th century Paris ditching their ‘épater le bourgeois’ in favour of ‘apaiser le bourgeois’; the Harlem Renaissance of the pre-war years being tamed into a rallying cry for acquiescence; or Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock reimagined as a rousing paean to patriotism?
This is why the man born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887 (his pseudonym is a playful version of his maternal grandfather’s name, Lecorbésier) — the godfather of 20th-century Brutalism — would surely delight in the fact that, almost 60 years after his death from a heart attack during his daily swim in the Mediterranean, he doesn’t so much split opinion as turn dinner parties into miniature war zones.
This distinguished polymath (words including ‘painter’, ‘theorist’, ‘writer’ and ‘urban planner’ often appear between the hyphens) first laid down the gauntlet in 1922 with the presentation of his Plan Voisin at the Salon D’Automne in Paris. His proposal entailed razing a chunk of the French capital’s centre and placing 18 cruciform skyscrapers set out in a rectangular grid, in a fashion that will resonate with anyone who has ever explored the outskirts of some obscure metropolis near the Russian Taymyr peninsula during an idle moment of dart-throwing curiosity on Google Earth. It would have been like Dubai reimagined by Aldous Huxley. Suffice to say, the outcry from heritage lovers was as loud as that from those heralding hyper-utilitarianism as a utopian ideal, and Paris’s Right Bank remained the carbuncle-free one it is today.
Le Corbusier was undaunted, though, and his vision for urban rejuvenation based on high-density, high-rise living and the rejection of decorative art in architecture found expression three years later in the form of his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit). Co-designed with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and built in 1925 for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, it was demolished a year later, although a replica in Bologna has become a pilgrimage site for Le Corbusier disciples.
What becomes of progress if the avant-garde, cowed by fear, fall into line with the regular troops?
Planning to provoke
From here on, each and every project Le Corbusier became involved with pushed the envelope just enough so it wouldn’t floor the aircraft, and prompted delight and despair in ever-changing ratios. Take the project that propelled him into the stratosphere: Villa Savoye, a modernist edifice in Poissy, just outside Paris, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre and completed in 1931 as a rural retreat for the family after whom it is named.
The building epitomises its designer’s ‘five points’ architecture manifesto that appeared in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1923 — pilotis, or supporting stilts; free design of the ground plan; free design of the façade; horizontal window; and roof garden. Many laud its hyper- functional appearance and the shameless nudity of the beton brut (raw concrete), which, adherents say, militates against the affected vanity of architectural styling or flourishes. Other contemporaries — not least its inhabitants, who bemoaned its damp and “substantial heat loss due to large glazing” — damned its aesthetic impudence, and would gladly have seen it meet the same fate as a life-size replica by the artist Asmund Havsteen- Mikkelsen would in 2018 (Havsteen-Mikkelsen immersed his five-tonne recreation in a Danish fjord as a comment on the interplay between modernity and technology).
And what of Immeuble Molitor, completed three years later, 12 miles to the south-west, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where the man himself lived for more than three decades? The building saw Le Corbusier’s devotion to ramping up the lumens for people living in urban environments brought to elegant fruition with creative deference to the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, a kindred spirit who encouraged Le Corbusier’s early work on canvas. Its detractors deemed it cold, uninviting, and proof that Le Corbusier was some distance along the scale used to measure autism spectrum disorder.
So it goes on. The Salvation Army hostel in Paris, erected in 1933, was for many an aesthetic reflection of its benevolent intentions — to help shelter people in need — while one Vanity Fair critic wrote: “The south-facing glass façade turned the un-air-conditioned dormitory into an avant-garde toaster oven.” Tsentrosoyuz in Moscow was described by the Russian constructivist Alexander Vesnin, however, as “the best building to arise in Moscow for over a century”, but by Le Corbusier’s compatriot Hannes Meyer, the architect, as “an orgy of glass and concrete”.
Casa Curutchet, in La Plata, Argentina — built between 1949 and 1953 — polarises those who gush about its balanced dialogue with surrounding edifices with which it has precisely nothing in common and those who fulminate over how jarringly it fails to harmonise with them. And what of the vast projects that promised to fulfil his utopian ambitions for large-scale urban planning, such as the Complexe du Capitol in Chandigarh? Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had commissioned this post-colonial capital of the Indian state of Punjab — conceived by Le Corbusier alongside his long- time collaborator Pierre Jeanneret and a team of Indian architects, plus British architects Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew — called it “symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by traditions of the past”. Conversely, Vinayak Bharne, the Director of Design at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena, California, wrote: “Its 800x1200-metre introverted sectors, vast distances, wide thoroughfares, segregated zoning and decentralised civic
core, while paradigmatic of a then refreshing modernity, are today the hallmarks of a myopic urbanism, devoid of any sensibility to India’s climate or culture.” That didn’t stop it becoming one of 17 Unesco World Heritage Sites on Le Corbusier’s posthumous C.V. in 2016.
