This week’s Iconic Buildings on Radio National’s Blueprint for Living highlights the wonder of Chartres cathedral (see here). I mention the recent contentious restoration of its internal painted walls which supposedly takes them back to the original colouring of the mid-1200s. I wasn’t sure if I liked that idea but shortly after recording that piece I was on my way to France. I hadn’t planned to visit Chartres but somehow it just became inevitable.

My partner and I left Paris and headed out to Brittany. On the way we stopped at Monet’s garden in Giverny, a place we visited back in the early 1990s. Back then we were left feeling slightly underwhelmed. The garden  had a vaguely municipal atmosphere, the way the plantings were managed so that there was always a good show of flowers. There was no sense of the place having evolved as most gardens do, with the plants changing shape and becoming established. It had a curiously lifeless atmosphere. Everything was being kept as it had always been. (Although the famous lily pond with its wisteria-clad bridge is now accessed through a concrete tunnel under the local road which adds that final municipal touch.)

classic Giverny

This year the queues were longer and the car-parks were bigger but the garden seemed exactly the same. It was late spring so there were plenty of flowers and it was pleasant to see the Japanese bridge dripping in wisteria blossom. We were struck again by the apparent randomness of the planting and the chaos of colour, like those old ads for fertilizer that show a garden where every plant is smothered in bright flowers. There didn’t seem any respite from flowers.

We left feeling disappointed again and decided that a quick drive to Chartres might cheer us up. On our previous trip we had been captivated by its dark interior and its stunning buttresses and magnificent labyrinth. It seemed a slightly spooky place. I had visited the cathedral when I was 11 as my family drove south to the Basque country for a summer holiday and I never forgot its uneven twin towers.

This time I was anxious to see if the restoration had changed its atmosphere. It looked the same at first, visible for miles around above the rolling fields of wheat. You can’t help marvelling at how massive it must have seemed back in the 13^th century because it still takes your breath away. Ely in England is the only other cathedral which does the same thing for me, the magical way it appears over the flat fields of Cambridgeshire. I love the sense of otherness that these cathedrals have.

those wonky Sun and Moon towers, Chartres

The town of Chartres had been spruced up since my last visit and a fête of some sort was packing up for the day. I am always surprised by the buildings that slightly block the lofty east front of the cathedral. Normally these have been cleared away so that the cathedral has an open area before it but in Chartres it’s a quirk that I like.

The huge labyrinth, Chartres

At last I pushed open the door into the cathedral, remembering the last time when the darkness took my eyes a moment to adjust. Immediately I saw the difference although the restoration isn’t finished. The whole interior was bright and the great labyrinth was covered by chairs (the cathedral management likes to underplay the building’s pagan links). The windows still sparkled but without the contrast of the blackened stone surrounds they didn’t stand out quite so much.

the newly painted walls against the old dark walls, Chartres

It is still a beautiful cathedral with its lofty nave and wonderful lines but it didn’t feel like Chartres to me. It felt much newer, like a Gothic-revival church of the twentieth century, and I couldn’t  help feeling sad about that. We strolled around for a while but I didn‘t feel drawn into it as I had before.

still beautiful, Chartres

As we drove out of the town I noticed the new pieces of urban planning – the wide avenues, the new plantings and lights and benches – and I realised how clean and bright our streets are today. We live in high definition now. The patina of time is often stripped away so that every detail can be picked out and every texture visible. The interior of Chartres cathedral had become somehow sanitised like Monet’s garden, all clean and new, as though the intervening years simply hadn’t happened. I hadn’t realised how much I like to see the murk of history.

crisp and clean vaulting, Chartres

A few miles out, I glanced into the rear-view mirror and there it was again, the silhouette of the cathedral rising over the town.  Still a character and still so strong. And I wondered if the painted interior is the architectural equivalent of a new haircut and I just need time to get used to it. I’ll tell you when I get back there again.

But don’t worry about Giverny – it will never change.

When I was a student I bought a little book called “Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac revisited” by Philippe Boudon. Published in 1969, it studied the 1920s housing estate that Le Corbusier built on the outskirts of Bordeaux to find out why it had been such a failure. This was based on the fact that practically every resident had changed the look of the starkly rational buildings. It’s a fascinating read and quite a hoot to see what the residents did with the reinforced concrete structures as they transformed them into traditional little houses with fake stone pillars, conventional windows and pitched roofs.

entrance to the Quartiers Modernes Fruges

So I was very pleased to visit the actual site earlier this year. It’s called the Quartiers Modernes Frugès (QMF) and was commissioned by the wealthy industrialist Henry Frugès who told the young architect to treat the place as an architectural laboratory. Le Corbusier had already built a set of 10 workers’ houses for Frugès in nearby Lège in 1920 (which have been similarly messed-about with) but Pessac was to be a proper new suburb with some 200 houses, all to be sold privately. About 50 were built and all remain in private hands apart from one which is owned by the local council and now used as a museum. It was an opportunity for Le Corbusier to put to the test his ideas about prefabrication and standardisation.

the opening ceremony in 1926 – those hats!

