As always, he was trying to gain her favour over his only just older brother, the gentle but troubled Albert, a musician. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own death.
That strange episode opens the book. Le Corbusier simply swam himself to death, believing that if he went on for long enough his failing heart would give out, allowing him to drown in the place and at the time of his choosing. It did. The business of dying too early? His mother lived to 99 Le Corbusier claimed it was but he had a weakness for round numbers , perhaps energised by a barrage of letters from him β fond sentiments interspersed with stern injunctions.
La Chaux-de-Fonds, where Le Corbusier was born in , lies a thousand feet up in the Jura, only a few miles from France. The largely 19th-century town was built on a strict grid, and housed a Calvinist population steeped in the puritanism that he both loathed and made his own. When Le Corbusier arrived in Paris in , he found work with the Perret brothers, the high priests of reinforced concrete. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful to those who taught him.
These two stints were the nearest he ever had to a formal architectural training. As he set off on his travels in , he found a confidant, a year-old homosexual music critic, Willem Ritter. It was to Ritter and his partner, Janko Czadra, that the young Le Corbusier confided his sexual fantasies and his driving ambition, in screeds up to 30 pages long.
As he left Germany he was exultant. The period of deliberate concentration is past! Open the floodgates! Let everything rush out, let everything live within!
