The 40s: The Story of a Decade (70 page)

Accompanied by Jacobs, Le Corbusier started his lecture tour a few days after his arrival. “Jacobs,” he said several times, as he riffled through the newspapers of whatever city they happened to be in, “where is the picture they took of me on the boat?” In two months, he delivered twenty-three talks in nearly as many cities. One of them, at Columbia University, was to begin at eight-thirty in the evening, but he arrived half an hour late. Jacobs had delegated his wife to take Le Corbusier up there, and Mrs. Jacobs explained that they had started in time but that he had stopped the cab at a delicatessen on the way. He was finishing off a loaf of French bread as he mounted the platform. During his tour, he
was amazed at the vast amounts of silverware that were provided for breakfast in bed at some of the big hotels, and he often enlivened this meal by clapping on his head the silver dome that covered his egg dish. He was also astonished by cellophane toothbrush containers, the ticket slots in the backs of train seats, and the paper wrappers on lump sugar. “In Paris,” he said, “food hangs around unsanitarily but appetizingly.”

Among the places Le Corbusier lectured at were Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Vassar, Bowdoin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota, and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. During his stay in Philadelphia, George Howe, a famous architect of that city, was introduced, or reintroduced, to him. Howe had been taken to Le Corbusier’s Paris apartment by a friend for a drink several years earlier; on this occasion, his host had ignored him for about half an hour and then asked him if he was an architect. Howe nodded. “Oh, I thought you were the naval officer from downstairs,” said Le Corbusier. When they met again, in Philadelphia, Howe, who is no man to take umbrage at genius, volunteered to show Le Corbusier around the town. One of the buildings he pointed out was the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, a notably modern skyscraper, which he and William Lescaze designed. His guest, who until then had been acting as though he still thought Howe was the naval officer from downstairs, gazed at this edifice with approbation. “
Ah, mon vieux
,” he said, “why don’t we be partners the next time you have a big job?”

Le Corbusier likes to talk to young people at colleges, and he enjoyed his tour until, toward the end, it dawned on him that he had been put through a pretty heavy schedule and wasn’t going to make much money out of it. His expenses came to about twelve hundred dollars. His lecture fees, most of which were seventy-five or a hundred dollars, added up to about eighteen hundred. The Museum gave him a check for the difference. It had also put on a show of his work and sent a couple of his architectural models on a travelling exhibition, from which they had by then returned in a somewhat damaged condition. Le Corbusier felt that the “Rockefeller Foundation” might have treated him more considerately. A few nights later he turned up at a dinner party waving a dollar bill. “This is what the Rockefeller Foundation paid me for my lecture tour,” he said. His sorrow was the greater because on earlier lecture tours, in South America, he had been paid higher fees and been received with greater éclat. Mr. Goodwin took this fact, as well as Le Corbusier’s astonishment
at American hotel silverware and toothbrush containers, into consideration in an urbane letter he wrote to Le Corbusier just after he went back to France:

Le Corbusier showed this letter around Paris for some time, advising anyone who would listen that America was the country of the dollar where you never saw the dollar.

Though Le Corbusier loudly expressed his disappointment in the Rockefellers, he actually has no great interest in money. The fusses he kicks up about it are more the result of wounded pride than a desire to get rich. “Intelligent things don’t make money,” he has said. “Money is the devil and it leads to lies, but it’s good to have some in your pocket. I have a
trou de finance
in my head, not the bump. I don’t want to be a millionaire or received in the fashionable world. I like friends and a few pleasures—those of the table, and others.” He is troubled by moneyed atmosphere, and he thinks that such weather conditions are more oppressive in America than in most places. “Because of its financial control, the United States is the last country to awaken artistically,” he says. In
Quand les Cathédrales Etaient Blanches
, he wrote:

Le Corbusier has rarely accumulated a mountain, or hill, of more than a few thousand francs. He likes to flex his monetary muscles, but only in small ways, and he does not care to be beholden to anyone. Years ago, a friend who had come into a modest legacy and knew that Le Corbusier was hard up mailed him a check. Le Corbusier called on his benefactor the next day and gave him hell. “I can’t take your money,” he said. “You know I can’t stand feeling gratitude to anyone.” This speech apparently having acted as a cathartic, he kept the check and cashed it without suffering any ill effects.