The Quartier was formally unveiled in 1926 by the Minister of Public Works, Anatole de Monzie (whose wife famously lived in Le Corbusier’s luxurious Villa Stein-de Monzie in Garches of the same period) although it wasn’t finished until the end of the decade.  When you see a photograph of the opening and what everyone was wearing then you begin to realise how ultra-modern this development was.  Back then, Pessac was little more than a village surrounded by vineyards and pine woodland but it is now a built-up suburb of the beautiful city of Bordeaux.

skyscraper style

The houses are familiar from Le Corbusier’s early Monol and Citrohan designs, with their strip windows and roof terraces, and each type of house is based on a standard cube. The ‘skyscraper’ style is the tallest, with three floors and a roof terrace that is accessed by a cantilevered external staircase. They are semi-detached, joined at the back, so that one faces one street, the other with a side entrance.

the elegant single dwelling

A single detached version remains (another was destroyed when a bomb exploded on the nearby railway in the Second World War).

arcaded houses

Another set of houses is linked by graceful concrete arches which reminded me of Oscar Niemeyer’s fluid forms.

the push-me-pull-you style of terrace as shown in a model of the development

And a low terrace of houses does a push-me-pull-you trick with every other house facing the street while its neighbour faces the street behind. It’s a curious idea but, according to Bourdon’s interviews with the residents, it supports a tremendous feeling of privacy, which was always important to Corb. It always sounded rather complicated to me which is why it’s important to visit these places and see the plan in action.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the estate is the use of colour. Le Corbusier was a painter, of course, under his real name of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, and he used a colour palette of blue, maroon, yellow, green and white for these buildings which reflect the natural tones of the landscape around them. It’s still quite a shock if you think of Le Corbusier’s buildings as being uniformly white, like his luxury villas in Paris such as the Villa Savoye.

the museum – the original garage now houses the model of the development

It was fantastic to be able to walk around the house that is conserved by the local council.

wide windows – revolutionary at the time, all that light!

But I was in for an even better treat. Later, as I took a photo of one house, a car drew up beside me and the driver popped out and asked me if I wanted to see inside. He had just bought it and was going to restore and then rent it out as holiday accommodation. “Where in the world can you holiday in a house designed by Le Corbusier?” he asked. “Nowhere but here!” The house he had just bought needed a lot of work but still had its original floors (local pine) and most windows. He proudly showed me the whole place, including the roof terrace. His enthusiasm was infectious and I was in my element, talking about my favourite architect.

two Le Corbusier lovers

It turned out that he also owned one of the skyscraper style as well, which he also showed me. (It’s a sign of how caught up I was in the buildings that I forgot to ask his name but you can view the houses and book one of them for your hols at www.lecorbusier22.com.)

the contrast of renovated and untouched

It’s so good to see that gradually all the houses are being restored to their original state. They feel remarkably contemporary and they show Corb’s preoccupation with creating homes that really work – after all, this is the same period as his Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau in Paris and the time when he coined the phrase ‘machine a habiter’ – a machine to live in – which people still bash him over the head with. At Pessac you can see modern homes that are light and private with heating and spacious living rooms and large gardens or roof terraces. I couldn’t help thinking of the Tudorbethan semi-detached houses that were about to swamp the new suburbs of Britain at this time. And yet the Bourdon book reveals how the ordinary people who bought these houses really wished that they looked conventional. After all, the suburb was mocked for looking like sugar cubes (because Frugès dealt in sugar) and called the Moroccan village (which was simple racism).

a traditional house of the area

The common style of house in the region is called a lean-to and directly facing the entrance to the QMF there’s a prime example built at the same time. Which would you prefer?

 The QMF is not without faults, and of course the houses leaked because building techniques simply hadn’t caught up, but judging by what I experienced that spring day, there is a strong feeling of community and I think there are still many lessons to learn from it in our contemporary urban planning. Boudon concludes that the fact that so many of the houses were modified showed how adaptable the designs were, which sounds too kind for my liking. They were simply ahead of their time and are now being re-evaluated and appreciated. Because most tellingly for me was the fact that I left thinking that I wanted to live in one of them.

 After all, isn’t that the mark of a successful design, when you want one for yourself?

Quartiers Modernes Frugès: http://www.pessac.fr/cite-fruges-le-corbusier.html

Holiday rentals: www.lecorbusier22.com

A modified house with trad windows replacing the strip windows

Following my recent piece on Le Corbusier’s housing development at Pessac, Sugarcubes in Bordeaux. I was delighted to receive an email from Monsieur Clocheau, the kind man who showed me around his own houses there. He reminded me that the Quartier Modernes Fruges will mark the 50th anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death on the 25th August and work will then start on the restoration of his own house. It seems a fitting way to commemorate the life of the great architect and I thought you would be  interested in following the progress on the house: www.lecorbusier22.com.

Zigzag houses as shown on the Pessac model

The house itself is of the zigzag type, which means it is one of three set at right-angles to its neighbour, affording them privacy and modulating the streetscape. Judging from the state of the house when I saw it there is much work to do but what a tremendous adventure. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

a gateway to a new restoration

I was working as an interior designer in London in the 1980s when I first heard about the Chinese practice called feng shui that appraises a building to find if it is a beneficial place in which to live or work. I was sceptical at first but the more I learned about it, the more it resonated and tallied with my experience of why some homes felt so good to walk into. Years later I became a feng shui practitioner and teacher, and I loved the idea of using Chinese principles in Western homes. China itself remained of only limited interest to me.

sunrise at Wudangshan

This year, though, I’ve had the opportunity to visit the country not once but twice and I was surprised to find how much it re-energised my interest in feng shui. My trip was centred on three sacred mountains in different parts of the country, with a side order of Taiwan on the way. Having being overwhelmed by the air pollution and the sheer scale of the building programmes when I visited the country in April, I was looking forward to seeing rural China and hoped for a glimpse of a more traditional way of life.

