convincingly how effective the plebeian material of reinforced concrete could be. Another was Architect Peter Behrens of Berlin, whose glass-and-steel industrial buildings were pioneers. Jeanneret worked for both. He found Perret's reinforced concrete studio in Paris, with its glassed front wall, "a manifesto" in itself, and harked to Perret's belief that "decoration always hides an error in construction." At Behrens' studio, Jeanneret was apprenticed with the self-effacing son of a poor masonry contractor in Aachen. His name: Mies van der Rohe, who is now the U.S. master of the spare glass-and-steel skyscraper. At length Jeanneret opened an office in Paris "in a beastly little street, seventh floor, over a yard, in the servant's room."
"What Shall We Do?" One day in 19 14, Jeanneret drew a skeletal plan f or a two-story, prefabricated house of reinforced concrete that was so simple it might have been the design for a child's toy. It consisted of six columns, three horizontal concrete slabs, a cantilevered staircase--and that was all. But the simple plan for the Dom-ino house contained a principle that was to be basic to all of his planning thereafter. The six-column skeleton relieved the facades and the interior walls of support functions: they could thus be moved and molded at will, giving the architect all the prerogatives of the sculptor. The Dom-ino houses were never built, but they "enabled us to say: 'There are no walls in the house. What shall we do?' "
In the U.S., Louis Sullivan had long since pioneered the skyscraper, and his famous "Form follows function" was the slogan of a new "democratic architecture" that wanted to do away with classic facades, which had nothing to do with a modern building's purpose. His young associate, Frank Lloyd Wright, was already famous for low-slung geometric prairie houses that were so carefully wedded to the landscape that building and nature seemed one. In Germany, 28-year-old Walter Gropius, freshly graduated from Peter Behrens' studio, had put up his steel-and-glass Fagus factory, which was the most daring example so far of the now standard "curtain walls"--the skin of glass stretched over a steel frame. All this affected Jeanneret, but in the first years after World War I, it was painting that preoccupied him.
He had become the inseparable companion of an artist named Amédée Ozenfant, and at the advanced age of 31, Jeanneret began to paint too. The two friends published a manifesto called After Cubism--"an optimistic, lyrical song on the beauty and lesson of machines, on buildings for use, and on the part played by science in an art worthy of our time." To spread their new credo of Purism, Jeanneret and Ozenfant started the magazine L'Esprit nouveau. The most important pieces were those on architecture, on which the two editors often collaborated and which Jeanneret signed with an old family name, Le Corbusier, in order to acquire a separate identity as an architect. The articles were the basis in 1923 Of Le Corbusier's Towards an Architecture.
Feather on a Head. What is architecture? It was, said Le Corbusier in his book, something that went far beyond style. "The styles of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, or Gothic, are to architecture what a feather is on a woman's head." Essentially, architecture was the "masterly, correct and magnificent placing of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage."
