Le Corbusier’s baleful influence
By Theodore Dalrymple
Le Corbusier was to
architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less
excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed
great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive
ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy.
Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me,
everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers
that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or
city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked
by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.
Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance,
something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.”
Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course,
morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most
important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on
history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.
Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been
obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is
something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published
an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a
huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a
hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and
Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex
of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism
seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate
enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le
Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless
architecture.
At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of
the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you
think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes
wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered
Le Corbusier, who were we laymen, the mere human backdrop to his buildings, who
know nothing of the problems of building construction, to criticize him?
Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite
material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead
crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by
him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian
building is incompatible with anything except itself.
The two ladies mentioned that they lived in a mainly eighteenth-century
part of the city whose appearance and social atmosphere had been
comprehensively wrecked by two massive concrete towers. The towers confronted
them daily with their own impotence to do anything about the situation, making
them sad as well as angry. “And who do you suppose was the inspiration for the
towers?” I asked. “Yes, I see what you mean,” one of them said, as if the
connection were a difficult and even dangerous one to make.
I pointed the ladies to an area of the exhibition devoted to the Plan
Voisin, Le Corbusier’s scheme to replace a large quarter of Paris with
buildings of fundamentally the same design as those that graced the outskirts
of Novosibirsk and every other Soviet city (to say nothing of Paris itself and
its alienated banlieues). If carried out, the plan would have changed,
dominated, and, in my view, destroyed the appearance of the entire city. Here, the
exhibition played a 1920s film showing Le Corbusier in front of a map of the
center of Paris, a large part of which he proceeds to scrub out with a thick
black crayon with all the enthusiasm of Bomber Harris planning the annihilation
of a German city during World War II.
Le Corbusier extolled this kind of destructiveness as imagination and
boldness, in contrast with the conventionality and timidity of which he accused
all contemporaries who did not fall to their knees before him. It says
something of the spirit of destruction that still lives on in Europe that such
a film should be displayed to evoke not horror and disgust, or even laughter,
but admiration.
Le Corbusier was born
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887, in the small French-Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds,
where his father was an engraver of watchcases and his mother a musician. His
father wanted him to follow in his footsteps; but as an adolescent, Le
Corbusier showed precocious artistic ability, attended the local school of fine
arts for a time, and then wandered Europe for several years in a program of
aesthetic self-education. His extraordinary abilities were evident in the
brilliant draftsmanship of his early (and conventional) drawings and
watercolors. He also made furniture of great elegance before the bug of
intellectual and artistic revolutionism bit him.
Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, deriving it in part from
the name of a distant ancestor, Lecorbésier. But in the absence of a first
name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being. It brings to mind
the verb courber, to bend, and, of course, Le Corbusier was a great
bender of townscapes to his own will. It also brings to mind le corbeau,
the crow or raven, not a conventionally beautiful bird in plumage or song, but
one that is simple and unornamental in both and therefore, metaphorically
speaking, honest and undeceiving, as Le Corbusier claimed his architecture to
be. In French, le corbeau has a further meaning: that of a
bird of ill omen—and perhaps that is the architect’s little joke upon the
world. He was certainly of ill omen for the cities of Europe and elsewhere.
Le Corbusier’s influence came about as much through his writings as through
anything he built—perhaps more. His mode of writing is disjointed, without
apparent logical structure, aphoristic, and with frequent resort to the word
“must,” as if no sentient being with an IQ over 50 could or would argue with
what he says. Drawings and photos often accompany his writing, but sometimes so
cryptically in relation to the text that the reader begins to doubt his own
powers of comprehension: he is made to think that he is reading a book by
someone on a completely different—higher—intellectual plane. Architecture
becomes a sacred temple that hoi polloi may not enter.
André Wogenscky of the Fondation Le Corbusier, prefacing an anthology of Le
Corbusier’s writings, claims that his master’s words are not measurable by
normal means: “We cannot simply understand the books; we have to surrender to
them, resonate, in the acoustical sense, with their vibrations, the ebb and
flow of his thinking.” The passage brings to mind what the poet Tyutchev said
about Russia: one had to believe in it because no one could measure it with his
mind. In approaching Le Corbusier in this mystical fashion, Wogenscky is, in
practice, bowing down to a peculiarly vengeful god: namely, reinforced
concrete, Le Corbusier’s favorite material.
Le Corbusier managed to communicate this elitist attitude to his followers,
apologists, and hierophants. Here, for example, is a passage from a book about
him by the architect Stephen Gardiner:
Le Corbusier remains, for many people, an enigma. Probably the chief
[reason] is the vastness of architecture, for this means that it is an art that
is difficult to comprehend. . . . And, while buildings are large, cities are
even larger: here, before us, is an immensely elaborate patchwork threaded with
a multiplicity of strands that lead in from all directions. At first it seems
quite impossible to see a clear picture where there is, in fact, order, shape
and continuity: all we see is a jumble. Yet it is at this point that one may
make the discovery that the pattern is not possible to follow because a crucial
piece of the jigsaw is missing. . . . In the twentieth century, Le Corbusier
provides it.