Leaving the thriving city of Wuhan and its 10 million inhabitants, it was a five-hour drive to Wudangshan, the mountain where tai chi originated some 400 years ago and which is a stronghold of Taoist belief. Wudangshan was immediately compelling. It’s the classic Chinese landscape of limestone peaks set with temples, and transport is limited to shuttle buses, adding to a sense of serenity that is hard to find in bustling China. The Golden Summit felt glorious, reached by a gondola or a protracted walk.

But it was at the Purple Heaven Palace (or Zixiao Palace) that I felt something special. It was built in the 15^th century using classic feng shui principles. The lushly wooded mountain seemed to embrace it and there was an open area at its entrance with water running through it. This is perfect feng shui and it felt a calm space where I wanted to linger.

a Taoist student

I wasn’t surprised to find that it had a school for female Taoist students. That sense of the nurturing Earth (or female energy) was palpable.

Taishan was my second mountain, a flight away to the East. It’s China’s most famous mountain, known also as the Emperor’s Mountain as every Emperor paid homage to it as it was so high (and therefore close to Heaven). Crowds still flock up the steep path from nearby Taiyuan (okay, I took the bus…).

It remains a sacred place and there were hundreds of pilgrims bringing offerings to the small, crowded temple at the summit. It felt like a holiday destination to me and I didn’t feel particularly moved by it.

It wasn’t too far to Qu Fu, which is the town where Confucius was born. The Confucius family were believed to have the best feng shui in the land after the Emperor.  Along with the Confucian temple and family mansion, there is Confucius’ tomb, set within a cemetery for the 75 generations of his family (100,000 graves, I was told). Given that one of the feng shui precepts is that one should not damage the earth as this awakens the wrath of a vengeful dragon, it was fascinating to see how the graves of the families were mounded above the ground. That same sense was visible in the Confucian mansion which was built on supports laid on top of the ground rather than within it. Entrances were set at angles, with steps and screens placed so that you have to turn often as you progress through the place, slowing you down and creating a relaxed atmosphere that is perfect for a home

Wutaishan

My final mountain was at Wutai, another flight away to the North West. The area has  great significance to Buddhists and there are still many temples scattered around the valley which gives it an incredibly romantic atmosphere. And yet, as we strolled to the small village of Wutaishan after dinner, we were forced to turn back because of the pollution in the night air. The Shanxi region is known as the cradle of Chinese civilisation but it is also the cradle of modern-day coal production, and the valley seemed to fill with smog in the night.

Everyday feng shui was glimpsed in the medieval city of Pingyao, now a major tourist attraction due to the completeness of its buildings within the impressive city walls. Thronged during the day, I was lucky enough to stay in its centre, and therefore able to wander along its quiet streets in the early morning. My hotel was an old courtyard mansion with a busy main building on the street and then the bedrooms housed in pavilions set on a series of courtyards behind, the entrance to each complete with steps and screen so that the chi is slowed, making each courtyard feel incredibly quiet and calm. I think the courtyard model is perfect for inner city living and wish it was adapted in cities such as Sydney. They’re tranquil oases, shaded in the sun.

The final few days were marred by breathing difficulties. Fabulous treasures such as the Hanging Monastery sat under heavy skies and choking air. The roads remain filled by large petrol-driven cars, important symbols of status, and there are many red-and-white striped factory chimneys which churn out smoke. It’s easy to criticise but there are good things afoot. I saw wind farms and solar panels everywhere, and most cities seem to be establishing or extending public transport systems. But I don’t think I have ever been so pleased to get back to the clear air of Sydney. The feng shui journey was worth it, though, walking through spaces that reveal themselves gently. It remains a lesson in urban planning and interior design.

Now, where did I put that wind chime…?

If there’s one thing that Australia does really well then it’s war memorials. Each one in the state capitals is appropriately impressive and solemn – the Art Deco wonder of Sydney’s with its glamorously-dead statue by Rayner Hoff as its focus; Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance that is so big you can walk around its roof; Brisbane’s elegant circle of columns. The national monument in Canberra is a focal point of the city, forming the axis that runs from the Parliament building, and housing a rather amazing museum beneath. Each one expresses how important war has been to this country and that there is glory in dying for one’s country. And whatever you think of that, there’s no doubt that these memorials are emotional places to visit.

But for all their grandeur, I prefer the simple memorials that you come across in country towns. The one in Hill End is a great example. Hill End is a very strange place, situated on the other side of the Blue Mountains from Sydney. It was a thriving gold town in the 1880s with a population of some 8000 people but it is now virtually abandoned. There’s a quirky old hotel, a bakery and a scattering of houses but the rest lies abandoned. Mobs of kangaroos graze in the old gardens of houses where foundations are often all that is left. And then there’s its modest war memorial. It’s a rudimentary affair – a brick platform with a machine gun on top, captured from the Germans in the First World War – and it’s so simple that it moves me every time I see it

Hill End memorial, thanks to Mattinbgn @ Wikimedia commons

Like many, I find the stories that come out of the First World War particularly affecting. For Australia, it was one of the very first conflicts that it took part in after becoming a federated nation in 1901. There was the gung-ho spirit of those going off to fight without knowing just how awful it would be. The innocence of those country towns is perfectly captured by composer Peter Sculthorpe’s Small Town.

