The 40s: The Story of a Decade (71 page)

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Le Corbusier rarely relaxes. His face, mobile and animated when he is speaking, is tense even in repose. He loves to talk to people he feels are responsive. His voice is low, gentle, insistent, and musical; his characteristic expression is one of intelligent observation. He thinks about architecture, or form and color in general, most of the time. Even when he is sitting on a beach, he manages to keep busy. He examines the architectural structure of pebbles, shells, and bits of wood. They often turn up in his paintings, though sometimes in rather abstract form. His interest in food is similarly professional; he especially admires the structure of melons, in which he sees no traces of a regrettable electicism. He also approves
of bee cells, since bees, like himself, distinguish between the wall as an insulating factor and the wall as a supporting factor.

The war slowed Le Corbusier down as an architect, but it provided him, for a while, with extra time in which to examine pebbles. In June, 1940, when France fell, he and Jeanneret were in Aubusson, working on plans for a cartridge factory there. After the armistice, they decided not to return to Occupied Paris, and, accompanied by Mme. Le Corbusier, drove to the Pyrenees village of Ozon, near an electro-chemical plant for which the two partners had designed buildings. The factory was in need of certain alterations, but the work didn’t amount to much and Le Corbusier was soon reduced to bicycling, painting, swimming, and inspecting pebbles. After four months of this idling, Jeanneret went to live with friends in Grenoble. Le Corbusier returned to Paris, and then went to Algiers, where he resumed his studies of the local
urbanisme
problem. In 1942, he returned to France. The Vichy government, perhaps suspecting that it was dealing with a dissident spirit, told him that he would have to have a new license if he wished to resume the practice of architecture in France. “We’ll consider your case and act accordingly,” an official informed him. “I was not appointed to the Committee to Normalize Building, which the Vichy government set up,” Le Corbusier said recently. “I was given no work in France until the Liberation. I was denounced as a Communist and threatened with arrest, but I never became a Communist, although my city-planning philosophy implies capitalist reforms. The Communists asked me to join their party, but I told them it was they who ought to join me. The Pétain government invited me to go on one of those artists’ trips to Germany, but I declined. I spent most of my time painting. The Germans never touched Picasso or me. It would have made too much of a scandal. The only time I talked to a German was in 1942, when I went to the chief of artistic propaganda to protest against the banning of a Fernand Léger exhibition. He said that Léger had gone to the United States, so they couldn’t show his paintings.” During the war, Le Corbusier was lower in funds than usual, and he was helped out by friends. He had so little to eat that he suffered from two hernias, for which he had to have operations. His wife fared just as badly. Coming home one evening, he found her lying on the kitchen floor with a broken leg. A doctor said that malnutrition had caused a bone in the leg to break.

Even before the war, Le Corbusier, although he was better known than any other French architect—and probably than
any
other architect—had
never been given government work in France. He attributes this neglect to the hostility of academicians high in the government. After the Liberation, he began to come into his own, and it was not long before he became a bureaucrat himself. In 1945, he founded a new, cooperative architectural firm, Atelier des Bâtisseurs, or Atbat, but he did not invite his old partner, Jeanneret, to join the firm, apparently because he felt that Jeanneret’s decision to leave him to go to live in Grenoble during the war was not the act of a friend. Jeanneret, who eventually became active in the Resistance movement in France, is now designing furniture in Paris. Le Corbusier is president of Atbat, with which twenty-five young architects and engineers are associated. “For thirty years, I’d been a consultant talking in the desert,” he has said. “Since 1945, I’ve led the architectural movement in France. I arrive at a stage where many things in my life flower, like a tree in season.” This sense of burgeoning was induced by his assignment to plan the reconstruction of La Rochelle and La Pallice; by his appointment to head a governmental Cultural Relations mission to the United States in 1945 to report on the progress of American architecture since 1939; by his being chosen, in February, 1946, the French delegate to the United Nations Headquarters Commission; and, a year later, by his elevation to membership in the United Nations Board of Design Consultants.

