In the machine age, said Le Corbusier, the architect must take his cue from the engineer. "We have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent First Fruits of the new age. The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." He drew observations from everywhere: "The airplane shows us that a problem well stated finds its solution," but the "problem of the house has not been stated." Then, in his most famous dictum, he said that a house "is a machine for living in." The statement was not so inhuman as it sounded. Only architecture of "passion," he added, could live and last. "Passion can create drama out of inert stone."
A Very Odd Specimen. Even in his person, he tried to be true to the "new spirit." One day in Paris, a friend of the painter Fernand Léger said to Léger: "Just wait. You're about to see a very odd specimen. He goes bicycling in a derby hat." Léger waited. "A few minutes later," he recalled, "I saw coming along, very
stiff, completely in silhouette, an extraordinary mobile object under the derby hat, with spectacles and a dark suit. He advanced quietly, scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective. The picturesque personage was none other than the architect Le Corbusier."
At that point the picturesque personage had built hardly anything at all. But Le Corbusier's reach was always to exceed his grasp. He was thinking of architecture not only in terms of this or that building, but of everything within the building--"every detail of household furnishing, the street as well as the house, and the wider world beyond." With an artist's bland disregard for the inertia of others, Le Corbusier drew up a master plan for a "Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants."
"Towers in a Park." It was the first of many plans for cities--plans that called for the redoing of Barcelona, Algiers, Antwerp, Buenos Aires, and the war-destroyed French city of Saint-Dié. None were built, but they still marked him as one of the most audacious city planners of his time, the man who more than anyone else foresaw the age of the traffic jam and the exploding slum. At the center of his City of Three Million was a group of cross-shaped skyscrapers, 50 to 60 stories high, placed far apart in expanses of greenery, like "towers in a park." "These skyscrapers," Le Corbusier airily explained, "will contain the city's brains. Everything is to be concentrated in them: banks, business affairs, the control of industry." Beyond the central ring was a civic center, and then a series of belts of apartment houses, with a garden for every apartment. Factories and utilities were relegated to the outskirts, for "in a decent house, the servants' stairs do not go through the drawing room." There were different levels of traffic, ranging from an airstrip to superhighways for vehicles of varying speeds to walks reserved solely for pedestrians.
Le Corbusier made another plan for Paris, but since it presupposed demolishing a good part of the existing city, the Parisians did not take to it at all. "Megalomania!" screamed the weekly Arts. "Vandalism! Vanity! Monotony!" "In Paris," sighs Corbu, "prophets are kicked in the rear."