Has anyone ever stood, overlooking, say, the Grand Canal in Venice, and
thought, “What I need in order to understand this is the missing piece of the
jigsaw with which only an architect can provide me, and only then will I
understand it”? Gardiner is a true disciple of Le Corbusier in his desire to
intellectualize without the exercise of intellect, in his failure to make
elementary distinctions, and in his use of words so ambiguous that it is
difficult to argue conclusively against him.
In fairness to Le Corbusier,
three extenuations can be offered for his life’s appalling work. He came to
maturity in an age when new industrial materials and methods made possible a
completely different architecture from any previously known. The destruction in
northern France during World War I, as well as social conditions generally,
necessitated swift rebuilding on a large scale, a problem that no one else
solved satisfactorily. And he had grown up at a time when bourgeois domestic
clutter—heavy, elaborate gilt-and-plush furniture; knickknacks everywhere—was
often so outrageous that an extreme revulsion against it in the form of
militant bareness and absence of adornment was understandable, though not
necessarily laudable (the diametrical opposite of an outrage is more likely
itself to be an outrage than to be a solution to it).
Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s language reveals his disturbingly totalitarian
mind-set. For example, in what is probably his most influential book, the
1924 Towards a New Architecture (the very title suggests that
the world had been waiting for him), he writes poetically:
We must create a mass-production state of mind:
A state of mind for building mass-production housing.
A state of mind for living in mass-production housing.
A state of mind for conceiving mass-production housing.
Who are these “we” of whom he speaks so airily, responsible for creating,
among other things, universal states of mind? Only one answer is possible: Le
Corbusier and his disciples (of whom there were, alas, to be many). Everyone
else has “eyes that do not see,” as he so tolerantly puts it.
Here are a few more musts:
We must see to the establishment of standards so that we can face up to the
problem of perfection.
Man must be built upon this axis [of harmony], in perfect agreement with
nature, and, probably, the universe.
We must find and apply new methods, clear methods allowing us to work out
useful plans for the home, lending themselves naturally to standardization,
industrialization, Taylorization.
The plan must rule. . . . The street must disappear.
And then there is this similar assertion: “The masonry wall no longer has a
right to exist.”
Le Corbusier wanted
architecture to be the same the world over because he believed that there was a
“correct” way to build and that only he knew what it was. The program of the
International Congress for Modern Architecture, of which Le Corbusier was the
moving spirit, states: “Reforms are extended simultaneously to all cities, to
all rural areas, across the seas.” No exceptions. “Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris,
Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same,” Le
Corbusier maintained, “since it answers the same needs.”
Le Corbusier’s imperatives apply to more than building or even city
planning, for he was nothing if not a totalitarian philosopher, whose views on
architecture derived at least in part from his self-appointedly omnicompetent
viewpoint:
We must create farms, tools, machinery and homes conducive to a clean,
healthy well-ordered life. We must organize the village to fulfill its role as
a center that will provide for the needs of the farm and act as a distributor
of its products. We must kill off the old voracious and ruthless kind of money
and create new, honest money, a tool for the fulfillment of a wholly normal,
wholly natural function.
There is to be no escape from
Le Corbusier’s prescriptions. “The only possible road is that of enthusiasm . .
. the mobilization of enthusiasm, that electric power source of the human
factory.” In his book The Radiant City, there is a picture of a
vast crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, with the legend, “Little by little,
the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the
USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea”—the idea being,
apparently, the absolute leader or state.
These words were written in 1935, not a happy period for political thought
in Moscow, Rome, or Berlin, and one might have hoped that he would have later
recanted them. But in 1964, on republishing the book in English, Le Corbusier,
far from recanting anything, wrote as an envoi: “Have you ever thought, all you
‘Mister NOS!,’ that these plans were filled with the total and disinterested
passion of a man who has spent his whole life concerning himself with his ‘fellow
man,’ concerning himself fraternally. And, for this very reason, the more he
was in the right the more he upset the arrangements or schemes of others.”
Among these fraternal plans were many for the destruction of whole cities,
including Stockholm. (Other cities he planned to destroy: Paris, Moscow,
Algiers, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Antwerp, and
Geneva.) In The Radiant City, Le Corbusier provides an aerial
photograph of Stockholm as it was, an astonishingly beautiful assemblage of
buildings that he saw only as “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He
dreamed of “cleaning and purging” the city, importing “a calm and powerful
architecture”—that is to say, the purportedly true variety that steel, plate
glass, and reinforced concrete as designed by him brought with them. Le
Corbusier never got to destroy Stockholm, but architects inspired by his
doctrines have gone a fair way toward doing so. As the blurb to the 1964
edition of The Radiant City prophetically puts it, the book is
“a blueprint for the present and the future . . . a classic work on
architecture and city planning.”
