Le Corbusier’s soft centre

The concrete king was in love with Renaissance Florence, reveals Jonathan Glancey

In 1907, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a 20-year-old architect and craftsman born and raised in Switzerland, travelled abroad for the first time. On the outskirts of Florence, he visited the Carthusian charterhouse at Galluzzo. Set on a hill and gathered around two Renaissance cloisters, it was a revelation to him.

Here was the perfect way to live. The long, deep cells of the monks, each with its own loggia, overlooked gardens, greenery and fresh air. The charterhouse offered privacy and community. Composed of many individual elements, it was nevertheless all of a piece.

Forty years later, the worldfamous architect Le Corbusier would rework the charterhouse at Galluzzo into a monumental concrete apartment block at Marseille, overlooking gardens, sea, mountains and fresh air. This was the Unité d’Habitation (1952).

In 1960, he would complete the Dominican monastery of Sainte Marie de la Tourette, 15 miles east of Lyon. Although made of the rawest concrete, and even wilfully ascetic, this complex was also a case of Galluzzo revisited.

Le Corbusier, of course, was Jeanneret. When he settled in Paris shortly after the First World War, having travelled and sketched extensively, and assisted in the studios of some of the most forward-looking European architects, he set out his creative stall in a magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau, founded, with the painter Amédée Ozenfant, under the nom de plume Le Corbusier.

In 1923, Le Corbusier published his epochal manifesto Vers une Architecture (first translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture – which was not what Le Corbusier nor Ozenfant had meant – by Frederick Etchells, a Vorticist painter who later became a conservation architect specialising in churches, a founding member of the Georgian Group and a stalwart member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings). It is in this book that Le Corbusier talks of the house, in a much misunderstood phrase, as a “machine for living”.

Le Corbusier published schemes for ideal new homes and future cities and was soon building elegant white “purist” villas for wealthy, artistic clients in and around Paris, culminating in the Villa Savoye (1931). Resting serenely on slender columns, or piloti, it made his name as a practising Modern architect. He became feted, admired and, perhaps inevitably, copied.

And here lay Le Corbusier’s downfall in terms of his reputation among blimps and fogeys, Englishspeaking critics for the most part, who have tended to take sides and spouted in architectural debates before using their eyes and looking.

Detractors thought – and still do – that his phrase about houses being machines for living, his plans for high-rise cities set in parks and his later love of Béton brut, or raw concrete, had spawned the prefabricated “concrete horror” housing estates of Britain, Western Europe, the United States and the former Soviet Union.

While it is true that Le Corbusier’s ideas and designs were borrowed, blended and served up in such baleful guises, his own mind was somewhere very different. In fact, it is not difficult to trace a line from his revelatory visit to the charterhouse at Galluzzo, through his ideas of apartment blocks set in parks, through the Villa Savoye (1931), the Pavillon Suisse student hostel (1931), Unité d’Habitation and on to La Tourette (1960). This line can even be extended to Le Petit Cabanon (1951), the tiny wooden cabin he built as a Mediterranean retreat for himself and his wife, Yvonne Gallis at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

Often reclusive, Le Corbusier was forever trying to recreate the Florentine charterhouse for the modern world. Yes, his long and fecund career was more complex than this pursuit alone, but it is clear that Le Corbusier’s thought and work was hardly synonymous with the cheap-jack local-authority estates of the Fifties to Seventies, and schemes to obliterate age-old city centres through car-centric “comprehensive redevelopment”.

Yes, he published outlandish projects to obliterate more than half of Paris and rebuild the city centre in a new, rational, high-rise form, but this was provocation – a way of testing ideas. He said silly things, too. In his book La Ville Radieuse ( The Radiant City, 1935), for example, he described the classical