From acclaimed biographer and cultural historian, author of Balthus and Patron Saints—the first full-scale life of le Corbusier, one of the most influential, admired, and maligned architects of the twentieth century, heralded is a prophet in his lifetime, revered as a god after his death.

He was a leader of the modernist movement that sought to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. He predicted the city of the future with its large, white apartment buildings in parklike settings—a move away from the turn-of-the-century industrial city, which he saw as too fussy and suffocating and believed should be torn down, including most of Paris. Irascible and caustic, tender and enthusiastic, more than a mercurial innovator, Le Corbusier was considered to be the very conscience of modern architecture.

In this first biography of the man, Nicholas Fox Weber writes about Le Corbusier the precise, mathematical, practical-minded artist whose idealism—vibrant, poetic, imaginative; discipline; and sensualism were reflected in his iconic designs and pioneering theories of architecture and urban planning.

Weber writes about Le Corbusier’s training; his coming to live and work in Paris; the ties he formed with Nehru . . . Brassaï . . . Malraux (he championed Le Corbusier’s work and commissioned a major new museum for art to be built on the outskirts of Paris) . . . Einstein . . . Matisse . . . the Steins . . . Picasso . . . Walter Gropius, and others.

We see how Le Corbusier, who appreciated goverments only for the possibility of obtaining architectural commissions, was drawn to the new Soviet Union and extolled the merits of communism (he never joined the party); and in 1928, as the possible architect of a major new building, went to Moscow, where he was hailed by Trotsky and was received at the Kremlin. Le Corbusier praised the ideas of Mussolini and worked for two years under the Vichy government, hoping to oversee new construction and urbanism throughout France. Le Corbusier believed that Hitler and Vichy rule would bring about “a marvelous transformation of society,” then renounced the doomed regime and went to work for Charles de Gaulle and his provisional government.

Weber writes about Le Corbusier’s fraught relationships with women (he remained celibate until the age of twenty-four and then often went to prostitutes); about his twenty-seven-year-long marriage to a woman who had no interest in architecture and forbade it being discussed at the dinner table; about his numerous love affairs during his marriage, including his shipboard romance with the twenty-three-year-old Josephine Baker, already a legend in Paris, whom he saw as a “pure and guileless soul.” She saw him as “irresistibly funny.” “What a shame you’re an architect!” she wrote. “You’d have made such a good partner!”

A brilliant revelation of this single-minded, elusive genius, of his extraordinary achivements and the age in which he lived.

In 1938, while visiting a new villa built by the Irish designer Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier was inspired to improve on her work. He admired the white-walled classicism and industrial finesse of the home, which was built in the spirit of his own domestic architecture. But he thought it needed a little something.

And so Le Corbusier stripped naked, took out his paint brushes and covered... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the house with large, sexually provocative images. "One of the murals was on the previously spare white wall behind the living-room sofa, so that what had been specified by Gray to be a point of visual respite was now an animated scenario," writes Nicholas Fox Weber in his new biography, "Le Corbusier: A Life." Gray, who admired Le Corbusier and was, like many architects, proprietary about her work, felt "raped" by the incident.

Le Corbusier — the Swiss modernist who, along with Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, laid down the commandments of 20th-century architecture — might have known better. After all, he became so enraged by how the art was hung in the house he built for the wealthy collector Raoul La Roche that he broke with his best friend at the time, the painter Amedee Ozenfant, who had perpetrated the unauthorized hanging: "I insist absolutely that certain parts of the architecture should be entirely free of paintings," he wrote.

But the modernist sensibility that gave his domestic architecture in the 1920s a lean, machine-like efficiency — houses such as the classic Villa Savoye, tethered to the earth with thin, white columns, like a land-ship floating on grass — didn't look so compelling when worked out on a larger scale. As an urbanist — one of the previous century's most radical and dark visionaries of the city — he proposed ideas that still make us shudder: isolated, repetitive skyscrapers, facing grand empty plazas, linked by highways. If he had had the free hand he wanted to remake Paris, with new airports, highways and high-rises, all of France might have felt as "raped" as Gray did.

Fortunately, as becomes clear in great detail in this biography, he was utterly obnoxious. He preferred wielding the absolute intellectual control more common to a solitary painter than to an architect, who must collaborate with others. Relations with clients and even prospective clients often ended in acrimony, and he left voluminous amounts of work unrealized. His client La Roche, Weber notes, "was a man of exceptional humor." But it must have taken Olympian forbearance to deal with Le Corbusier's tantrum over the paintings — especially given that the project was over budget, walls had to be redesigned and rebuilt during construction, windows didn't work, and there were lighting problems that took years to resolve. "It's six months since I moved in and I am still obliged to use illumination which ... relies on ad hoc arrangements," La Roche wrote plaintively.

He wasn't the only one to complain about the architect's work. Le Corbusier designed a home for his strict, Swiss Protestant parents in 1912, but blew through their modest budget. The simple watchmaker and his music-teacher wife were financially wiped out and forced to sell it only a few years later. When he finally built them a more reasonable house in 1923-25, it leaked and the heating was balky. For decades, as her son became perhaps the most famous living architect, building a whole city from scratch in India, revolutionizing public housing with his Unite d'Habitation in Marseille and redefining the possibilities of concrete at his chapel in Ronchamp, his mother wrote him long, wheedling letters, complaining about the structure.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier invented the name we know him by, which suggests the degree to which he thought of himself as a self-made object, larger than his humble origins. But he told his mother almost everything, from small slights to towering rages, including substantial, though circumspect, confessions of his sexual loneliness. She lived to be almost 100 years old, preceding him in death by only five years, so their correspondence covers almost all of his career.

