The ecology of modernism

Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow. By Anthony Flint. New Harvest; 256 pages; $25. Buy from Amazon.com

FEW doubt that Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, was one of the great architects of the 20th century. Few question that his more than 70 finished buildings and 30 books came to change how people thought about architecture. But there agreement ends. Rationalist planner or poet of space? Path-breaking genius or treacherous guide?

Getting Le Corbusier into focus is a challenge for any author, not least because he was all of those things. A great deal has already been written about him, too much of it either worshipful or blindly hostile. He himself worked hard at how he wanted his buildings to be seen and thought about. He was a masterbuilder with an unmatched feel for spaces and materials, but also a natural showman who fashioned a largely mythical personage that it is all too easy to be misled by.

Le Corbusier began publishing a comprehensive record of his work in sketches, designs and photographs when still in his 40s. Its eventual eight volumes included all his works, from the villa he designed as a self-taught teenager in Chaux-de-Fonds, the watchmaking Swiss town where he was born in 1887, to the important public and religious commissions he received after 1945. In between came signature houses in the 1920s and 1930s that embodied and promoted the modernist gospel: separate structure from skin; lift the building off the ground; open up inside space; lighten interiors with wraparound windows and utilise the roof.

He was (is this surprising?) neither nice nor easy. No structure known was large enough to contain his giant ego. Books about him that he authorised just before his death in 1965 stressed how innovative he was while downplaying the work of vital collaborators. These legacy volumes raked over lost competitions that the architect never forgot. They airbrushed his shabby campaign after the fall of France in 1940 to become architect-in-chief of Vichy’s authoritarian new order. Colleagues’ memoirs and previous biographical work have left little more to say about the costs of sharing a commission or a bedroom with genius.

Against that turbid background, Anthony Flint’s “Modern Man” sensibly does not try to do too much. Neither a survey of the buildings nor a psychological study, its strength lies in showing an architect at work. A knowledgeable and fluent writer on urban affairs, Mr Flint grasps that architecture depends not just on architects but also on clients, planners, contractors and engineers. He puts that understanding to good use in core chapters that track in detail how four uncontested masterworks came to be: the Villa Savoye outside Paris, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, the Chandigarh government centre in India and the French hilltop church at Ronchamp. He does the same for the Carpenter Arts Centre at Harvard, Le Corbusier’s only work in America.

“Modern Man” has fluff and digressions that a sharper edit would have cut. But those are minor flaws. A well-judged “Epilogue” reminds the reader of the critics, but comes down squarely on the great man’s side. The last word goes to an American architect, Andrès Duany, a leading anti-modernist, whom you might expect to be among Le Corbusier’s fiercest detractors. “I adore his stuff,” Mr Duany is quoted as saying. “I can’t help it.”