To Their Credits: The Women Who Influenced Le Corbusier
The gendering of space or artwork occurs through the architect’s or artist’s beliefs and principles primarily based on gendered stereotypes that have been in place for a very long time. In the design world, the influences coming from females could be only in forms or colors, as architects claim, because of the place of women in society. In this paper, by looking at Le Corbusier’s buildings, graphics, and photographic records, one can see them with many symbols and codes that reflect his attitude to design through gendered associations and meanings. As one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture, he is a subject of the matter when we think about his relationship with women. Many of his works give us a glimpse into his subconsciousness about his views on women and the positioning of women through his architecture within the context of modern architecture.¹ Feminine traces in his work indicate the influence of the women he encountered throughout his private and professional lives, especially with her mother, Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret, her then-lover, Josephine Baker, and his colleague, Charlotte Perriand.
This essay begins by discussing Le Corbusier’s view of women. It then looks for traces of femininity in his paintings and architectural works. Subsequently, it explores women collaborators in his career. The paper is not trying to find evidence about the women who influenced Le Corbusier; it is more of a discussion connected by the related symbols and feminine influences. By employing this agenda, we can begin examining the works of Le Corbusier to assess his attitudes toward women in general and in the context of his architecture. To do this, however, we must understand the “traditional” view of women within the architecture spaces, the relationship between the architect, and his objectification of women.
Even during the modernist era, the place of women in terms of architectural spaces had not changed since the Middle Ages. Furthermore, this division had been defined by a Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise, I Libri della Famiglia², which says:
“It would hardly win us respect if our wife busied herself among the men in the marketplace, out in the public eye. It also seems somewhat demeaning to me to remain shut up in the house among women when I have manly things to do among men, fellow citizens, and worthy and distinguished foreigners…The character of men is stronger than that of women…Women, on the other hand, are almost all timid by nature, soft, slow, and more useful when they sit still and watch over our things.”³
Having all these in mind, we should carefully examine Le Corbusier’s views on women in his private and work-life life. The notion of women in professional life does not seem unusual to us now. Still, at the time, not very long ago, that was something not everybody would be comfortable with, especially in architecture which is a very male-dominated field even in today’s world.
Ronchamp Chapel and “Marie Shining Like the Sun”
While searching for the critical figures in Le Corbusier’s life, one cannot ignore his mother and their unique relationship and how this translates into his works. The mother of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret, was born in 1860 and lived to the age of one hundred or so. Le Corbusier consciously credited his mother for his existence. He never entirely separated from her, nor did he ever have what he wanted from her. He fought relentlessly and unsuccessfully to gain her approval, mainly from his older brother, Albert.
Le Corbusier wrote his mother about an encounter that he had with a psychiatrist who told him that, judging from his paintings, he evidently had some complex about her that he had not managed to resolve.⁴ Le Corbusier also made several annotations to discuss Freud’s Oedipus complex suggesting that he may have recognized his jealousy of his father and attraction to his mother.⁵
The beginning of Le Corbusier’s book When the Cathedrals Were White⁶ suggests that Marie occupied some primary role in his creativity due to his obsession with her. In response to his friend Jean Petit’s suggestion that his mother was Le Corbusier’s major source of inspiration, “It is the music of Madame Jeanneret-Perret that explains the art of Le Corbusier.”⁷ By all accounts, Madame Jeanneret was a strong woman. She worked as a piano teacher to bring additional income to the family. She was in active communication with Le Corbusier. He designed houses for her, supported her financially, and shared his very intimate emotions and sketches with her about himself or other women or his work. He described the house he designed for her at Vevey as an “antique temple by the side of the water, fitting for the goddess within.”⁸
According to Jane Drew, who shared her knowledge about Le Corbusier in several interviews, Marie Charlotte Amelie ‘was a very great force in his life (Fig.1). At Ronchamp Chapel (Fig.2), the masterful country church of 1955 designed by Le Corbusier, he dedicated one of the three side chapels to the woman who bore him, Marie. While Ronchamp is officially a shrine to the Holy Virgin, the brilliant stained-glass window that bears, in the exuberant script, the message “Marie shining like the sun” closely echoes the way Le Corbusier often flattered his mother. Ronchamp is a temple to feminity in general and, very specifically, to the person who created him, much as he created it. Le Corbusier revered the sun as the source of all life: Marie was the origin of his Ronchamp, with its womblike hidden chambers, so rich and nurturing, and its organic form and pulsating surfaces.⁹ About Ronchamp, the architect stated publicly the “requirements of religion have had little effect on the design.”¹⁰ In my opinion, if it has something to do with, it should be about love: the love he had for his mom and some resources claim that love for his wife, Yvonne.¹¹
