Becoming designer fashion information

"He lives in the extraordinary world of the acrobat" was how Le Corbusier referred to himself, describing his profession of architecture in My Work (published in 1960, five years before his death). Throughout the half century that he practiced, he had indeed managed to astound the world with his buildings. At the moment that he emerged in the mid-1920s, seemingly out of the blue, as the modern architect we now revere, he had already created a series of incredible villas for famous clients--art collectors and industrialists--as well as a fully fledged theory of urbanism. Catapulted into celebrity and controversy, here was an adopted citizen of Paris (then the center of the modern world) who provided complete answers as to how architecture should be made and, what is more, infused it with a moral imperative.

How did he do it? The exhibition "Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier," recently seen at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York City, attempted to answer these questions by revealing the architect's personal and professional roots. The show offered us a prehistory of Le Corbusier by mingling evidence of his intellectual and material culture (what he read, wrote and collected, and where he traveled) with his early production as a designer, decorator and architect (of jewelry, paintings, interiors, furniture, and relatively conventional villas for his parents and a few rich patrons). It charted the progress of a small-town star from the Swiss provincial town of La Chaux-de-Fonds who came to Paris in 1917 to make his name (literally, by changing it).

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret devised the name Le Corbusier to cover up the fact that he had written the majority of articles in the early issues of L'Esprit nouveau, an occasional periodical that he and Amedee Ozenfant published with Paul Dermee in Paris; it ran for 28 issues, from 1920 to 1925. The pseudonym was a version of Jeanneret's maternal grandfather's name (Lecorbesier) with "Le" separated for added glamour. The magazine became a platform for an investigation of art, design and architecture; it was, in essence, the manifesto for the editors' developing ideas. It incorporated the principles of Purism (a search for the ideal in manufactured forms or objet-types that was the subject of their paintings, as well as those of Leger) and a pared-down architectural esthetic stripped to simple forms and proportions. The culmination of this phase, just outside the scope of this exhibition, was the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, where their manifesto became an exhibition building designed and decorated by them and others.

The exhibition focused primarily on the period from 1907 to 1922, and extended from the early villas in La Chaux-de-Fonds done in a debased Beaux-Arts-cum-modern style to what we recognize as the classic modernist villas (1923-25, Paris) for Raoul La Roche and Albert Jeanneret (the latter structure now the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris) and the publication of his urbanist manifesto, Vers Une Architecture (1923). Curated by Stanislaus von Moos and Arthur Ruegg, both Swiss architects and distinguished architectural historians, the show came to New York from the small Langmatt Museum in Baden, Switzerland, accompanied by an important and necessary catalogue. In Switzerland, the exhibition was called "Der junge Le Corbusier" (The Young Le Corbusier), and what that title lacked in marketing buzz, it gained in accuracy and simplicity. The American title forced us to guess when Le Corbusier indeed became himself, without supplying the information clearly and precisely for us to be able to do so.

The exhibition displayed the architect's material culture (happily in line with the Bard Graduate Center's own recent decision to include design and culture in its expanded mission) to show his progress from petit-bourgeois Swiss watch engraver to self-proclaimed greatness. The curators took his artifacts and the books he chose to read and notate, and displayed them alongside his early efforts as intellectual, artist and architect. The development could be disconcerting, however, since often we needed to know what came next (outside the brief period covered by the show) to make sense of some of the juxtapositions. In terms of urbanism, we needed to keep a sense of a maturing process rather than dismiss him at this early date because he has, today, with his utopian schemes to replace entire cities with a few gargantuan towers, become a modernist pariah.

In the brilliantly simple opening room, the curators proposed a process of conceptual development by displaying a series of chairs; we moved from vernacular rush-seated armchairs chosen for his parent's house to a Thonet-style bent-wood armchair to a French metal garden chair. But understanding this selection required having in mind images of Le Corbusier's own chaise longue and basculant chair of the late 1920s to be able to complete the thought and understand the enormous strides he made in the 15year period of the exhibition. In other galleries we encountered examples of his books (Ruskin, Hegel, Romantic and Classical philosophers) in the context of his drawings or notes; here we were called upon to adduce the influences, or turn to sources outside the exhibition and catalogue for help.

His drawings, paintings, notebooks and photographs were more useful in re-creating the personal trajectory. Presenting these along with works by his teachers, such as Charles L'Eplattenier, and colleagues, such as William Ritter (both considered brilliant then, but now forgotten), gave us a sense of the relative sophistication of La Chaux-de-Fonds and of the overwhelming ambition of Le Corbusier to transcend its narrow bounds. As a center for watchmaking, La Chaux-de-Fonds was in regular contact with the worlds of advanced fashion and design. Its visitors were international, and its wealthy bourgeois inhabitants absorbed some of the culture that came as a by-product of its manufacturing.

In Le Corbusier's paintings and watercolors before 1918, we could watch him aspire to Fauvist flower painting, to Swiss and German Expressionist watercolors, and to the drawing style of Ruskin, among other influences. In 1918 he painted the first picture he acknowledged, La Cheminee, a severe representation of a mantelpiece with books and a white cube--what the catalogue calls a "conceptual picture upon which he built his reputation as an architect-painter." He floundered badly until he met Ozenfant in that same year, and they published the painting manifesto Apres le Cubisme and began to create what became their new Purist works. The small group of Purist paintings in the exhibition, dating from 1918 to 1922, and a fine Leger from MOMA, as well as an accompanying vitrine of objet-types, provided an elegant demonstration of this symbiotic flowering.

The exhibition charted in detail Le Corbusier's "grand tour," his idiosyncratic, modern version of the 18th-century aristocratic practice, that in effect completed his education. On journeys in Italy (1907 and 1911), France (1908-09) and Germany (1910 and 1911) he seems to have discovered and noted ways of describing space and articulating a personal vision of the Classical and Renaissance past. These thoughts appear and reappear in his writing, especially in L'Esprit nouveau, and infused his urbanist researches. In 1911, he also visited the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. Modified versions of the architectutal styles of these countries emerged much later, when the machine esthetic had been softened to become a massive vernacular in buildings such as the Maison Jaoul (1951). Again, we needed to know what came later.

The largest section of the exhibition dealt with Le Corbusier's furniture and early houses. The furniture that he designed for his parents, and for the watch-factory owners who were his first clients, is sophisticated and elegant, but scarcely modern. The same applies to the villas in Switzerland where the dominant Arts and Crafts esthetic (a high moral art imported from abroad) is modified by a chalet vernacular peculiar to the region. The exhibition was playful in its display of two examples of wallpaper (one his design, the other a conventional toile de Jouy) that he used, presumably without being morally compromised by their decorative qualities--something he eschewed in his later modern phases.