Lodeve monument courtesy http://www.tourisme-lodevois-larzac.com/

I find the memorials in the small towns of France equally affecting. You only have to see the lists of names on any of the memorials to realise just how many men from small towns were killed, many from the same family. The memorials usually have a statue of a soldier, which makes them more touching. One in Lodeve, in the Herault, by sculptor Paul Darde shows a dead soldier surrounded by the women who represent the four seasons, all dressed in their 1920s best – fancy hats and all. It’s a strange piece of work, rather like the life-sized nativity scenes one finds outside churches at Christmas. Sentimental but affecting.

In Memory of the Fallen, artist Francesca Howard

This year I bought my own memorial to the First World War. In Memory of the Fallen was painted by the artist Francesca Howard (see other works here). I find it a powerful piece of work, the way it evokes the enormity of the war with its endless ribbon of red poppies, glowering sky of souls and renewed greenness of a land that had been desecrated. It touches me because my own grandfathers were in that conflict. My paternal grandfather was a young officer and I remember reading in his diary of the time he walked through the rubble of Arras, reflecting on the two deserters he has just seen who would be shot at dawn the next day. My maternal grandfather was an ordinary solider. Like many boys, he lied about his age and was sent out to the trenches where he was promptly blown up. As children my sister and I were fascinated by the funny indent at the back of his neck. We didn’t see him without his shirt on but when he died, the funeral director told my mother, “Goodness, he must have gone through something big with all those scars.” He never talked about it but the experience left other scars – he would never set foot in France again.

November is the month of remembrance.

Do you have a favourite memorial?

Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.

Comte de Mirabeau

So I’m strolling along the path beside the sea this morning, gazing at the surf and wondering if I will see dolphins, thinking I’ll pick up a lettuce on the way home, but I’m aware of something else going on in the back of my mind. It’s a word, echoing away, almost like background music. The word is ‘fecund’ but on any other day it will be something entirely different. I have spent the day with ‘fallopian’ drumming away in the background and even had a simple ‘spent’ bounce around my brain for a day.

Is it because I’m a writer that certain words catch (and hold) my attention? They tend to be a juicy blend of hard and soft sounds  – fallopian is quite luscious, fecund is quite direct – and you have to move your lips when you say them. I don’t think it’s anything to do with the meaning of the word – it’s all about the sound.

This is why I like the comedian Miranda Hart so much. Often she will dwell on a certain word – plunge, Jacinta, plinth – and enjoy saying it again and again. That’s me, I think to myself when I watch her do it. And I suspect that it might also be quite a few other people, too.

For a brief period I worked with adults who had autism. One older man liked to sit contentedly looking about him and repeat ‘micronesia’ over and over again. While others used to wonder why on earth he was saying it, I understood that it was the pure, comforting pleasure of saying the word that he was enjoying. Micronesia is such a satisfying word, after all.

As a broadcaster, it’s good to have words that have a kind of chewiness. It makes for more interesting listening, which is why I like to use ‘zingy’ or ‘zappy’ instead of plain old ‘exciting.’ Isn’t ‘plopping’ something down more satisfying  than ‘putting’ it down? A master of the chewy word is Rowan Atkinson and especially his famous turn as a schoolmaster conducting morning registration – the pure joy of  certain words while adding a dig at the absurdity of British surnames.

Stephen Fry is another wonderfully eloquent wordsmith who chooses a word for the pleasure of its sound. And didn’t Lewis Carroll have fun with ‘Jabberwocky’, his poem where its nonsense words still make more-than-perfect sense? Which makes me wonder if this is a peculiarly British thing or if the same is true in other languages. I’d love to find out.

Do you have a favourite word?

Filed under: Writing Tagged: frabjous, Jabberwocky, Miranda Hart, Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, words

This morning I woke early, my mind awash with thoughts, and so I decided to go for a walk by the sea. It’s the best time to go, especially on summer days when the temperature tops 30˚C and the UV index is extreme. In the cool, dewy light, I joined scores of others who had the same idea. Some were jogging, others were setting off for a swim or to surf, and a few were simply sitting and watching the sun rise up over the horizon. It’s as though all of us needed to be close to the vast wilderness that borders the suburb where I live, this great expanse of water that mirrors the sky.

Like most people, I’ve always loved being close to water. As a child, I was seldom happier than playing on a beach or exploring rock pools. Beaches meant holidays and fun. Growing up in South Wales, my best friend and I would often spend summer evenings exploring and playing and discussing the world on the banks of our town’s gentle river, the Usk, as sand martens flitted about and locals fished for salmon.

Most major cities are built on rivers which were used for drinking water and drainage. You will struggle to find many important cities in the world that do not in fact border water of some sort.

The practice of feng shui has clarified many of my feelings about water. In traditional Chinese thought, water is money, which is not surprising given that water is the medium on which ships could set sail for new places, new markets, and bring back new merchandise (and slaves). Think of spice routes and the maritime trade winds. Having flowing water in front of your home is generally thought to bring good fortune, especially if the home is backed by a mountain. A wealthy city such as Hong Kong is a great example of this. And I don’t have to look far from home to see the wealth-generating aspect of water in my own city, where even a tiny glimpse of harbour, bay or sea will command a premium.