Josephine Baker: “Sweet Josephine’s Hips” as an Architectural Influence
Josephine Baker, the American-born French entertainer, also influenced Le Corbusier’s work by her vitality and talents. This influence shows us another insight into Le Corbusier’s views on women. He met Josephine while traveling to South America in 1929 (Fig.3). Besides being the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, she was exceptional with her charm and intriguing to Le Corbusier. Her influence is evident in his sketches of her.¹² Since he always thought of dwellings as a part of the “Machine Age,” he sought a balance between art and function with the “Housing as Machine” notion in mind. It could be the reason why he started out his career with many rectangular shapes defining the space like his contemporaries from Bauhaus like Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and so on. However, Renee Kemp-Rotan, 41, a Washington-based architect and urban designer who has exhaustively researched Baker’s life, says:
If you go through a chronology of all of his work and you come to the time period in which he had an affair with Josephine Baker, all of a sudden, there are no more straight lines” in his sketchbook. “Corbusier’s whole philosophy changed after his affair with Josephine Baker,” Kemp-Rotan says. “He begins to write prolific treatises on the art of meander, the philosophy of the curve. Girlfriend put a hurting on his soul, and everybody can’t do that.”¹³
Furthermore, Kemp-Rotan says that after Le Corbusier was commissioned to draft a plan for the coastline of the North African city of Algiers, he wrote in his memoirs that he “based the dimensions on sweet Josephine’s hips.”¹⁴ One can argue that this inspiration is not very “architectural”; however, who says that every architectural form-making decision comes from rational thoughts? It would be more oblivious to see the creative process as a non-emotional journey. As Le Corbusier was an architect who did not need to justify his decisions frequently, proportions of woman's body could definitely be his motive in his various works, such as the houses in Algiers.
Charlotte Perriand: a Pupil for Architecture and Collaborator for Furniture
In the last section, I will talk about Charlotte Perriand and how her contributions are portrayed in Le Corbusier’s works. Charlotte’s influence on Le Corbusier is best understood by starting with an analysis of Le Corbusier’s way of representing his works: Photography. Beatriz Colomina refers to the photographs of Le Corbusier as representing a new reality about the ways in which he used them, not only to represent but rather, as the modern advertisement had done, to construct a text. For Le Corbusier, the photographs of architecture and machines that he included in many of his publications helped him assess a portrayal of his architecture and his relation to it.¹⁵ Under closer examination, we find that these photographs do indeed present the contemporary cultural situation; however, they also provide us with a window into his subconscious. An exploration into Le Corbusier’s process of continuous editing of photographs-erasing, removing from context, reframing, choosing, composing, and constructing-reveals many indications in these images about Le Corbusier’s aversion toward women.¹⁶
Whether he had a plan to objectify the women in his representation or not, seeing this for the works that he collaborated with Perriand is strange if we compare it with the cases of his mother and Josephine Baker. This may come from his thoughts on women in professional life. Even though Le Corbusier was familiar with the idea of working women since his mom also worked and there were women workers at the watch-making workshops, his first reaction to women in professional life was somewhat demising. He believed that, and I quote:
“The architects’ vocation is open to women in all matters connected with housing. Architecture is no longer the right term for the activity that is expected. The vocation must be broadened. Those who devote themselves to it must always be faced with realities: the workshop, the factory, the building site. Those who have acquired sufficient knowledge in this field might be awarded a “diploma of housing” and authorized to build and equip homes. The diploma given today is a barrier to much of this potential energy.The type of mind necessary to win the official diploma is not necessarily the same as that which will devote a lifetime to the service of me in their homes.”¹⁷
While this statement suggests that women are only suitable for domestic architecture, it should be remembered that Le Corbusier believed housing to be the single most fundamentally important form of building. However, all things considered, limiting women’s capabilities and positioning them into a frame he decided could not be approached very optimistically. Similarly, his first very famous interview with Charlotte Perriand proves his view of women as inferior and disregarding in general, if not unique to the moment since he has never seen her work yet. Perriand was a young Parisian designer and an architect in training at the time and wanted to work with Le Corbusier at his atelier. She states:
One afternoon, a portfolio of drawings under my arms, somewhat intimidated by the austerity of the premises, I found myself face to face with Le Corbusier’s large eyeglasses, which concealed his gaze. His greeting was rather cold and distant “what do you want?” and I replied. “To work with you” He glanced quickly through my drawings “we don’t embroider cushions here,” was his response. He led me to the door. In a final attempt, I left my address and told him about my installation at Salon d’Automme without any hope that he would see it. I went away feeling almost relieved. No one could say that my charm had worked on him.
