A new book, Le Corbusier: A French Fascism by Xavier de Jarcy, cites evidence showing that the Franco-Swiss architect not only held fascist and anti-Semitic views, but was in fact a member of a militant fascist group.
“Personally, I was very shocked,” says the author. “I found it hard to accept. You need time to absorb that kind of information.”
Personally, I’m not shocked at all. And I don’t need any time to absorb that information. For Le Corbusier’s totalitarian outlook can be easily inferred not only from his writings but, more tellingly, from his day job.
Le Corbusier’s architectural ideas, realised or otherwise, scream fascism as loudly as anything produced by Albert Speer or other exponents of totalitarianism by artistic means.
Unlike Speer, however, Le Corbusier left a legacy of lasting damage, as so appropriately demonstrated by Centre Pompidou in Paris, the venue of the current exhibition of the architect’s work.
Le Corbusier is one of France’s cultural heroes, which makes him a demigod there. Criticism therefore equates blasphemy, to which the French respond with vigour only outdone by the Muslims.
So far Mr Jarcy hasn’t been eviscerated, beheaded or even shot, but the verbal violence to which he has been exposed is quite virulent.
Jarcy, says Frederic Migayrou, one of the exhibition’s curators, is a headline-grabber out “to create a media event”, tabloid-style.
Most of the evidence the wretch quotes, says the curator, is dated. Actually that’s hardly surprising, considering that Le Corbusier died in 1965 and hence has been unable to provide any fresh evidence in the intervening 50 years.
And “all the quotations on racism or fascism came from… private correspondence.” Presumably that makes the evidence inadmissable.
Then came the clincher, giving the lie to Jarcy’s insinuations: “Le Corbusier was also in contact with many architects close to communism [and] people thought he was a communist in exactly the same way.”
Mr Migayrou obviously thinks that fascism and communism are so incompatible that championing one precludes any association with the other.
This is nonsense, which can be confirmed in a couple of minutes by anyone glancing at reproductions of works by Nazi, Fascist and Soviet painters or sculptors, depicting the same muscular men and sinewy-breasted women holding up the institutional symbols of their ideology.
The swastika, fasces or hammer and sickle are incidental there. What matters is the spirit, or rather absence thereof. We aren’t looking at works of art – we’re looking at totalitarianism executed in pigment, stone or bronze.
The same goes for totalitarian architecture, except that it doesn’t just make an artistic statement. It also tells people how they must live, and even though at times various fascist ideologies differ aesthetically, they’re all united in their shared commitment to dehumanising humans.
Le Corbusier’s work screams totalitarianism in concrete, his preferred material. He didn’t care which totalitarian was in power, as long as Le Corbusier was his architect. Stalin, Laval, Mussolini, Hitler could all look at his designs and smile in that kindly, avuncular way of theirs.
That Le Corbusier was talented is as indisputable as it’s irrelevant. Albert Speer also had talent, and so did Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s personal architect. This only goes to show that, when driven by evil motives, a talented man can do more harm than a hack.
When you see today’s ugly, impersonal concrete structures giving parts of great European cities that unmistakeably Soviet je ne sais quoi, think of Le Corbusier. Think of him specifically in London, when looking at the Southbank, the Barbican or whole areas of tower blocks. It’s his vision, albeit executed by less talented men.
But never mind areas. Le Corbusier thought on the scale of whole cities, which he wanted to build or rebuild to the stencil he had in his fecund mind.
Of course rebuilding cities that already exist, such as Paris or Moscow, first means wiping the slate clean. That was exactly what Le Corbusier proposed to whomever was willing to listen, from Vichy to Stalin.
He wasn’t the only one, it has to be said. For example, at roughly the same time Kazimir Malevich proposed that the Kremlin, St Basil’s and the Bolshoi all be replaced with structures more in keeping with the technological Zeitgeist.
Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin proposed to perpetrate similar vandalism in Paris, and then on all continents. “Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires,” Le Corbusier wrote, “the solution is the same since it answers the same needs.”
He was particularly inspired by Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s charming Old Town. Le Corbusier could never see such a place without wishing to replace it with his mass-produced monstrosities, and he proposed to do just that.
No surprises there: totalitarians worship at the altar of uniformity. There was only one right way, and only Le Corbusier knew what it was.
The right way à la Le Corbusier was not only to drive people into soulless, inhuman slabs of concrete, but also to take their streets away. Not for him were places where people could walk, shop, chat with their neighbours.
He strove to replace streets with roads, zipping by his concrete boxes or, better still, underneath them, with the whole city raised on to stilts for that purpose. The stilts idea didn’t really catch on, but one can see cities of roads rather than streets all over America.
Antoni Gaudi, an architect at least equal to Le Corbusier in talent, sought to incorporate his own ideas into the existing townscape, enriching rather than destroying it. For Le Corbusier that sort of thing was too namby-pamby for words.
Masonry walls, according to him, had no right to exist, Gothic architecture was incoherent because it ignored primary forms – concrete and glass were God, and Le Corbusier was his prophet.
There’s no point arguing whether Le Corbusier was a fascist, communist or neither. He resided in that dark area where all totalitarians converge in their desire to override human nature and bend people to their will by every available means, violent, political, social – or architectural.