In these last three capacities, Le Corbusier has spent most of the past fifteen months adjusting himself to New York. His wife, who is not in good health, did not accompany him here, and he flies back to Paris every three or four months to visit her. He is living in the Grosvenor, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, where he has converted his bathroom into a painting studio. He sometimes feels lonely, a sensation that he hints at in a passage that occurs in the Headquarters Commission’s official report, a section of which he wrote:

Le Corbusier, who was born Charles Edouard Jeanneret, didn’t bother to provide himself with a first name when, some twenty-five years ago, he decided to adopt the name by which he is now famous, so he just signed this report Le Corbusier, but he has permitted himself to be identified as Charles Le Corbusier on the rosters of the Headquarters Commission and the Board of Design Consultants. His pleasure in being a bureaucrat got a big fillip last October, when he received a letter from the
Biographical Encyclopædia of the World
, saying that it would like to include him in the “Who’s Important in Government” section of its next edition. The encyclopedia, it appeared, also contained a section on “Who’s Important in Art.” He was delighted at being tapped for the bureaucratic category of the book and didn’t mind being left out of the art section. He filled out the necessary forms with alacrity. His well-being and mental stimulation have been somewhat provided for by a number of friends here—notably José Luis Sert, an architect and city planner who once served an apprenticeship with Le Corbusier & P. Jeanneret, and Constantino Nivola, a young Italian painter who lives on Eighth Street. Sundays, when Le Corbusier gets tired of painting in his bathroom, he sometimes drops in at Nivola’s studio and spends several hours painting there. The first time he went around, he examined his host’s work and then launched into a thirty-minute exposition of what he thought was wrong with it. He made notes and sketches as he talked, and presented them to Nivola. Nivola decided, after some contemplation, that there was a good deal in what Le Corbusier had said. The Nivolas and the Serts frequently dine with Le Corbusier at the Jumble Shop, an Eighth Street restaurant, or at the Monte, an Italian eating place on Macdougal Street. The Monte is in a dark and windowless basement, a setting as remote from Le Corbusier’s favorite architectural concept—a glass-walled structure set above the ground on
pilotis
—as anything could well be. “My God, a cavern!” he exclaimed the first time he was taken there. He felt better after eating a plate of excellent spaghetti. “It’s strange,” he said. “I should be against this place, but it’s really not so bad.”

When he is not with close friends, Le Corbusier often displays a lively sense of his own importance. The fact that he is the world’s most influential architect is not universally recognized in this country, and last year, while the United Nations Headquarters Commission subcommittee to which he was attached as an expert was making its site-inspecting jaunts about the country, he was always offended when the newspaper photographers asked him to step aside while they took pictures of city
officials and subcommittee members. They made this request because a commission delegate was considered to belong to a bureaucratic echelon inferior to that of subcommitteemen and municipal officeholders. “I have never had to deal with such imbeciles in my life,” he grumbled after being invited to get out of a photograph in Philadelphia. Dr. Eduardo Zuleta-Angel, a Colombian, who was head of the Headquarters Committee, is a great admirer of Le Corbusier, and he tried to salve his feelings, and also gain some useful advice, by taking him up in a helicopter to inspect the land that Philadelphia was offering the United Nations. On the whole, Le Corbusier was favorably impressed by Philadelphia. He also liked Boston, despite a rather unfortunate incident at a dinner tendered him and his colleagues at the Harvard Club of Boston. According to Le Corbusier, a bishop and a lawyer flanking him at the table persisted in talking across him to each other. He did not consider the fact that his English is poor and that his dinner neighbors’ French was worse a mitigating circumstance, and presently he picked up his chair and moved it next to Serge Koussevitzky, a French-speaking guest. Before Rockefeller made his offer of the East River area, Le Corbusier had been inclined to regard San Francisco, where his inspection group spent three days, as the best site. “The receptions there included ladies,” he says. “At Boston and Philadelphia, they were stag.”