She convinced him that she could do more than he thought for the atelier and got hired a month later.
Moreover, the famous quote, “We don’t embroider cushions here.”, can reflect his opposition toward the feminine in this case. Even when working with Perriand, whom he always respected, one can wonder why he made her an object of male desire in the representation of chaise longue, the famous photograph. He portrayed Perriand in the act as he objectified her to a male gaze. She is lying down on the chaise lounge as if she is an accessory to the furniture. (Fig.4)¹⁸ Luis E. Carranza describes her position in this article, Le Corbusier, and the problems of representation as furniture. By allowing the skirt to flow downward, her legs are revealed and thus fetishized and shown as objects of desire. However, most important, Perriand never acknowledges the viewer.¹⁹ In this photograph, she abandons her position as a furniture designer to become the object of male desire. In the article, he continues criticizing the photograph with Manet’s Olympia (Fig.5); the photograph does not depict an opposing gaze confronting the photographer but rather shows a voyeuristic scene: the unknowing woman and the photographer, and audience, that looks at her…she appears to reveal herself to the viewer in an unknowing way by the natural falling of the skirt. In contrast, Olympia appears to object to her viewing and hides from us while, at the same time, she dares us and confronts our looks.²⁰
Perriand, in this photo, is no longer the furniture designer who collaborated with Le Corbusier; she is a model to make the chair more attractive. We cannot say this is for sure or intentional; however, Le Corbusier was aware of his decisions. The “chaise lounge,” which is now known as mainly Perriand’s own design, could be represented as if it wasn’t. Even though he always respected her about her work and tried to make it his own in some cases, her influence on him was undeniable. Introducing tubular steel in furniture and “equipping the house” rather than decorating it only came into life after Perriand joined the atelier. She was a pupil of architecture and a collaborator for furniture who improved his works and made Le Corbusier’s interior ideas real.²¹
Overall, these women and their influence are evident in Le Corbusier’s works. He lived with women, loved women, and he worked with women. Some of these women were influential for many male designers at the time. Giving the credit they deserve would be another goal of this paper. Feminine traces are not hidden but also not revealed in his works. I simply tried to see them with a different lens on my eyes: ‘The Modern Women.’
¹Luis E. Carranza, “Le Corbusier and the Problems of Representation” in Journal of architectural education (1984), p. 48.
²This division was stated earlier in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which he describes that the god had “directly prepared the woman’s nature for indoor works and indoor concerns” (VII, line 22).
³Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, Rende Neu Watkins (Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 207.
⁴Le Corbusier’s letter to his mother, 19.02.1937, (Foundation Le Corbusier).
⁵Allendy R., Capitalisme et Sexualité : le conflits des instincts et les problèmes actuels, (Paris : Denoel), pp. 61 and 64.
⁶Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
⁷Le Corbusier’s letter to his mother, 10.11.1931, in Jenger, Le Corbusier Choix de Lettres, p.215.
⁸Le Corbusier’s letter to his wife, Yvonne, 11.09.1924, Foundation Le Corbusier.
⁹Nicholas Fox Weber. Le Corbusier : a Life 1st ed. in (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
¹⁰Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2000).
¹¹Michael Healey, “Le Corbusier, Ronchamp & the sacred/feminine.”
¹²Mary Ann French, “A Hurting on Their Souls: Josephine, Jazz and Juke Joints.” in The International Review of African American Art 13, no. 1 (1996): 27–.
¹³Ibid.
¹⁴Ibid.
¹⁵Beatriz Colomina, “Le Corbusier and Photography,” in Assemblage 4 (1987): 18.
¹⁶In this case, for example, in particular the early photographs from 1927–1931.
¹⁷From an article originally published in Le Point in 1948 and cited in Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, (London: Faber 1958), p.162
¹⁸Luis E. Carranza, “Le Corbusier and the Problems of Representation” in Journal of architectural education (1984), p. 48.
¹⁹Ibid.
²⁰Luis E. Carranza, “Le Corbusier and the Problems of Representation” in Journal of architectural education (1984), p. 48.
²¹Charlotte Benton, “Le Corbusier: Furniture and the Interior.” Journal of Design History 3, no. 2–3 (1990), p. 103–124.