Le Corbusier’s attitude toward finance, and toward a good many other things, is clearly set forth in “Urbanisme,” a series of articles he wrote in his thirties for
L’Esprit Nouveau
(a long-defunct
avant-garde
Paris magazine of which he was co-publisher) and that was later published in book form. After recommending the demolition and reconstruction of the center of Paris, he suggested that part of the reconstructed area be set aside as a sort of colony for foreigners of all nations, “for would they not then take good care that it was not destroyed by long-range guns or
bombing airplanes?” Warming to this theme, he came to the conclusion that the presence of this colony of aliens would be an insurance for the entire capital. “If twenty skyscrapers over five hundred feet in length and six hundred feet high were set thus in the center of Paris, Paris would be protected from all barbarian destruction,” he wrote. “That should mean something to the War Office,” he added hopefully. Having thus demonstrated the value of his project, Le Corbusier proceeded to show that it was economically feasible. “If a decree were passed for the general expropriation of the center of Paris,” he began, “the value of the land would stand at a certain figure which we will call A. This figure can easily be ascertained by experts from the contemporary records of sales of land at various points in Paris. The value is thus A.” The chapter in which this explicit passage occurred was headed “Finance and Realization.”

· · ·

The complete reconstruction of urban life is a continuing passion in Le Corbusier. Shortly after returning to Paris from his American lecture tour, he drew up a slum-clearance project, never put into effect, that provided for the conversion of a large section of the city into vertical-garden units. Soon thereafter, he visited Rio de Janeiro, where, at the invitation of the Brazilian government, he gave several lectures and acted as consultant to a group of local architects, who closely followed his recommendations when they designed a new Ministry of National Education and Public Health building. “In 1936,” he says, “Brazil awoke after my presence.” He went on to Buenos Aires and devised a master plan for that city, which was not used. Two years later, in Algiers, a city he has visited a number of times since 1930 in futile efforts to have it rebuilt according to his ideas, he worked up another unfulfilled project—a skyscraper office building for ten thousand workers, equipped with a novel form of air-admitting but sun-deflecting shutters outside its windows. This building, by concentrating so many people under one roof, would, he thought, centralize the business community and do away with a vast amount of street traffic.

Le Corbusier has an intense curiosity. He likes to explore strange cities at odd hours. In 1938, as he was studying a disreputable part of Algiers after midnight, taking illustrated notes on local
urbanisme
problems, he was so ruthlessly mugged by a gang of thieves that he was unconscious for nearly an hour. “Everything looked golden,” he says. “I thought I was in Heaven.” He dismissed this idea when he discovered that the bandits
had removed not only his money, the loss of which he was philosophical about, but also his notes and sketches, about which he was not. For a while, he toyed with the notion that his attackers might have been partisans of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an institution whose architectural devotion to eclecticism he had derided in many articles and books, and of which he had written, two years before:

At forty-nine, Le Corbusier is also in excellent health, but he sometimes jeopardizes this by a physical recklessness as immoderate as his literary style. He likes to swim tremendous distances. In the pleasant prewar days in Paris, he would close his architectural office for a month and, accompanied by his wife and his partner, a second cousin named Pierre Jeanneret, go to some seaside resort, generally on the French Riviera. While he was staying at Cap Martin, in the early spring of 1937, he went, on an out-of-season impulse, for a long swim in cold water. The nerves in his neck became inflamed and he was laid up for five months. The next year, at St. Tropez, he was swimming under water when a sizable yacht sailed over him. He saw its hull in time and remained under water until he thought it had passed. As he came up, however, the propeller struck him and one thigh was so badly ripped that it required a foot or so of stitches. One affliction of his, now apparently cured, was the result of a purely aesthetic pursuit. Until he became involved in the United Nations project, he had painted nearly every morning since he was thirty-five, always standing while he worked and resting most of
his weight on his right leg. After several years, he developed a painful varicose condition, which he called “the paralysis of the painter.”

Le Corbusier prides himself on his will power, and this pride, rather than any apprehensiveness about his health, prompted him, shortly before the last war, to give up smoking. All day long, for two decades, he had smoked cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. He had finally come to own sixty pipes, and he had his suits made with a pocket that would hold a box of two hundred and fifty kitchen matches, of which he used up a box a day. Then, one day, a friend of his, André Jaoul, a prominent French industrialist, told him he had given up smoking. “Very few people could do a thing like that after so many years,” he said. “You think I can’t?” said Le Corbusier. “I doubt it,” said Jaoul. Le Corbusier, who has an idea that big business is inimical to his kind of city planning, is no man to be outdone by an industrialist. He tossed away the cigar he was puffing, put his sixty pipes in a bureau drawer, and telephoned his tailor to omit the special pocket from a suit that was in progress. He hasn’t smoked since. “I was profoundly tempted at banquets on site-inspecting tours I made last year,” he says. “All those excellent cigars we were offered in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco! But I resisted. It’s a joke, in a way, but I don’t treat it as such. Discipline is essential.” Le Corbusier, who was probably the first architect to state the now famous modernist doctrine that building plans should proceed “from within to without,” feels that his renunciation of smoking is in a sense like his lifelong fight against the Beaux-Arts school of architecture. For him to light up a White Owl now would be the equivalent, morally, of putting an Italian Renaissance façade on a building or providing it with a mansard roof instead of a flat one on which to sun-bathe and grow wild flowers.