Perhaps, though, it’s fair to judge Le Corbusier by his magnum opus — and also his first public commission in France. “The Unité is an astonishing complex of spatial, structural, economic and perhaps sociological relevance,” Architectural Review wrote in 1964, referring to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, a residential housing project, created in collaboration with painter-architect Nadir Afonso, whose most famous monument is the Ville Radieuse (‘Radiant City’). A vertical garden city that housed 1,800 denizens of Marseille, displaced after France’s oldest metropolis was bombed in the second world war, it is made up of more than 337 two-level apartments perched above facilities including shops, a school and a theatre. That it divides arguably more than any other of Le Corbusier’s projects — American historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford referred to it as “buildings in a parking lot” — offers a clue as to why Le Corbusier is the ultimate Marmite creative visionary.
He’s blamed for urban renewal, suburban office parks... but he was trying to challenge the status quo.
‘It’s not you, it’s us’
Many of the reasons Le Corbusier has a Moses-like ability to divide opinion come down to him, the creator. Independent of spirit, he never had formal training as an architect. Instead, he left school at 13 and attended the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de- Fonds, close to the Swiss Jura mountain region in which he grew up. As well as the engraving of dials, his father’s vocation, he learned art history, and took pencil to paper to emulate the Art Nouveau movement as a young man.
He also studied under Auguste Perret, a pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in architecture, whom he met while travelling through Europe. An equally influential mentor was the aforementioned Ozenfant, whom he met in Paris aged 30 in 1918. It was with Ozenfant, both men deeming the Cubist movement to have gone astray, that he published Aprés le Cubisme, a manifesto setting out the geometrically stark tenets of Purism.
There are also character clues in how enamoured Le Corbusier was of the mathematical rigidities of Leonardo da Vinci’s Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci sequence theorems. He published a measuring system, Modulor, influenced also by another Renaissance figure, Leon Battista Alberti, as well as the geometrical strictures of the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius. A hark back to the rumours of autism, alluded to earlier, are hard to avoid.
An armchair psychologist might also draw conclusions about the single-mindedness he displayed in his personal life: celibate until the age of 24, and then a regular visitor to prostitutes, according to Nicholas Fox Weber’s 2008 biography, he married the Monegasque fashion model Yvonne Gallis in 1930, and had affairs with the French entertainer Josephine Baker and the Swedish-American heiress Marguerite Tjader Harris.
Perhaps the most striking reasons Le Corbusier is so divisive, though, concern not him as the creator but us as beholders. Structures like Ville Radieuse were not just building projects, they were blueprints for social reform. Le Corbusier coined the phrase ‘architecture or revolution’, a crystallisation of his belief that stark, utilitarian architecture was the only way to divert the human narrative away from class-based revolution. When, while visiting Depression-era Manhattan, he described the skyscrapers as “too small” and Central Park as “too big”, he was lamenting what he saw as half-hearted attempts at civic empowerment.
His mission was therefore a political one. He effectively asked us to change our ways, which leaves him open to charges of sanctimony. He stood charged with banishing poor communities to city fringes and confining them to concrete-monolith beehives by some, and by others with compromising urban aesthetics for the sake of the great unwashed. The fact he offered his services to Mussolini via letter, and various charges of holding fascist and antisemitic views, further complicate how we might perceive him politically.
Since time immemorial — certainly before Facebook became the unseemly dialectical riot it is today — political statements from figures in the arts have rubbed people up the wrong way, and comparisons with those French Decadent poets, the protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance, Jimi Hendrix and countless others before him are irresistible. Little wonder, of his 300-plus designs, only 78 saw completion.
If the reader is among his detractors, though, consider the words of Anthony Flint, the author of a new biography, Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow, talking to NPR’s Rachel Martin. “He’s blamed for urban renewal... urban freeways, even countless suburban office parks with their horizontal strip windows, but what he was trying to do, if you go back to the 1920s, was that he was challenging the status quo,” Flint says. “He believed the city wasn’t up to its full potential. This spirit of innovation is something that can be applied in today’s developing world cities in the 21st century — millions and millions of people streaming into cities, and many of them moving directly to slums.”
Even leaving aside the value of his work in a world whose urban population is soaring, without those who militate against convention we stagnate culturally. Even their most abject failures are prouder milestones on the path of human progress than the more celebrated work of those who merely clone what already exists.
His mission was a political one. He asked us to change our ways, which leaves him open to charges of sanctimony.
Photo Credits: Getty Images
