"A car! A car!" my little boy Billy cries at every passing automobile, waving vigorously. Now, at age 2, he has expanded his vocabulary to buses, or "buseys" (short for anything bigger than a car), and says "bye-bye, busey" after they lumber on.
These homely thoughts of my home life, stimulated by a delightfully written review in archpaper.com by Craig Hodgetts, put me in a generous frame of mind, even though the review has very nice things to say about a book on one of modern architecture's greatest villains. Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile, by Antonio Amado (MIT Press), details a facet of the modernist pioneer's career of which I was unaware: Corb was a nut for cars, collected them and wanted to design them himself.
There's a childishness to this automania of his that appeals to me for some reason. Many successful men fall big for cars, and build huge garages devoted to the storage of their collections. So far as I know, Le Corbusier never designed one of these huge garages.
"But he loved cars!" writes Hodgetts. "Gatsby had nothing on Le Corbusier. . . . look at . . . Corb's stable of sultry Voisins, with their long noses and dinner-plate wheels, as they idle in front of Villa Garche, or lounge in the shadow of Villa Savoye."
His effort to create his own car failed, but it did give rise to Amado's book and Hodgetts's review. Perhaps if Le Corbusier had succeeded at automotive design and moved to Detroit, he would have veered off into less harmful adventures. His Plan Voisin (1925) for the demolition of much of central Paris and its replacement by eighteen 60-story cruciform towers in parkland on a grid of streets, was thankfully never built, but it became the model for public housing around the world, much to the detriment of its impoverished, choiceless inmates.
Plan Voisin was named for Corb's friend and patron Gabriel Voisin, an aviation pioneer and the founder of Avions Voisin, whose luxurious, sylphid automobiles filled Corb's garage.
On the other hand, suppose Corb had ended up in Detroit. He might have had more success at inflicting his architecture on America, where only one of his designs was realized -- the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, at Harvard.
But let's consider the Voiture Minimum. Corbu entered a 1936 competition to design an inexpensive car sponsored by European industrialists. (Some people prefer the nickname Corbu to Corb for Le Corbusier, a pseudonym adopted by the Swiss-born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in the 1920s after he moved to Paris. He took French citizenship in 1930.)
"I would be very pleased to design the body of such an automobile," he wrote one producer. He visited a Ford plant in Detroit. Streamlining was coming into vogue for automotive design. Corbu entered sketches of what Hodgetts calls a "strange, pug-nosed vehicle."
Delightfully, Hodgetts continues: "Slab-sided, and aggressively Euclidean, with arcs and planes where his [rivals] imagined aircraft-like swoops and ogee curves, it has all the charm of a self-propelled, home-built travel trailer. . . . As soberly utilitarian (it fairly shouts 'Home Depot!') as the Voisin is proud and majestic, the design is a tart reminder of the disconnect between Le Corbusier's rhetoric and his bid to personally enter the world of the industrialist."
Amado, Hodgetts adds, "has unearthed fascinating letters politely shunting Corb to those the authors deem likely to collaborate, which, like a spurned lover, he pursues with increasing ardor. Between the lines, however, the message was blunt: architecture was fine for the estate, but not for the road."
The Voiture Minimum was decidedly a smaller car, and it made me miss our Mini Cooper, which we sold after deciding that having a baby seat behind the passenger seat required too much scrunching in the latter by Billy's mother, Victoria. Le Corbusier's houses, which he called "machines for living," were difficult to live in. His Villa Savoye leaked like a sieve. Except for two models in 1987 and 1989, his Voiture Minimum was never produced. His clunky car recalls his uncomfortable furniture. "Chairs are architecture," he asserted, "sofas are bourgeois." H.L. Mencken channeled Corbusier when he wrote, in 1931, of the "ghastly imitations of the electric chair that the Modernists make of gas pipe."
Would that Corbu and his fellow pioneers of the modern, and their more cheesy successors, had devoted more energy to forays into autos and chairs. These would have been more easily rejected by the masses than their unbuilding-like architecture -- commissioned mostly by committees of elite corporate technocrats-cum-artist wannabes -- in the end sparing our cities, our streets, our eyes and our souls.
At least Billy would have recognized Le Voiture Minimum as a car, not a busey.
David Brussat (dbrussat@projo.com) is a member of The Journal's editorial board. His blog at projo.com is called Architecture Here and There.