But water is a wild, unpredictable energy, too. It’s incredible that something we can barely hold in our hands can have such a tsunami force, easily toppling people and buildings. And water seeps and spills, getting into everything, making it the energy of secrets and sex (think of the sleazy ports of the past). It flows like words and thoughts. It’s the flow of life itself, like the blood coursing through our veins. But too much water in your life can mean you have a tendency to overthink or be a chatterbox or have too much happening in your life – literally being swamped by life itself. Too little is the opposite of all that. And water is the energy of fear, which can develop into phobias when unbalanced. It can be an interesting exercise to imagine the type of water that characterizes your life. If you’re like me, it might change each day, running the gamut from ocean storm to stagnant puddle and back again.

So I came back from my walk feeling hot and sweaty (dripping water) and needing a glass of water to refresh me. But I felt good. My morning thoughts had swirled about as wild as waves and then, once home, they settled and became orderly. The water in my life had ebbed and flowed and become calm again.

Do you have a favourite place to be close to water?

I wonder if it’s natural to hold affection for the buildings that were constructed in your youth. For me, as a teenager in the ‘70s, that was concrete and the aptly-named Brutalism. Or at least the 1970s was the decade when that particular style of building was still being put up before it was swept away by architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers and their lightweight industrial vibe. I’ve always been a cusp kind of person, a foot in two camps, and it’s true of my taste in buildings. While I was drawn to the heavy concrete bulk and concrete ziggurats of Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia campus when I arrived there in 1978, I was blown-away by Foster’s aluminium shed, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

UEA with SCVA at left (photo: John Fielding/ Flickr)

A change was in progress and at that time I was happy to revel in both, loving the way the 1970s SCVA shimmered at the end of the suspended concrete walkway leading from the 1960s university. It heralded the wonder of reflective glass and sexy metals that were to become the materials of the following decade. By the 1980s, concrete seemed very passé. 

But recently I’ve fallen under its spell again. Some of that I can put down to the time I’ve spent with Le Corbusier over the past year or so, and certainly it’s hard not to feel exhilarated by his concrete buildings of the 1950s, the various Unité d’Habitations and the chapel at Ronchamp especially. But I was recently wandering around one of Sydney’s most reviled concrete buildings, the University of Technology’s main Tower, as I prepared a short piece on it for my Iconic Australian Buildings series on ABC RN’s Blueprint for Living. The UTS Tower is famously hated for its lack of human scale and bunker-like aesthetic. Across the road from it stands Jean Nouvel’s Central Park One, a glamorous apartment building completed in 2014, with flowering green walls and plenty of glass.

I knew the UTS Tower well enough from the outside as it kind of hogs the limelight when you’re near it, poking up into your line of sight from the train, a marker for that part of town, or at least it did until Nouvel showed up. I’d been into it a couple of times to view exhibitions in its gallery but I hadn’t really studied the building properly. So I wasn’t prepared to be so blown away by its interior. Here was a busy space that was truly exciting, with broad areas of shining floor under low ceilings leading into cathedral-like spaces with grand staircases and bridges crossing above. There’s colour on some walls and a heavy lattice-work of lights. There are sitting areas tucked away for private conversations or occupying open spaces to encourage informal gathering. It felt simply wonderful. And that took me back.

It reminded me of my university days, moving into my concrete room in Norfolk Terrace at UEA. Its walls were painted white, its carpet was dark brown, and it had an acoustic heaviness that made you realise that it was made from a dense material. No sounds passed through its walls from other rooms. It felt very safe. That bunker thing. And then living in London, I often visited the National Theatre, another Lasdun building, with its wood-grained concrete walls (shuttering, they call it – the imprint from the timber formwork leaving its imprint after the concrete has set). It was a bunker, too, where you entered a zone to watch a play at one of its three theatres or sat in its various public areas to listen to jazz or poetry and watch the crowds. It was, and is, an engaged space – the concrete contrasting with soft carpet, polished timber and the colour of life.

Central Park One – can we have too much green?

I think that’s a clue to the successful use of concrete, when it is balanced with other textures and materials, just as the contrast of Nouvel’s shining, green tower makes the UTS Tower look better. Too much concrete is perhaps as overpowering as having every building clothed in plants although I have yet to visit the Salk Institute, Louis Kahn’s monumental 1965 concrete spread in California, and look forward to visiting (and hopefully staying in)  Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette this year, which is a consciously austere work, as demanded by the monks.

Salk Institute, La Jolla (photo: Alfred Essa/ Flickr)

There’s a recent shift of appreciation for these concrete structures, perhaps a backlash to the translucence of current buildings, which is oddly circular as Brutalism itself was a backlash to the ubiquity of Modernist translucence back in the late 1950s. I find myself, as usual, standing on the cusp, enjoying the dark and heavy as well as the light and luminous.

Are you a concrete lover or hater?

Do you have a favourite concrete building?

