100 Years of Le Corbusier

That October the sixth, in the year two thousand and twenty, is the one hundred and thirty-third birthday of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret would be unremarkable except that at the age of 33 he morphed into Le Corbusier, the equivocal Olympian god of modern architecture in the 20th century. Or at least some think of him that way (and I am one of them).

That makes this the 100th birthday of Le Corbusier, born in 1920 as the alter ego of Jeanneret. I remember Elvis Costello interviewing and playing with Elton John, where they each referenced their prior names as distinct and different people; ‘back when I was Reggie Dwight’. It wasn’t just when he was called Reggie Dwight, but when he was Reggie Dwight.

Jeanneret became Le Corbusier and his work transformed, leaving behind a portfolio of Swiss houses (culminating in the Villa Schwob) and starting a decade of increasingly refined, white (“by law, all buildings should be white” he opined) utterly modern and doctrinaire houses, mostly in and around Paris. Each house is an argument for a set of ideas, capped with the iconic Villa Savoye. And what followed was decades of unpredictable forms, materials, logic, bluster and marketing.

Le Corbusier might be such an object of fascination not just because of the utterly marvelous things he created, but because he was constantly inventing something new and constantly reinventing himself. One could almost wrap each volume of the Oeuvre Complete in a different book jacket and imagine 8 different architects.

I was carrying one volume through my office (there is a fantastic little sketch of Friari, in Venice) to show a client and a guest remarked “oh, the ideas book!”. And of course that is exactly right; ‘the man is non-stop’ to quote another polymath describing another genius (Lin-Manuel Miranda on A. Hamilton). In his 44 years as LC his output was not just prolific, but stunning in its range.

Like the authors of so many of our most admired works he was an incredible asshole. He vandalized Eileen Grey’s E1027 with murals while she was away, so horrifying her that she never returned to the villa (and ironically his fame saved the now-famous building from destruction). He back-dated designs to be the first, including his consulting work on the UN buildings in NYC. He took credit for Charlotte Perriand’s remarkable furniture, now as iconic as anything he built. He was anxious to build for the Vichy (read Nazi) French government and was a reputed anti-Semite. And he made those bulky round black eyeglasses impossible to wear without looking like a wannabe (or worse, a Philip Johnson admirer!).

He produced a stream of the most remarkable manifestations (and manifestos) of modern architecture; not always perfect, not always sensible by today’s standards, but nonetheless the most prolific body of modern architectural, era-defining works ever produced.

So Happy 100th Birthday Le Corbusier (and happy 133rd birthday Charles-Edouard Jeanneret)!