Weber's book is billed as the "first full-scale life of Le Corbusier," but this lengthy tome was cobbled together from undigested — and often indigestible — letters from the architect to his family, including baby-talk missives to his difficult and alcoholic wife. In the earlier years of his career, he also wrote libidinally charged flights of Nietzsche-esque gibberish to the older, German music critic William Ritter. We never really learn what Ritter — who, as an openly gay man in the early 20th century, was himself a remarkable figure — thought of these screeds. Was he a bemused mentor? Or living by proxy through the life of a younger man?

Questions aren't just left unanswered in "Le Corbusier," they are not even asked. After an introductory chapter that begins with the architect's funeral in 1965 (Andre Malraux gave the homily), the author begins a relentless forced march, day by day, year by year, through the architect's life. Weber devotes little space to Le Corbusier's historical or architectural context, and makes very little attempt to answer the larger questions about his political and artistic philosophy. Often the architect's actions, as revealed in this biography, indicated that he was really an anti-modernist — a deeply traditional man devoted to age-old notions of home and hearth and the submissive role of women. Was he? In this personality-driven account, Weber fails to examine Le Corbusier's contradictions or any of the received ideas about the man's importance or his legacy.

Granted, the blow-by-blow method — the ups and downs, the manic highs of a new commission, the furious rants against "treacherous bastards," enemies and critics — fits Le Corbusier's monomaniacal, narcissistic and pugilistic temperament. And it's fascinating to see the daily detail of his darkest chapter, his concerted and disgusting efforts to win commissions from the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France. (He also courted work in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mussolini's Italy, and socialized with French fascists, bigots, rabid nationalists and Nazis.) Weber seems to take the architect at his word that he was interested in a humane revolution within architecture, making it more alert to man's needs, regardless of politics.

But there's ample evidence that he wasn't just an architectural opportunist, but was deeply sympathetic with the authoritarian impulses of even his most noxious would-be clients. And though it is nothing new to anyone who has grappled with Le Corbusier, his romance with the destructive energies of the 20th century — the cleansing power of war, the brutal restructuring of whole societies — is felt in this biography with disturbing force. There was method in Le Corbusier's mad egotism — he saw himself almost as a primal force of history — whether he was defacing another architect's house or celebrating plans for remaking the city of Saint-Die, heavily bombed in 1944: "Saint-Die was systematically destroyed in 3 days," he once remarked. "A splendid problem."

Unfortunately, small errors and, worse, cliches compound this biography's lack of analysis. He groups the French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier with Olivier Messiaen and Stravinsky as composers of modern music heard at the inauguration of the chapel at Ronchamp (perhaps Le Corbusier's greatest work). Charpentier was born in 1643. Le Corbusier's wife is described as having suffered from the unlikely injury of breaking "her femur at mid-calf." Architectural descriptions that are often meaningless (unenlightening comparisons to symphonic music), bland (buildings are "completely poetic") or hyperbolic ("The triumphant building was unlike anything that had ever existed before") make one doubt the author's basic powers of visual description and his grasp of architecture.

It's almost as if the book weren't edited. This is a major cultural figure, sketched by the author of more than a dozen previous books and published by a major press. It's not that Le Corbusier deserves better. He was brilliant, but a monster. A fascinating biography might be written not about his heroic accomplishments — the banishment of everything unessential, the successful translation of classic architectural values into a new modernist language — but about the heroic resistance to his destructive ideas. Curious readers, however, do deserve better. There's far more to understand about Le Corbusier than his relationship with Mom.

Philip Kennicott, the Post's culture critic, writes frequently about architecture.

Reviewed by Philip Kennicott, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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The influential yet oft-maligned architect Le Corbusier is the focus of this biography by Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The author used access to Le Corbusier's letters to his confidant William Ritter, his parents, and his wife and lovers among other sources to write the story of the man considered the leader and the very conscience of modern architecture, a man who worked under the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy, and the Vichy France before renouncing that government and working for de Galle. As the first substantial biography of Le Corbusier, this book will no doubt belong on the shelves of many architects, architectural and art historians, and historians. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

“Full of provocative insights and welcome surprises.”

–The New York Times

“The deeply felt tribute to Le Corbusier’s work is enriched by Weber’s engrossing, entertaining portrait of his complex personality.”

–Kirkus Reviews, starred

Weber delves into the life of one of the most influential, admired, and maligned architects of the 20th century. Le Corbusier, designer of the United Nations headquarters, was a leader of the controversial modernist movement that sought to create a better society through innovative urban planning.

Nicholas Fox Weber was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Columbia College and Yale University. He is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the author of thirteen previous books, among them The Clarks of Cooperstown, Balthus, Patron Saints, and The Art of Babar. He and his wife, the novelist Katharine Weber, live in Bethany, Connecticut, and Paris. They have two daughters.