"Madmen!" He built a studio and house for his friend, Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, which Lipchitz recalls somewhat plaintively as "a good studio, but he would not allow me to put any of MY sculptures along the walls. He was such a Calvinist in those days." He managed to put up a model Workers' City near Bordeaux, but the buildings so offended the local authorities that they refused to furnish them with water for six years. In 1927 Corbu, with his cousin and partner Pierre Jeanneret, submitted a plan for the League of Nations. As he bitterly wrote of the incident later: "After 65 meetings of the jury in Geneva, the project of L-C and Pierre Jeanneret was the only one of 360 schemes (seven miles of plans) that received four votes out of nine. It was at this point that the delegate from Paris pointed out: 'This scheme has not been drawn in India ink. I insist it be disqualified,' and it was." Huffed Corbu of his critics in those years: "Madmen!"
In 1930 Corbu became a French citizen and married Yvonne Gallis, an earthy, black-haired young woman from Monaco. Yvonne had little use for the walls of glass he built into their Paris apartment ("I'm tearing my hair out by the roots! All this light is driving me crazy!"), but she knew how to soothe her volatile husband better than anyone. Things began to go a bit better for Corbu from then on. The next year, on a broad green site in Poissy, he built a residence called Villa Savoye. Like his other buildings, it was basically a "pure prism" raised on stilts (pilotis), banded horizontally with long ribbon windows and topped with a roof garden. But its geometry was pure liquid, with every room and level flowing into the next as if the walls and floors could be dissolved at will, until the villa itself became an "architectural promenade."
In 1932, at University City, Paris, there rose a dormitory called the Swiss Pavilion--a great slab on stilts with a front wall that was mostly of glass, and blank end walls. One Swiss newspaper predicted that it would corrupt the youth who lived in it, but to architects it was a milestone; it became the model for countless other slabs before and since the U.N. Building. In all his work, Corbu had lifted his prisms on high to reclaim the land underneath. His columned structures had freed the facade for inventive sculpturing, opened up interiors, surrendered the long dark walls to light. And as a grace note, he had added the roof garden. These devices, which he imperiously declared to be the basis of a "fundamentally new esthetic," seem simple in retrospect-but then, so does the arch.
Captivated Audience. As Corbu built, he also wrote. In the U.S., Frank Lloyd Wright thundered his contempt for the French "painter and pamphleteer," but one by one, young architects were captivated by him. "There were no teachers to teach us the new architecture," says the Chinese-American architect, I. M. Pei, "so we turned to Corbu's books, and these were responsible for half our education." In Greece, a young student named Constantinas Doxiadis, who was to become famous in his own land, got a Corbu book as a gift on Christmas Eve in 1932. "I glanced through it," he recalls, "then I read it through the night. In the morning I knew Corbu had opened my eyes."
In Stuttgart, Germany, another young man named Sep Ruf went with his first employer to see two houses that Le Corbusier had designed. The employer declared them a "blasphemy"; the employee thought they were great. "We argued," says Ruf, who is now president of Munich's Academy of Art, "in the long, open, austere living room, and my boss got so angry that he fired me on the spot."