Recently I recorded a programme for Radio National on the future of skyscrapers (podcast here, article here). Researching the subject I kept confronting my own feelings about skyscrapers. I interviewed Scott Johnson, an architect in Los Angeles, and when he said that skyscrapers are our biggest artworks that clicked with me. I realised that I tend to think of skyscrapers in terms of what they look like from the street or from afar, not what they are like to inhabit. This view was fostered at an early age by the number of times I saw the glittering skyline of Manhattan in a thousand films and television shows, none better than Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Last year I took as much pleasure sitting by London’s Tower Bridge to gaze upon the characterful jumble of shapes that has now taken over the City as I would sitting in an art gallery.

I’ve never wanted to live high up, or even considered it. I’m one of those people who stands on a balcony and fears that he might be impelled to hurl himself off it, although I have obviously restrained myself so far. Tall buildings are wonderful to look at but I’m not so sure about living in them. Researching the programme made me wonder if I am, at heart, a bumpkin who needs to be able to walk directly outside into a field (or garden).

Several high-rise experiences come to mind:

• Lying in bed on the umpteenth floor of a hotel in Taiwan last year and suddenly being rocked backwards and forwards as a low-level earthquake shook the city. As I rolled about on my mattress, I wondered what kind of medical crisis was causing my body to behave in this odd way. When I realised what was actually happening then I did my own quiet rendition of Munch’s The Scream.
• Standing on the roof terrace of the Montparnasse Tower in Paris which, despite the high glass screens, howls with wind so that all the photos you take are blurry. That calm-looking sky suddenly feels very violent with its invisible, gusty volleys – visions of being blown off a balcony now join the one about the involuntary jumping.
• Staying in a hotel in China that had the unfortunate name Twin Towers. Even worse, it was an actual copy of the Twin Towers (pre, of course). Thirty floors up, I couldn’t stop thinking of planes. And there I was thinking the Chinese did anything to avoid attracting bad luck…
• When friends of mine showed me through the apartment they had rented on the thirty-somethingth floor of a smart building in the centre of Sydney, I marvelled at the sleekness of it all but couldn’t get over the sight of their bed being a mere foot away from a large floor-to-ceiling glass window that overlooked the street a million feet below. I would’ve had to rope myself to the furniture just to get in and out of that bed. The vision of tripping on an errant shoe and lurching headlong through the window still haunts me.
• On the plus side, I used to love meeting a friend for a drink at the bar on the 28^th floor of the Park Lane Hilton in London which had ritzy views across the city and made you feel like a filmstar.
• The skyscrapers of China are mesmerizing but the astonishing blend of history and style makes Chicago a visual skyscrapin’ delight,even if it gives you a crick in the neck.

Staying anywhere above 6 floors and my legs go a little wobbly, like I’m on a ship. It’s as if I’m constantly bracing myself for the inevitable tumble as the building’s balsa-wood structure snaps. So it’s no surprise to find that when I was first able to buy a flat in London I bought one in the basement – or at garden level, if we’re being twee. I discovered, however, that greeting the working day by climbing a set of steps has a rather demoralising effect, and in winter the sun was always blocked by surrounding buildings. So it felt like an achievement of sorts to rise to ground level when I moved to Australia. So far I haven’t made it any higher.

So what’s your experience? Do you, or would you live up high? Tell me your views (or describe them, if you already live up high).

Taipei 101

I’ve just finished re-reading a magnificent book that was written by architect Robin Boyd and first published in 1960. I think it should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in Australia because it is not only savage and hilarious but spot-on. It has a big main theme: the Australian love for what he called Featurism, and why. Much of what drives Australian taste, he posits, was the fear of the natural world.

‘The greater and fiercer the natural background, the prettier and pettier the artificial foreground,’ he wrote. The result was a mishmash of styles, nothing really meaning anything. He describes Melbourne as ‘a dressmaker’s floor strewn with snippings of style.’

I have a rollercoaster relationship with my adopted country. I marvel at the beauty of its natural environment, and the sometimes old-fashioned ease of the place where businesses don’t see the need to take deposits before they start your order, and where I can often see my doctor or dentist on the same day that I ring for an appointment. But I have always been dismayed by its buildings. Of course there’s some good stuff but most of the built environment is pretty bland, if not downright ugly. Which is why Boyd’s book still rings out loud and clear.

And so I thought I’d take you on a little walk, one that I do most days, to show you why.

As I walk down to the beach, I pass this:

Where on earth?

It’s the backyard of a house which the occupants obviously wish was in some Mediterranean village. That entire wall, complete with flowering shrub and leaning bicycles, is essentially a vast photograph acting as a fence. Do those roofs beyond add to the vibe? You’re right, they don’t.

Next, as I walk on a lovely pathway beside the sea, often watching dolphins frolicking in the surf, I pass this house.

pick’n’mix

It used to be a very ordinary place given Federation touches – a wooden veranda, wobbly barge-boards and finials on each gable, the pretend multi-paned windows. But recently it’s been given a Featurist make-over. Classical-looking stone facings were added to the window surrounds and at the corners. And then the veranda was extended and steps added, all covered with travertine tiles that relate to nothing else (no lip, even, on the steps to match the traditional style). A deck was placed in the garden, using composite decking that will never rot, and then a large planter was built, which was faced in a rough stone quite different from either the fake-stone cornerstones or the travertine tiles. To cap it off, the lawn was removed and replaced with synthetic grass to provide a uniformly green sward that will defy the strongest weed.

