Corbusier, who died August 27 at the age of seventy-eight, was one of the greatest artists of our time. Toa higher degree than anyone else, he contributed an architecture to the twentieth century. The nineteenth century, the era of triumphant bourgeois individualism, had no genuine architecture and left no monument that achieved beauty.
In his folders, to which he added throughout his life, Le Corbusier compiled his responses to the architectural needs of our time. But at his grave, a government minister could offer a eulogy, repeated by all Le Corbusier's opponents, proclaiming that "through depreciation glory achieves its supreme splendor." We could hardly say anything different in France. If India and Latin America are able to contemplate the genius of Le Corbusier in several patterns of cement, France has only a church as a worthy product bearing the name of this atheist architect. This man, who wanted to build for mankind,
saw his plans caricatured, shrunk and: slashed to bits by municipal mediocrities and technicians to fit the needs of greedy promoters; and he did not acknowledge as his own the buildings that bear his name in France.
Brunelleschi's plans for the Duomo in “Florence ied people to treat him as a madman the way Le Corbusier was called "le fada" [a little crazy]. But Brunelleschi was able to carry out his work integrally, an opportunity not granted to Le Corbusier. At Saint Peter's in Rome, Michelangelo's work was partly spoiled after his death, but Le Corbusier's work was sabotaged while he was alive. The France which pays him honor is that of the H.L.M. [low-cost hous-. ing] destined from the beginning to become slums, ‘and buildings that collapse. The biggest construction company in the country, controlled by the government, eats into the green spaces that Le Corbusier wanted as genuine parks with no streets.
Le Corbusier's misfortune, which he continually fought throughout his life, was that his conception of a dwelling implicitly called for socialism. Bringing in all the conquests of modern science, it boldly resolved the anachronistic, still surviving opposition between town and countryside. an
Although Le Corbusier did not hold strong political views, he keenly felt what kind of men and conditions offered the only possibility of reaching the "radiant city" which he envisioned. He dreamed, with Trotsky, of constructing in Moscow, after the destruction of the civil-war period, a new, colorful city, revolutionary in concept and yet linked to the deepest Russian tradition. Instead, Stalinism erected the heavy, lugubrious structures afflicted with gigantism,
He created a scandal one day in 1936 when he came to a serious meeting which he was scheduled to chair and excused himself for being late by saying that he could not stop reading a book, "the stunning, magnificent and revealing Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky."
Le Corbusier recalled these things when he gave our party [the French Trotskyist movement] a beautiful drawing of the human forms of a hand and a woman,
A whole pack of former depreciators and authorities who denied him the means to overcome French urbanism can try like clerics to claim his body. Hailed by everyone, Le Corbusier was nonetheless a "reviled" creator whose passionate struggle did not achieve the world he dreamed of. And no speech can bury that fact, because no words of a government minister have ever succeeded in cheating history.
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