The infarcted machine, no longer fit for living in, lifted from the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the morning of 27 August 1965 was that of a (just) former man, definitely dead. The corpse’s namesake, far from dead, was, and remains, a by-word for sculptural, architectural, urbanistic intolerance and shrill sectarianism that have shaped the world to this day. The factions have often been riven by internecine handbags: but no one could pick a fight with Le Corbusier like Le Corbusier himself. No one could reject an idiom that he had spent 20 years perfecting and distributing throughout the world with such offhand selflessness even if that selflessness is wholly misread by people who should know better: ignorant columnists, our misled king’s architecturally illiterate advisers, the idiot patrons of Quinlan and Francis Terry, the soi-disant philosophers who champion all that is beige in the name of restraint, the gentleman aesthetes for whom architecture is little beyond the application of motifs stolen, meaninglessly, from a bottomless store of “tradition” — a banal sort of exterior decoration which deplores imagination and sates itself with Testo-Max symmetry, the favoured form of the tyrant.
Le Corbusier — the bogusly matey “Corb” is to be resisted — grew up in the francophone Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds on, so far as he was concerned, the wrong side of the French border. Like Jean-Luc Godard some years later, he became a French citizen: both were mildly Helvetophobic, unattracted by ski-lifts, horology and rösti. Though Le Corbusier did not acknowledge it until much later the town made more impression on him than he did on it with a few prentice villas for family and friends which wave to art nouveau. La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century. Its grid pattern, unique in Switzerland, is omnipresent. It is a relentless rectilinear labyrinth which offers no relief, its axes are incarcerating. They lead to repetitive vanishing points. This would provide the template for the thwarted urbanistic projects which blighted Le Corbusier’s career. It fed the animus held by the enemies of modernism in the Twenties who failed to distinguish between Le Corbusier, architect of genius whose work shaped a century and — often apparently unrelated — Le Corbusier, utopian oddball (or hurluberlu). This wisenheimer’s megalomaniac schemes were not invariably recognised as the deadpan jests he partially intended, probably. Did he really expect to demolish much of Haussmannian Paris? Did he really expect to build 18 Cités Radieuses in a row in Marseille? He hid expressionlessly behind a prankster’s mask of the heaviest black-framed glasses that a human nose could support: frailer schnozzles have been defeated.
It is indisputable that modernism in its various forms has won. Won what? Just look around you. (Unless, that is, you are in a British “housing” hutch or a “unit” of volume building.) Over half a century ago John Summerson noted that the architecture which demanded to be qualified by “modern” would soon no longer require a prefix. It would become architecture, tout court. Its debt to Le Corbusier would be immeasurably vast — and immeasurably third hand. A notion — playful or earnest, rational or fantastical or all of those, simultaneously — will, whatever its tenor, beget variations and dissipations, improvements and diminutions. Glasgow’s former Metropolitan College and Stirling and Gowan’s flats at Ham Common are obvious examples. Le Corbusier has been ripped off with abandon by the hackery which knows his work only from videos or low-quality images on a phone. Architecture can be represented in many ways, by far the worst of them is one dimensional.
A minor nuisance suffered by those, like me, whose home is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the abundance of tourists who mill about the place. But at least they acquire some notion of the building as a living organism even if its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea. We seldom pick lice out of our fur. Many of the guided tourists clearly have no idea why they are being directed though these corridors which are not so different from those in the blocks they live in. Now and again one of them dares to ask a passing exhibit why it lives here. What’s it like? What are those strange receptacles beside the front doors? (Ice boxes, daily refilled before the advent of the golden age of white goods.)
“Its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea.”
I guess this exhibit lives here because it can’t afford Blenheim or even Eastbury, the remaining wing of Vanbrugh’s third great house. But, generically there is a correspondence: the work of a supreme architect who was (in Vanbrugh’s case at least) a marvellously funny writer, the sense of being swaddled by concrete, cosetted by details realised with wit. The late Jim Cadbury Brown, whose wife Betty described Le Corbusier as an indefatigable groper, compared the Cité Radieuse’s solid clunkiness to a Bristol motor car. Piers Gough, whose work shares that quality, exclaimed, the first time he made a tour of the building: “This isn’t a modern work… this belongs to the arts and crafts.” That is one chasm which separates Le Corbusier from his followers, persons of blind goofy devotion who recall Eugène Burnand’s fanatics hurrying through a Millet-shaped landscape. “So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulchre.” (St John 20.3)
Le Corbusier was, then, a magnet, a secular idol who, absolutely bereft of religion, created in his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp near Belfort the supreme ecclesiastical structure of his age. But it might have been an eye-catcher, a stable, a sty, a bar. It belongs to refulgent architecture, to man’s craft and ingenuity, rather than to a clapped-out faith and its murky prescriptions, sick men’s dreams which demand no empirical validation.
