It was the dawn of a new century.
It was a new time with new opportunities. Everyone was seeing the world in new ways. New was it.
Like many of his artistic contemporaries in Paris, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris "believed that anyone could reinvent himself." For him and many of his friends, reinvention started with adopting a new single name by which the world would know you.
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris morphed his maternal grandfather's name "Lecorbesier" into the pseudonym, Le Corbusier, "The raven like one." Familiarity would distill the name further into simply "Corbu".
Born in Switzerland in 1887 close to the boarder of France, Corbu entered the Twentieth Century under the experimental teaching methodologies of Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of Kindergarten. His young mind gravitated to the arts while the industrial revolution exploded into ever new and more efficient machines.
The world was art and machines. The art of machines was changing the world as fast as the new printing presses were publishing the changing world.
Like everyone else, Corbu reinvented himself: as an educator, then an architect, then a city planner and a politician. This constant reinvention of focus allowed Corbu to experiment and discover things he may not have experienced outside this time of change.
And while Corbu embraced the new and the changing and the machine, he was first and always, the artist.
Color and sculpture was his foundation. His foundations strengthened through his careful study of the Golden Section and of human proportions. His own "Le Modular" and almost obsessive attention to the human scale of things kept him firmly rooted in architecture that worked. Architecture that was pleasing.
Corbu first experimented in residential architecture. He fully embraced his own axiom that "a home was a machine for living in." But he managed to keep the machine subservient to his own sensitive mandate of human scale and art.
He based his living machines on "L'Esprit Nouveau" (The New Spirit) as discussed in his book "Vers une Architecture" (Towards a New Architecture). He believed this new spirit was based on strict adherence to Five Principals Points. These are best illustrated in Villa Savoye (1929-1931).
1. Lift the bulk of the structure off the ground. Support it on "Pilotis" (concrete stilts)
2. Free the façade. Walls were to be non-bearing, in-fill between the stilts or columns with anything, including large expanses of glass.
3. Open the floor plan. No bearing walls meant floor plans could be opened.
4. Connect visually with the outdoors by the free use of expansive glass areas.
5. Put a garden on the roof. The slim and open concrete floors used as well for the roof, would allow displaced green space to reappear on the roof.
Important aspects in today's Green Movement come directly from these five points.
Open floor plans allow reduction in the cost of walls. It allows free movement of outside air and human energy. Non-bearing walls allow for large expanses of glass and less expensive non-structural materials. It allows easy and intimate connection to outdoor spaces and micro-environments. Around the world, gardens are appearing on roofs from small residential projects to sky-scrapers.
Corbu connected with Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany. The goal of the Internationalists was simple: The New was Freedom from the Old. But freedom from the old and experimentation for the sake of experimentation, sometimes lead to works that evolved less than sensitive or functional or practical.
Only when Corbu departed from this aesthetic foundation of humanness and connection to art and ventured into attempting to solve the global conditions of humanity, would critics raise their voices.
Corbu was a product of the times. The times measured consistency by how often and how quickly one could change into something different, how one might charge into something new. It was more important to challenge and explore and experiment than to focus into the perfecting of craft.
Style was calibrated by the degree of newness. Newness required style to morph so rapidly that the human connection, the human function, was sometimes circumvented.
Corbu proclaimed in "Vers une architecture", 1923, that, "The 'Styles' are a lie." He stayed true to his version of the truth and moved through experimentation fast enough to avoid being labeled with any particular style.
Corbu's interests grew to include large scale city planning based on the socialistic and utopian movement at the time. His foundation of art and sensitivity to human scale was loosing ground to a more universal, global perspective on the machine for living.
The machine became so important that it forgot the human reason for its being.
In 1947, Corbu organized his thoughts on city planning into "Unite d'habitation." He departed from the simple goals of his residential work, the dematerialization of walls and the opening of floors, the intimate connection to nature and dove into almost brutal expression of form and forced function.
Corbu believed that Henry Ford and the mass-produced automobile should carve urban living for the better. Corbu proposed leveling most of central Paris north of the Seine.
He would replace the slums of human squalor with giant blocks of cell-like apartments stacked sixty stories high. Human connection to each other and nature would happen in perfectly gridded parks connected by freeways and parking lots in the sky.
Corbu firmly believed that architecture built on this scale would avert revolution and war. Humanity had to be organized, compartmentalized. Man had to fit into "The Machine" as just another of the many gears of industrialization.
Corbu believed that his New Architecture would elevate the quality of life for the lower classes. Everybody would be equal. Everybody would have a living room and bedrooms, a garden terrace and a car. Everybody would have equal access to green space and to movement. Class distinction would be obliterated.
Corbu's vision expanded to include Ville Contemporaine, an entire Contemporary City of three million inhabitants, all living happily the same structured way.
Freedom was achievable through the architecture of conformity. Regularity was the new regulatory of reason.
Critic Norma Evenson slashed back, "The proposed city appeared to some an audacious and compelling vision of a brave new world, and to others a frigid megalomaniacally scaled negation of the familiar urban ambient."
Resilient Corbu again, reinvented his perspective.
He morphed from his Contemporary City to his "La Ville Radieuse" (his Radiant City). Corbu now suggested that families would be organized not based on their economic position or class distinction but on family size.
But it still didn't work.
Corbu's city planning ideas were ultimately rejected. He grew dissatisfied with capitalism, "a market subject to the passions of the people." He moved politically further right, to the far right.
Finally, Corbu left politics to the politicians and returned, wizened from his experience and experimentation, to the expression of his foundation of human proportion and art.
The architect who penned, "The Home is a machine for living in," reinvented himself one last time, back to the artist, back to the humanist. He admitted, "Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."
In my opinion, Corbu came back from the trip of tripping into politics loaded intellectually and emotionally with everything he needed to create his masterpiece of master pieces.
It is Notre Dame du Haut or the Chapel Ronchamp.
It is not a machine.
It is art.
It is poetry.
It is inspiring humanness for all humanity.
Corbu swam in the depths of experimentation and reinvention. He almost drowned in the dirty water of politics.
In the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris, August 27, 1965, humanity said good-bye to Le Corbusier, the world paid their respects to Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris.
Corbu had gone swimming against his doctor's orders. Bathers found his seventy-seven year old body floating in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
The day I do a building this well, I'll too be ready for a great long swim.
Keep your head above water. Always come back to the basics and do the basics well.
