When war broke out in August 1914, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier] was exempted from military duty in the Swiss army because of his bad eyesight. [...]Years later, Le Corbusier claimed publicly that he had done his military service by directing the construction of roads. Considering French soldiers "a marvel, nothing could be finer, more robust," he implied that he had been among their ranks, but it was a fantasy.
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In September 1914, Jeanneret received news of the partial destruction of the cathedral at Reims. He wrote [William] Ritter, "I'm profoundly disturbed by the spectacle of these fallen stones. Reims destroyed. All I had to do was to consult images of this unique, ineffable vessel of glory in the fantastic structure of its stones in order to feel a decisive hatred, somewhat equivalent to the sadness you must be feeling. Oh, I promise you my architect's soul is suffering." That catastrophic damage to a masterpiece horrified him: "These stones arched over a tabernacle and the eloquent relics within - now hurled to the ground by a pig named Wilhelm or Kronprinz." He called it "a cruel nightmare. Everything crumbles before these criminals, and so many men will die who were beacons in the darkness."
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The cruel reality of war did, however, lead him to develop a brilliant concept of housing for the victims of bombs.
Dom-ino was a form of housing conceived for the victims of war. Based on standard elements that could be combined quickly at low cost, it could exist anywhere.
[...] Jeanneret planned entire Dom-ino complexes to replace areas that had been destroyed by the war. This early idea of mass production - dedicated to the well-being of all inhabitants, respectful of human scale - was to have echoes in the city planning with which he altered the face of civilization.
[...] Dom-ino is one of many designs today associated with the name of Le Corbusier where credit should be shared; Max Du Bois was only the first of many people to feel that Le Corbusier erased his significance from history.
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Early in June, Jeanneret went to the south of France to meet Auguste Perret. The first leg of the journey was a train from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Lausanne. [...]
Changing trains with his temporary ward in Lausanne, he witnessed a heartbreaking scene on the platform that both saddened him and awakened his voyeurism. A woman had accompanied her fiancé, a soldier, from Geneva to Lausanne, where he was being mobilized to Italy.
[...] Continuing on his journey, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret became increasingly devastated by the wounded soldiers, young wives in mourning, and military men armed for battle. With his penchant for good machinery, he admired the weaponry - "The first bayonet. A terrible device at the end of a rifle. Long, black, splendidly sleeved" - but even if he respected the mechanism, he was shattered by its significance. "The afternoon Lyon-Marseille express, dear friend, is the train of women in mourning. Black crepe in almost every compartment."
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Faced with the human suffering wrought by the war, Jeanneret was anguished by Swiss neutrality and his own distance from the action he was witnessing in France but had essentially ignored at home.
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Jeanneret wrote Ritter that he greatly admired Auguste Perret's Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and regretted not having been able to accept his former boss's invitation to return to Paris and work on it: "As far as I'm concerned, it's the best piece of architecture in a long time. Auguste Perret has no diploma, he tells me. His thoughts are permanently molded, like reinforced concrete." Here was a role model to replace L'Eplattenier. Modern technique, steadfast resolve, no official credentials: these were the ingredients of genius.
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The love affair with that exotic seaside city [Marseille] was, after yet another world war, to culminate in one of Le Corbusier's masterpieces (Unité d'habitation).
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After war broke out in 1914, [Aristide] Maillol had buried his statues to protect them against enemy bombs. That act led to Maillol's being accused of spying for the enemy. A public prosecutor issued a search warrant to try to find grounds for arresting Maillol for treason, and, although the investigating judges dismissed the charges, a mob burned Maillol's workshop.
When Jeanneret met Maillol, he felt immediate sympathy for someone he considered, like himself, society's victim. And he admired Maillol's robust, overtly sensual sculptures, which were like spirited fertility symbols.
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The milestone of Jeanneret's thirtieth birthday was looming. When he was invited to Frankfurt to work on some municipal building projects, he accepted. But at the passport office in Neuchâtel, as he stood at the wooden counter awaiting the visa stamp, he changed his mind.
Having walked into that office to gain the right to move to Germany, he requested a passport for an unlimited time period in France.
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The Paris Jeanneret encountered when he arrived on February 9, 1917, had been torn asunder by aerial bombardment. Many people were at the brink of starvation and everyone felt constant danger. But to the young man from the Alps, the French metropolis was "the crucible, the diapason, and the torch."
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Jeanneret became absorbed by the prostitutes he studied and coveted in the Métro. [...]
But sex was often a struggle for him: "The act of love is rather complicated to perform; it requires special circumstances. I no longer manage to have my old magnificent erections."
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The act of sex and the making of buildings were inextricably linked in Charles-Edouard Jeanneret's mind. Going to brothels and realizing architecture required similar determination; the challenge was to get from the fantasy stage to efficacy. In his diary to Ritter, Jeanneret wrote, "I'm an architect, a builder. I like my drawing tables on their trestles, my telephone, my typewriter. I like the hiss of automobile tires and the clamor of the street. I'm not a castrato. I'll pay my visits to that seething Montmartre sloping up toward Saint-Augustin."
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At the end of April 1917, Jeanneret sent a postcard to Ritter from Chartres. It was of a single thirteenth-century figure from the North Portal, a solemn woman, looking downward, carved with great dignity, who represented "la Vie Contemplative."
On this card showing another tormented observer frozen into inaction, Jeanneret wrote, "Yes. Alas, one must look ahead and fulfill one's destiny. This cathedral is as much the house of the Devil as of God. The tragic heroism of these stones deserves a portico of hell; here, in a titanic effort, man expresses his own damnation. No one could imagine Chartres from looking at other cathedrals: the foundations are like the successive movements of a symphony and of fatally incomplete thunders: there is moonlight in these stones, and an unheard uproar."
