Le Corbusier and the Occult

This monograph is the result of five years of empirical research, using social anthropological fieldwork and participant observation in France and Switzerland into public, semi-public, semi-secret, secret and private (and hitherto unresearched) archives. it is the story of Le Corbusier and his family and friends (Juan Gris, Amedee Ozenfant, Paul Dermee, etcetera), involved in the occult, the hermetic, the esoteric and in Swiss or French Freemasonry (La Grande Loge Suisse Alpina, La Grande Loge de France and Le Grand Orient de France). These archives, off the beaten track, reveal another Le Corbusier within the local culture and social networks of La Chaux-de-Fonds in the early 1900s, as well as in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. This story has then been tested against the contents of the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris and the Le Corbusier Archives in La Chaux-de-Fonds, where key documents survive that have not yet been discussed by others because (1) they do not fit the official story and (2) they do not fit the presuppositions of most architectural historians. For the first time, one can begin to understand not just Le Poeme de l'Angle Droit, but also such key architectural concepts as the ‘architectural promenade’, ‘ineffable space’, ‘the radiant city’ and the ‘Five Points of a New Architecture’. Because of the in-depth and wide-ranging empirical research, the monograph also includes information about his Parisian Masonic friends (Juan Gris, Paul Dermee, Amedee Ozenfant, etcetera) and patrons, clients and friends (Andre Citroen, Jean Zay, Jean Cassou, etcetera). The monograph thus paints the picture not just of one architect, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret dit Le Corbusier, but also of the society, the entourage and the networks in which he was enmeshed, including such significant characters as Nathalie Clifford Barney. This, inevitably, is a critical book that will probably infuriate many people because of its rejection of the ethnocentric Anglo-Saxon presuppositions that underlie much Le Corbusier scholarship. Methodologically too, it is a critical book because (in addition to the social anthropological emphasis on fieldwork with its focus on local culture, social networks and kinship) the monograph develops the kind of reverse methodological approach that Rosalind Krauss described when she wrote: "No longer the tale of the crime’s commission, it is now the story of the deed’s detection. As Holmes liked to explain to Watson, it becomes a matter of ‘reasoning backwards’." In this respect, the book proceeds with concepts and approaches related to Gerard Genette’s notion of the ‘paratexte’, Charles S. Peirce’s notion of the ‘indexical trace’ and Giovanni Morelli’s art historical focus on concrete material evidence. The monograph thus necessarily builds upon H. Allen Brooks’ classic study of Le Corbusier’s Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds (1997) , but this new empirical research into local culture, social networks and kinship modify and reverse many of Brooks’ conclusions. From this arises a completely new picture of Jeanneret / Le Corbusier and of his belief system and architecture. However, what really matters is not just the new specific understanding of the work of Le Corbusier. What really matters are the general implications for our understanding of modernism and of modernism’s complex relationship to historical traditions. There are also here critical implications for the notions of copying and of originality, as developed by Richard Shiff in his study of Cezanne’s ‘technique of originality’ (1984). The illustrations will include historical photographs of individuals (Jeanneret / Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier’s friends and family, freemasonic society in La Chaux-de-Fonds and in Paris in the early twentieth century, Juan Gris, Nathalie Clifford Barney, etcetera), of Paris in the early twentieth-century century, of newly discovered archival materials, of classic Lucien Herve photographs of Le Corbusier buildings. As in my last book, the illustrations will be related to both the key topic and to its wider cultural and historical setting, with a very wide range of supporting evidence of an historical and cultural kind from many other archives and institutions (Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Ecole des Beaux-arts, Grand Orient de France, private archives, etcetera). Amongst the many unusual illustrations will be the images of the theatrical interiors of the eighteenth-century Masonic temple of La Chaux-de-Fonds, as well as other occult and Masonic iconographies and archival documents relating directly to Le Corbusier and his family and friends. As for the occult and Freemasonry, two classic publications are Margaret C. Jacob’s "Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in eighteenth-century century Europe" and Joscelyn Godwin’s "The Theosophical Enlightenment". But these treat of the eighteenth century, not the twentieth century. Paul Frankl’s article of 1945, ‘The Secret of the Mediaval Masons’, did not either consider modernism. Finally, there are two publications by Joseph Rykwert on tangentially related topics ―his article ‘The Dark Side of the Bauhaus’ and his monograph, The First Moderns ― whose conclusions my research extends and develops to Le Corbusier and to twentieth-century modern architecture.