Corboozing at Ronchamp

The great news is that a senior cadre of the Sisters of Clare (an offshoot of the Franciscans—the Assisi boy would be thrilled)—are moving to Ronchamp to make Notre Dame en Haut more of a church than it’s ever been. And Renzo Piano has accepted the challenge of designing a nunnery that will neither detract from God nor Corbusier. The real crisis is that 100,000 architecture buffs a year have turned the sacred shrine into a gawker religion. We’re counting on those old nuns to show those geeks how to bend their knees piously. There will even be ten secular bedrooms to accommodate travelers in search of Corbooms.

It happened that the summer of 1987, the centennial of Corbusier’s birth, I was madly beguiled by a Portuguese maiden in the Immigration Department of the City of Grenoble. I had headed for that sissy Alpine city because Serge Renaud, a Paris architect friend of mine, had said that the worker’s housing his father had made in Grenoble was even greater than his first big assignment in Ivry-sur-Seine, the Communist’s favorite part of the Capital. Its main streets were named after Maurice Throrez and its squares after Robespierre. And I had lived for several weeks in Ivry and thrilled to its public works. I went to the Immigration Department in Grenoble in search of maps and orientation, and explained that I was “an immigrant” from Philadelphia! Right? But that beguilement is another story. For later.

The main connection with Ronchamp was the train station in nearby Belfort. It was in yellow Constructivist brick, and a visual wonder. So I decided to stay overnight in Belfort to take a good look, which meant that the local train to Ronchamp arrived the next morning at 7:00 a.m. As a former Altar Boy, I was used to entering churches at ungodly hours. But it was locked so I turned with American directness to the rectory. Shall I say the Abbe who answered his own door was not in a charitable mood! “Vous Americains!” began his tirade. I prayed for Sanctifying Grace and told him tartly that he should be reading his Breviary at this hour not insulting Corbu Boosters. This stunned him, and before he realized what he was doing, he invited me into the Rectory rather than the Church I had come for.

I asked him how come a Swiss agnostic was assigned a pilgrimage church. He countered with a rhetorical questions. “Qui a cree le Temple de Solomon?" I got his point. "Not a Jew!" He showed me a small book he had written as a guide to “church” which he later inscribed to me. By eight o’clock he had opened his wine cellar and was treating me to his finest cru’s. And by nine a.m. he was unwrapping his collection of Corbu crafted pornographic drawings. Hmm. I began to wonder if the good Abbe was making a move on me. No such luck. I think he was just a bit ashamed of the sullenness of our first encounter. Needless to say I had almost no one to interfere at that early hour on a Monday with my delectation of my second most favorite building in the world.

If eggnostic beggars can be choosers in Heaven, I want God to know as soon as my papers are signed that my idea of eternal rapture is not communing with him but relishing my favorite buildings. I would present him with my own Pritzker Prizes. Number one of course would be Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water” (Bear Run, PA), two would be Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer’s Zeche Zollverein (Essen, Germany), third Ronchamp, fourth Oscar Niemeyer’s MAC art museum (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), fifth Mt.Saint Michel (Normandy, France), and so on and on—for eternity.

But because it was Corbu’s centennial year, I went on to organize what I called an ODD-I-SEE, a genre I first devised in 1982 to celebrate the golden anniversary of FLW’s founding of his first architectural slave labor camp in Taliesin, WI. USAirways was then only a lonely old local airline called Allegheny, but in an attempt to nationalize its customer base it set up “The Liberty Fare” (three weeks use of any or all of their routes for an absurdly cheap $175). I booked Phoenix immediately, soon I was being led around Taliesin West by Bruce Pfeiffer, their honcho. When I explained it was my way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Taliesin East, he gave me a blank look. It was on their calendar! (Later, I’m happy to report they booked some suitable events. Event invention.)

Not to be distracted, but I noticed that one structure had cement painted to look like redwood! “What gives,” I pleaded. It seems that when Frank arrived in Arizona he was dazzled by the way water sparkled in the irrigation sluices. He immediately decided to use a lot of local redwood in Taliesin West buildings. Wrong, Wright. When no water lubricates the redwood, the cruel sun literally liquifies the redwood right into the atmosphere. He “repaired” his dream with painted cement.

It reminds me now of my Alvar Aalto ODD-I-SEE in the centennial year of 1987. When I took my usual pre-breakfast walk in Helsinki around Finlandia, I was astonished to discover that the glorious travertine cladding had been stripped away. I tracked down a hard hatted engineer for an explanation. Finnish winters were finishing the travertine. Huge shards were dropping off on tourist’s heads! Can’t have that. But since the Finns are sentimental over their geniuses, there had been a long long harangue about whether they should stick with Alvar’s fondness for the Tuscan material (with thicker sheets and a better adhesive) or go with Granite that they knew could last cruel winter after winter.

They opted for travertine even though they knew it would cost many more millions in a few more years. Those lovely, loving Finns. After breakfast I went to the Finnish Architecture Museum to see the Aalto centennial show. Its epigraph was by the Master. “Never forget, architects can make mistakes”. That should be inscribed over the doors of every architecture school! More about that ODD-I-SEE later.