World events were making his incertitude worse. In February, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the monarchy in Russia. On April 6, the United States had entered the war in Europe. No place seemed stable, even if the epidemic of mutiny in France had been ended when Henri Pétain, the new commander in chief and future Maréchal, and Georges Clemenceau, the new premier, restored order.
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In May, Jeanneret founded the Société d'Entreprises Industrielles et d'Etudes, leasing a new office at 29 bis rue d'Astorg - a location near the Madeleine that put him at the center of bustling, commercial Paris. In his free time, he dedicated himself to watercolors.
Beyond that, on October 16, ten days after his thirtieth birthday, he opened an enterprise to manufacture reinforced-concrete bricks.
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The big break occurred when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was asked, at last, to submit a design for an architectural project of substantial scale. It was to be in Challuy - near Nevers, in the center of France. "Right now I'm studying a big slaughterhouse," he wrote.
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At the end of January 1918, he was on the Pont des Arts, a lovely bridge spanning the Seine between the Left Bank and the Louvre, when a bomb exploded. An air alert a few minutes earlier had sent most people to the Métro or to cellars, where they huddled together and enjoyed the protection of being underground. Jeanneret had opted to be among a smaller group out in the open air, facing the spectacle directly. Standing there brazenly, looking up and down the Seine, the young Swiss took in the bombing as a concert of sounds and a visual panoply. Transfixed by the explosions, he felt no fear and experienced no horror.
The next day, he wrote Ritter, "Yesterday I watched the bombing from the Pont des Arts. I couldn't make anything out of it. There were a good fifty of us on the bridge listening to the roar of the cannons, the enormous explosions close by, watching the glow of fires. Bombs were exploding a hundred meters from us; we didn't realize they were bombs." He was as interested in this lack of cognition as in the horrific event itself.
It was the beginning of the heaviest action of the war in Paris. Yet, two weeks later, Jeanneret tried to be as circumspect as possible to his parents: "The spectacle was fascinating, the sound of it overwhelming... But in the roar of the cannons and the violent explosion of the bombs, I couldn't tell what was happening, and it was only next day that I realized that this time the Goths had reached Paris and were actually spitting their bullets. Now the moon is back; the Boches will return with it. Right this moment, during this freezing night, you can hear the hum of pursuit planes: the moral security offered to the Parisians." The only thing that terrified Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was the prospect of missing the excitement.
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An art collector he knew, Barthélémy Rey, was killed by the Germans directly in front of the Ministry of War, at the moment of presenting himself to enlist. The event was a turning point in Jeanneret's life. He realized he had to summon incredible toughness and self-mastery just to endure. He wrote his parents, "So now we have bombs all the time, which means that the women are hysterical."
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On July 4, Jeanneret joined the spectators watching the American soldiers march through the streets of Paris. No one else could have seen or heard that event in the same way, or calibrated human behavior as he did. He wrote in his diary, "July 4: Independence Day. American troops by the thousand paraded stiffly across the place de la Concorde in an oppressive silence, faces impassive above their helmet straps, though a few flowers were tossed. A strange stream of massive steel followed, rumbling tanks maneuvering slowly down the boulevards. Soldiers of the Second Crusade, with the sentiment that, having come here from so far away in order to die, it was for God or his equivalent; the innumerable crowd manifested in stupefaction the fruits of their victory over the demoniac madman. There followed the YWCA, homely and clumsy women in Salvation Army outfits, here to save the world. [...] There was great enthusiasm all over the country, a huge rush of confidence. America had surpassed all expectations, it had confounded all expectations. Mammon? no; a Protestant preacher in a black frock coat, yes. Wilson - Peter the Hermit. These cowboys in the Paris of eternal grisettes, in the festivities celebrated among the trees and in the clouds, were, for all their athletes' build, communicants of a sort on church steps: the fields of Champagne, the hills of the Vosges. These troops of bodies efficient as machines would serve to give Hindenburg the poignant terrors of nightmare."
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When After Cubism appeared following the armistice, Jeanneret and [Amédée] Ozenfant were convinced that their cry for artistic revolution at this transitional moment of history was the most important doctrine of the new era. Their manifesto begins with a flourish: "The war over, everything is reorganizing, clarifying, and focusing; factories are being built; already nothing is what it was before the war: the great rivalry has tested everything, has discarded senile methods and replaced them with those which the struggle has proved to be superior... Never since Pericles had thought been so lucid."
Ozenfant and Jeanneret's premise was that Cubism, embraced by a decadent bourgeoisie, was inadequate for the changed civilization. What was needed instead was a new, orderly world, in which science and art would function in tandem. Machinery, industrialization, and technology were the modern gods; painting and architecture should reflect their capabilities and truthfulness.
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On November 12, the day the armistice became official, the Americans jumping and dancing in the streets of Paris again struck Jeanneret as different from other people.
Riveted by these revelers from across the Atlantic, he decided that they had the boldness and directness of their silos and factories. Black and white, they kissed one another and threw dollars in the air. "The women want to spend their dollars and they want that sensation in that little vice of theirs - the transoceanic sensation," Jeanneret raved to Ritter.
The armistice itself, however, was a nuisance. He and Ozenfant were supposed to have their exhibition open at Thomas Tableaux at just the time when people were too busy celebrating, and Jeanneret resented the intrusion on his career. On November 20, he complained, "The show had to be postponed on account of the armistice. The armistice has disorganized a lot of things. People have been celebrating for the last eight days. Not me, of course."
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1-q8zwkkhn8Vz3bvuFA2cCkVJOwQ3-SeA
http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/kunst_architektur/architekten-in-uniform-1.18369441
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Sant'Elia