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These days, in addition to working on plans for United Nations buildings and holding conferences with Reynal & Hitchcock, who, having just published a translation of his
Quand les Cathédrales Etaient Blanches
, are planning to bring out another book of his,
Inexpressible Space
, Le Corbusier frequently shows up in Harrison’s office with new tables of organization for the United Nations headquarters project, in which his name and the names of his disciples are prominently displayed. Harrison, who admires Le Corbusier more as an architect than as a bureaucrat, tactfully clears his throat. Le Corbusier is also working on plans for a model of a typical Le Corbusier vertical garden city, which he figures can be put on the market as a useful educational toy, and he is promoting a tape measure of his devising, seven and a half feet long, which he calls the Règle d’Or. The Règle d’Or is based on the proportions of the human body, or, at any rate, the human body in the form of a man standing up with his arm raised comfortably high over his head. This measure is bisected by a line running down the middle of its entire length and is ruled
off, horizontally, on either side by lines at varying intervals. These intervals, taken in threes, bear the same ratio to each other as the distance between the standing man’s fingertips and the top of his head, the distance between the top of his head and his solar plexus, and the distance from there to his heels. The sum of the first two of these distances is equal to the third. Le Corbusier worked this out with his own body as source material, but he says it applies to everyone. According to him, the measure embodies many historically accepted formulas for calculating the rules of proportion and is invaluable in designing windows, doors, walls, formats for books, or anything else in which proportion is a factor. He hopes that it will become a universal instrument, and he believes that, if adopted on a worldwide scale, it would break down nationalism by making all doors and windows in the same proportion, thus setting up a kind of architectural Esperanto of good design. John D. Dale, president of Charles Hardy, Inc., a Manhattan engineering firm, is manufacturing this device, which is to be sold to architects and engineers under the name of Modulor. Each one will bear Le Corbusier’s signature and will be accompanied by a thirty-page explanatory booklet Le Corbusier has written.

Last June, Sert’s partner in an architectural firm here, Paul Lester Wiener, who is a friend of Einstein’s, took Le Corbusier to Einstein’s house, in Princeton, so that the architect could get Einstein’s opinion of his measure. With Wiener translating Le Corbusier’s artistic terms into mathematical terms and Le Corbusier waggling his Règle d’Or at Einstein, the two men had a lengthy technical conversation. Einstein is probably the only man in the world in whose presence Le Corbusier would feel like a disciple instead of a master, but even so his eagerness to explain his ideas about proportion was so acute that he interrupted Einstein in mid-exposition several times. “It’s a new language of proportions,” Einstein finally said of the Règle d’Or, “which expresses the good easily and the bad only with complications.” Le Corbusier, who took this to mean that his baby would eliminate the bad, beamed. He assumed a pleased, almost diffident expression when Wiener, at the end of their visit, produced a camera and took a photograph without asking him to get out of the picture.

The United Nations building plans are supposed to be completed by July, and Le Corbusier expects to return to Paris then. He likes the idea of going back to live in a place where people say “
Bon jour, Corbu
” to him on the street, but he thinks that he will miss New York. “This is a funny
country,” he told an American friend one night recently. “Your hospitality is Draconian, and your convictions are too tied up with finance. Money is ferocious here. Your brutality turns sensitive people into Surrealists. But the country has an extra cipher in population and money—it is
alive
, and everything is possible in it. All life is poisoned by the disorderliness of your cities; people look like cockroaches from your skyscrapers, and, oh, the loneliness of your large crowds, the anonymity of your cafeterias! No
terrasses de café
here, where three or four friends can talk over an apéritif—not that I ever have time for this in Paris. I was astonished by the fact that Americans never climb stairs. They will lose their legs. I’m the only man here who climbs stairs two at a time. Your escalators are undignified. New York is a turntable where you meet everyone in the world. I often ride the Third Avenue ‘L’ at two in the morning, looking at all the Negresses and Chinese dead of fatigue. I like the light here. Paris is gray—it used to be white—and Zurich is greenish, but New York is a red city—the color of blood and life. Everything in it arouses both enthusiasm and disgust; it reflects God and the Devil. Its potentiality is terrific. Your sky at night is formidable. It’s terrible to soil it with General Motors and Lucky Strike publicity. The beauty of the sky should belong to the people. I like your restaurants, and the great freshness in young people here. And how can one be bored in a city in which the young women wear crowns of flowers and in which the houses are red?”