So back to Corbu. On my visits to or through Switzerland I used to stay in the little village of Lutry with Anita Elefant, a Brazilian student of mine back at Beaver College. She had married a Swiss Nestle exec unhappily, but had stayed at their marvelous residence on a ridge overlooking Lac LeMan. All divorces should so amicably dissolved. Aware of my Corbu binging, she and some Swiss friends took me into the Juras to see his home town, La Chaux de Fonds, ultimately to be known as the SWATCH capital of the world. Um. He didn’t study architecture at all. He studied watch design. Indeed I discovered there that his first award—at the Turin International Exposition of 1902—was for a modernistic watch design. Hmmm. A machine to keep time by!

Indeed his first buildings of any substance were there in his home town, Jugendstil villas of delectable refinement. His first building was another story that I only visited serendipitously.

On a train trip from Lausanne to Lutry, I fell into conversation, as is my traveling wont, with an interesting looking old geezer, who turned out to be the recently retired editor of the local paper in Vevey. That’s where Charley Chaplin ended up, or up ended, and it was on my prospective itinerary. He grandly offered me not only lunch at a hotel overlooking the lake that was so glorious it took your appetite away, but to show me the first modern house Corbu made—for his parents. (A nasty book could be written about how many architect’s parents had to suffer their offsprings’ growling pains.) This was used a ten meter module and abused unwittingly the promising new material we call cement. Alas, the stresses between summer’s heats and winter’s cold resulted in cracks that he ultimately covered over with aluminum cladding! Or that parents could be better module, for their experimenting geniuses.

A high point I knew had to be an inspection of the Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. Innocent that I was, I didn’t realize that the Genoa to Marseilles route along the Mediterranean littoral was Snatch Purse Alley. As you snooze dreamily, gangs of sneak thieves quietly open your chamber door and whisk anything that’s loose. Luckily, I wore my passport, credit cards, and other required impedimenta around my neck, so I wasn’t cleaned out. I’d still be washing dishes to get back on the road returning to America. I later read that techno crooks were squirting knockout gas under the doors so they could do their evil deeds with the victim knocked out. So I arrived at the Unite in a state of slight shock, which quickly dissolved as I chatted up the concierge who was clearly used to Archi-Geeks on their pilgrimage. We need a Chaucer to fully dramatize this aspect of late twentieth century traveling.

Serendipitously, a young woman nursing a baby heard my fractious French with the concierge and with an Franglish as marginal as my French asked me if I’d like to look inside an apartment. Would I ever?! As we left the elevator, she explained that most Unite-arians didn’t much go for Corbu’s Mezzanine Complex. Those few who keep alive his dream lived in what they called “pas prolonge” apartments. But those who like she wanted the space not the capricious two level view lived in “prolonge” flats. It had that old Bauhausey cement coldness that I’ve come to despise as the central sin of early Modernism. Personal appointments can reduce the barbarousness, but not destroy it.

I’m reminded of my 75th anniversary visit to Weissenhof outside Stuttgart. Mies van der Rohe wanted to liberate himself from the tacky reputation of creating a Denkmal in Berlin (1926) for the two leaders of the German Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. He dreamed of corralling over thirty internationally known architects to create a community of model dwellings. Corbu was to be his Starchitect! The two storied twin with terrace looked great on paper. Walking around it inside, it seemed like a prison, cold cement chambers. Last year one of his uninhabitable apartments became a Visitors Center. This year a Museum was created of the other apartments. This is kind of a pattern. Old Iconic Modern buildings never are torn down. They are transmuted into Visitors Centers, like the Old Farnsworth House in Plano, IL—a monument to Mies genius which didn’t know the difference between a work of art and a habitation.

My nursing mother wondered if I’d like to see a “pas prolonge” after having had a marvelous coffee in hers. Her mother in law lived in a “pas prolonge” across the hall! Her father had been a French colonial administrator with an absolute eye for world class African Art. I had trouble concentrating on the pas prolongevity of it, so enchanted was I by the sculpture. You win some, lose some. I ended my visit on the roof, where there were kids playing vigorously, in an unused for the moment swimming pool, and delectable views of Marseilles. I thanked them for their generous hospitality and got directions for the best bouillaibaisse in town at the harbor. I left town, for Saint Tropez, not so much to see how the other haves lived as to see a rare Seurat exhibition. I slept soundly in Toulon that night, ready for more Switzerland.

Corbu’s city planning schemes turned out to be destructive of community. But his heart was in the right place. His head, alas, was only loosely connected. We know, in retrospect, that Corbu was not responsible for the terrible tragedy of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. It was American racism that condemned the high rise in America to uncivil warfare. Minoru Yamasaki’s drafting table was civilized. The cities he worked for weren’t. We know from Ernst May’s 10,000 workers flats with their superbly designed Frankfurt Kitchens that 1920’s architecture could be civilized.