A terminal inhumanity—what
one might almost call “ahumanity”—characterizes Le Corbusier’s thought and
writing, notwithstanding his declarations of fraternity with mankind. This
manifests itself in several ways, including in his thousands of architectural
photos and drawings, in which it is rare indeed that a human figure ever
appears, and then always as a kind of distant ant, unfortunately spoiling an otherwise
immaculate, Platonic townscape. Thanks to his high-rise buildings, Le Corbusier
says, 95 percent of the city surface shall become parkland—and he then shows a
picture of a wooded park without a single human figure present. Presumably, the
humans will be where they should be, out of sight and out of mind (the
architect’s mind, anyway), in their machines for living in (as he so charmingly
termed houses), sitting on machines for sitting on (as he defined chairs).
This ahumanity explains Le Corbusier’s often-expressed hatred of streets
and love of roads. Roads were impressive thoroughfares for rushing along at the
highest possible speed (he had an obsession with fast cars and airplanes),
which therefore had a defined purpose and gave rise to no disorderly human
interactions. The street, by contrast, was unpredictable, incalculable, and
deeply social. Le Corbusier wanted to be to the city what pasteurization is to
cheese.
When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my
reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a
degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept,
and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might
be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people
with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or
substance: reinforced concrete, say.
Le Corbusier’s hatred of the
human went well beyond words, of course. What he called the “roof garden” of
his famous concrete apartment block in Marseilles, the Unité d’Habitation,
consists of a flat concrete surface in which protrude several raw concrete
abstract shapes and walls. Le Corbusier wanted no other kind of roof henceforth
to be built anywhere, and wrote passionately denouncing all other “primitive”
kinds of roof. One might have hoped that Le Corbusier’s characterization of
this concrete wasteland as a garden would have occasioned derision; instead,
pictures of it are reproduced as evidence of his inventive genius.
The only city Le Corbusier ever built, Chandigarh in India, is another
monument to his bleak vision. In the London exhibition, pictures of it were
shown to the sound of beautiful classical Indian music, as if some intrinsic
connection existed between the refined Indian civilization and ugly slabs of
concrete. Le Corbusier’s staggering incompetence—the natural product of his
inflexible arrogance—was revealed, no doubt unintentionally, by pictures of the
large concrete square that he placed in Chandigarh, totally devoid of shade. It
is as if he wanted the sun to shrivel up the human insects who dared to stain
the perfect geometry of his plans with the irregularities that they brought
with them.
His ahumanity makes itself evident also in his attitude toward the past.
Repeatedly, he talks of the past as a tyranny from which it is necessary to
escape, as if no one had discovered or known anything until his arrival. It is
not that the past bequeaths us problems that we must try our best to overcome:
it is that the entire past, with few exceptions, is a dreadful mistake best
destroyed and then forgotten. His disdain for his contemporaries, except those
who went over to him without reserve, is total: but a stroll through the
Parisian suburb of Vincennes, to take only one example, should have been enough
to convince him, or anyone else, that right up to World War I, architects had
been capable of building differently from, but in harmony with, all that had
gone before. These architects, however, were not mad egotists determined to
obtrude their names permanently on the public, but men content to add their
mite to their civilization. At no point does Le Corbusier discuss the problem
of harmonizing the new with what already exists.
In denouncing Gothic architecture, for instance, Le Corbusier says:
Gothic architecture is not, fundamentally, based on spheres, cones and
cylinders. . . . It is for that reason that a cathedral is not very beautiful.
. . . A cathedral interests us as an ingenious solution to a difficult problem,
but a problem of which the postulates have been badly stated because they do
not proceed from the great primary forms.
So now we know why people like Chartres and Rheims Cathedrals! They solve
badly formulated problems! Le Corbusier reminds me of the father of a Russian
friend of mine, a man who was the greatest Soviet expert on plate glass, who,
on visiting London for the first time, looked up at a modernist block of
Corbusian design that ruined an eighteenth-century square and said, referring
to some aspect of its plate glass, “That is an interesting solution to the
problem.”
The most sincere, because unconscious, tribute to Le Corbusier comes from
the scrawlers of graffiti. If you approach the results of their activities
epidemiologically, so to speak, you will soon notice that, where good
architecture is within reach of Corbusian architecture, they tend to deface
only the Corbusian surfaces and buildings. As if by instinct, these uneducated
slum denizens have accurately apprehended what so many architects have expended
a huge intellectual effort to avoid apprehending: that Le Corbusier was the
enemy of mankind.
Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to
that of totalitarianism, to the spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity of
the interbellum years in Europe. Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a
creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. His plans for Stockholm, after all,
were in response to an official Swedish competition for ways to rebuild the
beautiful old city, so such destruction was on the menu. It is a sign of the
abiding strength of the totalitarian temptation, as the French philosopher
Jean-François Revel called it, that Le Corbusier is still revered in
architectural schools and elsewhere, rather than universally reviled.
