Flint - Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow

BOOKS BY ANTHONY FLINT

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New Yorks Master Builder and Transformed the American City

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America

Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes

Text copyright 2014 Anthony Flint
All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Publishing, New York

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eISBN: 9781477850350

Cover design by Isaac Tobin
Photograph of Le Corbusier Yousuf Karsh

To Melissa, who went her own way also

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Ascent

He smiled, knowing their worlds were not so far apart. As his stateroom companion well knew, he was no ordinary draftsman.

He had been welcomed in South America as a celebrity just as much as she was: the man from Paris, stepping out in tailored suit with a pocket square and bow tie, filling lecture halls across the continent with those eager to hear his radical new theories in architecture and urban planning. He was breaking the mold in building homes and entire citiesjust as Pablo Picasso had in painting and Ernest Hemingway with the novelsculpting smooth, white, streamlined buildings that had never been seen before, forgoing wood and brick and stone for concrete, replacing staircases with spirals and ramps, wrapping exteriors with long ribbons of black-framed windows, and planting gardens on rooftop terraces. Everything about his architecture was different. He perched his buildings on sturdy yet elegant concrete columns he called pilotis, freeing the ground for cars and open space, and making the structures appear to float in air. And his formula was repeatableefficient housing built with low-cost construction methods, whether three-story town houses or towers set in parks, linked by spacious high-speed roadways and ultimately served by planes and helicopters. The turn of the twentieth century had brought the machine agecars, locomotives, planes, and the factories of mass-production manufacturingand that most fundamental of lifes functions, the habitation of homes and cities, required the same modernization. The dapper visitor with the slicked-back hair and round black eyeglasses was delivering a new way to live.

Becoming Le Corbusiernot just a man, but a forcehad required no little marketing. He adopted the pseudonym in 1920, leaving behind his given name, Charles-douard Jeanneret-Gris. Taking a single moniker was popular among the bohemians and artists in Paris at the time, and for him the act had a symbolism all its own. While inspired in part by his great-grandfather Monsieur Lecorbesier of Brussels and the eighteenth-century French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, a former resident of the town house where he lived in Paris, the renaming signaled his break with the past, with Victorian and bourgeois traditions, and the embrace of the modern. But it was also an exercise in branding. The original star architect would be forever distinguished from all other innovators in design, including his American rival, Frank Lloyd Wright. The name was reminiscent of a mystic bird of Celtic lore, the highly intelligent hunter and scavenger le corbeau, the raven. He had taken to drawing himself as the sleek black bird, peering down from a tightly gripped perch, assessing the landscape, ready to launch in acrobatic flight.

All of Paris, wealthy clients and bohemians alike, knew where to go to find new ideas in design: 35 rue de Svres, the bustling atelier next door to the department store Le Bon March. The equivalent of a start-up in a garage, the top floor of an unremarkable building in the sixth arrondissement served as his headquarters, little more than a long corridor with drafting tables and adjustable black lamps, one after the other, and papers and plans hanging on the walls and sprouting from the floor in rolled-up bunches, like some kind of crazy shrubbery. The apprentices reported each morning, eager to work for the visionary master, alongside the team partners and like-minded innovators: his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the furniture designer Charlotte Perriand. Each month, it seemed, brought a new building design, a new way to organize life: the places for living, for business, for government, for recreation and culture.

The atelier was the fountainhead for all manner of innovationsa car that was the precursor to the Volkswagen Beetle; furniture made of aluminum tubing, black leather, and spotted horsehair; even, in time, a womens clothing line, an ensemble of V-neck blouses, pleated skirts, and go-anywhere sandals, submitted to Americas first fashion magazine, Harpers Bazaar. At night the team would celebrate with wine and champagne in the bistros of the Latin Quarter, and in the morning, after the master had done calisthenics or played basketball and painted, his lifelong side pursuit, they would all reassemble and get back to the blueprints and do it all over again.

It was gratifying, and utterly intentional, that the people of Latin America, a hemisphere away, would hear about all the excitement. The trip there was one of many international forays for the ambassador of the new order. The fast-growing cities of Argentina and Brazil needed his help to be better-organized, cleaner, more orderly places. Le Corbusier was the man with the plan. In standing-room-only lecture halls, he sketched the next city with charcoal on tan newsprint, never reading from prepared remarks but instead creating a storyboard on the spot. He drew chains of apartment buildings set in open space, awash in sunlight and fresh air, with recreation areas and circulation all around, proposing it all as the most natural of evolutions. To demonstrate how cities cannot be frozen in time, he drew the cathedral of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and then his towers in the park; the progression honored the past but didnt stay stuck in it, not least because cities of the future needed to be prepared for ever-increasing populations. But as he wrote, the critics and the mandarins in academia were saying no to all of it. They thought it outrageous, to move on from convention and propose new forms. And that just made Le Corbusier more exciting, a true rebel. The Argentineans and Brazilians felt like they were part of somethingthat they were being given the keys to the future. They could even leapfrog places like Paris and New York City in embracing the modern.

While the urban planning schemes had broad appeal, the rich and powerful had something more selfish in mind. They wanted him to build a modern architectural masterpiece as a villa of their own.

It didnt take much time for Josephine Baker to have that idea as well. From the time the fellow Parisian introduced himself after her performance in Buenos Aires, it was clear this was not just another fan eager to meet her backstage. She was charmed and curious. Within a few days of their paths crossing, she was asking him to design a house for her on the Right Bank in Paris, close to Montmartre and the nightclub that helped make her famous, the Maud de Forest.

A mixed-race daughter of St. Louis, she was an impossibly exotic sight, whether warbling tunes with a snake draped around her neck onstage or walking her pet leopard, Chiquita, down the Champs-lyses. Everything about herher hairstyle with a slicked-down curl on her forehead, her gold-painted nails, her designer-made gowns, her caramel-colored skin that inspired a sun-tanning craze at the Cte dAzur, even her American accentwas soaked up in France and around the world. She was the new thing, lifting the people out of their seats and making audiences feel they were part of something.