This then is Featurism writ large. It is a little bit of this, a little bit of that. As Boyd says, “Featurism works on the principle that one cannot have too many good things, even conflicting things, provided the eyes are kept entertained.”

Perhaps surprisingly, this is not a matter of snobbism or what constitutes good taste. Boyd speaks about the success of buildings that have a strong central motivating idea. This design integrity means that each part of a building relates to the other. It is why the Sydney Opera House works and why Palladian villas work and why Le Corbusier’s Unite d’habitation works, and why this building at the end of my walk works.

This house is called Apollo Gate and was designed by architect Reuben Lane in 1969. It wouldn’t look out of place on the Cote d’Azur. It doesn’t matter if it appeals to you or not. The point is that the whole building has been designed as a whole, in this case a home built around a space large enough to hold chamber concerts. It has the integrity of a central idea. There are no quirky gables or sudden changes of materials or extra windows in a completely different style. Its huge presence offers welcome respite from its Featurist neighbours with their fussy bits’n’pieces.

This morning, as if I need to torture myself any more, I drove around a new housing development on the edge of my suburb. It’s tucked beside the remaining sand dunes of a long and beautiful beach, although the site itself was sand-mined and consequently the houses all sit in a kind of hollow, without views.

They’re all different and yet all the same – an assortment of materials with stone or slate glued on to walls that have no real use except to break up the façade. Slanting roofs lead you to believe there are clerestory windows letting in light to darker parts of the buildings but no, they’re there to add a jaunty angle. This sort of development is found everywhere across Australia, from Darwin to Perth to Adelaide, regardless of regional climate differences. Gardens are small but usually filled with further features with nothing allowed to proclaim itself as a simple wall, and no space for proper trees. Walking around I began to feel breathless, smothered by the awfulness of it all. It has, as Boyd would say, a frank and proud artificiality.

What’s the answer? Boyd advocates real architecture, and education of both architects and the general population. But in a country where you still see houses named ‘This’ll Do’ I think there is still a long, long way to go. The last paragraph of The Australian Ugliness sums it up beautifully:

‘The Australian ugliness begins with fear of reality, denial of the need for the everyday environment to reflect the heart of the human problem, satisfaction with veneer and cosmetic effects. It ends in betrayal of the element of love and a chill near the root of national self-respect.’

 So what’s the ugliest building you know?

This morning the usual peace and quiet of my suburban street was shattered by the sound of a chainsaw. A street tree was being removed. It was not a great tree – a eucalypt of some sort, which was growing at an alarming slant over the street – so I wasn’t that surprised. And yet this is the fourth tree to be removed from the street this year. Soon there will be none left, except for those which stand in people’s front yards (and which get radical prunes at various times). Where once the trees were beginning to arch and meet over the street there is nothing but air. This year, there has been the continuing removal of beautiful old Moreton Bay fig trees close to the centre of Sydney, to allow for a new tramline to run from the centre to the Eastern Suburbs. Replacements will be planted, they say, and yet it’s just another sign that Australia seems to have become a nation of tree-haters.

that’ll teach nature…

In a previous post I mentioned Robin Boyd’s book The Australian Ugliness, which was published in 1960. In it he mentions the aboraphobia of Australians, the desire to cut down trees and keep the wild, wild nature at bay. It feels as though nothing has changed.

Sydney jacarandas (Flickr/Francisco Martins)

Australian native trees are rather messy things. They tend to drop whole branches for no apparent reason, making them less than ideal for school areas, and giving them the name ‘widow makers.’ And they drop leaves constantly, according to the weather, and shed bark, so there’s always a natural litter at their feet. The paperbark tree’s trunk looks like something made from papier mâché, and at this time of year its canopy is filled with blossom, which the parrots and bees adore, and which gives the air a curious smell of mashed potato. The spreading limbs and roots of fig trees are nothing short of architectural wonders. And there are also many exotics, such as the feathery jacaranda, which puts on a show of purple flowers in the last months of the year, and of course palms, including the awful Cocos palm which was planted in many gardens in the 1980s and whose heavy crop of berries makes it an invasive weed. But don’t trees clean the air and bring in welcome shade? Don’t they support complicated eco-systems? Don’t they make our cities more liveable and more beautiful?

my Illawarra Flame Tree

In my own garden I have an Illawarra Flame Tree, a local species that loses all its leaves at one point and becomes covered in vivid red bracts. You often see them planted next to jacaranda trees, as they flower at the same time, and look simply stunning.

the power of man

When I first arrived in Sydney I was rather surprised to find that the parts not bounded by the ocean are bounded by forest. Hence the problem with bush fire, which can invade the leafier parts of the city if not controlled. Naturally people are afraid of fire, and some disastrous bushfires in Australia over the past few years have reinforced that. And property has become so expensive that development is rife, turning suburbs like mine, with their quarter-acre gardens, into huge housing developments, as gardens are merged into building sites. Where once there were two houses, now there may be ten. Naturally the trees have to go, along with any sense of natural beauty.

Gradually the leafy outlook from my house has changed into a more manmade array of Colorbond roofs and gleaming white extensions. Planted gardens are replaced by decked areas with pots. At the moment a pretty magnolia called Little Gem is popular, which has huge, fragrant cream flowers, but as these begin to grow above the line of eaves they are removed. Nothing large is planted anymore because there simply isn’t room.

Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains

For a country that promotes its natural environment as its prime tourist attraction, the denuding of its cities seems remarkably short sighted. Traditional main streets across the country are bare of trees, leaving broad streets baking in the sun where there could be cool shade. I think of Singapore and the way its manmade environment is beautified by its many street trees. A recent directive makes adding living walls to parts of each building mandatory. It would be so easy to do that here in Sydney, if the will was there.

Singapore (flickr/Jorge Cancela)

My quiet street will become quieter without the birds that filled its trees. And I’m not sure where the magpies will go that nested each year in the tree they cut down this morning.

who doesn’t like trees?

I’m thrilled to announce the release of my novel, Loving Le Corbusier.

Yvonne in the late 1920s

The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Yvonne Gallis, the woman from Monaco who became the wife of the architect Le Corbusier. It’s a love story but an unusual one, and peopled by many of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century, people like Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. While it’s the story of an ordinary woman, naturally it gives an insight into the life of the dynamic man she fell in love with –  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, who called himself Le Corbusier.

It was impossible not to tell the story of France, too, in the tumultuous years after the devastating Great War, as Paris blossomed in the Art Deco years and accepted the social changes of the 1930s, which was then all thrown into chaos by the sudden shock of the German Occupation in 1940.

Researching the novel meant reading almost everything I could lay my hands on about the work of the architect, as well as his personal correspondence (which meant I really had to brush up my French). I also talked to many Le Corbusier specialists, and visited his buildings across France. But my focus was always on Yvonne. She intrigued me. Most books on Le Corbusier (and there are many) mention her fleetingly – a model from Monaco, that kind of thing – but occasionally there were clues to another person, the one who drank too much, who flared easily. That was what pricked my interest. She intrigued me. Such a happy soul – at first, anyway. I wondered who she was and what sort of woman had ended up living with a man who was famously tricky and controlling and who seemed to want to cover the world in concrete tower blocks. It meant that I had to travel not only to their home in Paris, which is open to the public and run by the Fondation Le Corbusier, but also to the other places that Yvonne stayed, places like Vézelay in the Burgundy region, or the holiday cabin they had on the French Riviera, and even the bleak little hamlet in the Pyrenees where they sat out several months of the Second World War. You won’t be surprised to learn that this was no hardship. Every step was a joy, but to travel around my favourite country and look at it through the eyes of history, and the eyes of Yvonne specifically was pure magic.

I remember a moment in Paris. I’d enjoyed lunch in the simple restaurant on Rue Saint-Benoît on the Left Bank where Yvonne and her husband had often eaten (and where I imagined they had their first dinner together). The place seemed unchanged since the early decades of the 20^th century.

Petit Saint Benoit

I had then sauntered down Rue Jacob, past number 20 where they had lived for the first years of their relationship during the 1920s and early 1930s, and then I sat for a while in the leafy green shade of the Vert-Galant, the park at the prow of the Ȋle de la Cité. My thoughts were tumbling all over the place, as I realised what a task I had in front of me. I wanted to make sure that I got it right. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of writing a rose-tinted version of life in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century but to find out what it was actually like. And I wanted to understand the hardship and joy of living with a man who was determined to change the world. I knew I had so much research to do, not only about Yvonne but also about normal French life through those decades. It seemed like a momentous task.

the Vert-Galant

And that’s when I turned and noticed the name of the barge tied up at the quay behind me: Yvonne. Instantly, I knew it would be all right. I know it was magical thinking but it felt as though I had Yvonne’s blessing, or at least her encouragement.

Portrait of Yvonne by her husband (collection Fondation Le Corbusier)

And that’s why, when I had finished the novel and had it edited and prepared for release, I made sure to thank Yvonne. Because for the past three years she has opened my eyes to France in a way I had never experienced before.

I hope you enjoy it. Loving Le Corbusier is available from Amazon Kindle now and on iBookstore and most other ebook retailers within the next few weeks. I’d love to hear what you think. A review on whichever site you bought it through would also make a huge difference to its promotion.

Now excuse me while I go and run around the room one more time…

I just wanted to let you know that my novel ‘Loving Le Corbusier’ is now available across all the ebookstore sites from today. (I know that many people prefer to use iTunes to download books to their iPads so just to make it even easier, click here to go straight to the right page.)

The period after a novel’s release is sometimes as fraught as the lead-up, but in an entirely different way. It’s nearly two weeks since my novel Loving Le Corbusier made its debut and I’d forgotten the feeling that creeps in at this time. Although it’s truly exciting to see your baby take its first steps in the world, there’s also a kind of dead feeling lurking in the background. I keep thinking of the French term, la petite morte, the little death, which is used to describe the moment directly after orgasm. That’s what it feels like – a moment when you almost cease to be.

Maybe it’s the same after most endeavours – winning a race, putting on a show, getting a job you’ve always dreamed of. Sometimes it steals in and whispers quietly in your ear: so that’s it, is it? All that work and now what?

yee haa, a hairy Bisset!

It reminds me of something I did a few years ago. I was an extra in Wolverine, one of those X-Men Origins films. It was quite a palaver. I was a Confederate soldier in an American Civil War battle sequence at the beginning of the film and so I had to grow a beard, which was alarming (where did those grey hairs come from?). A group of us spent a day at Fox Studios learning how to load and fire muskets, how to march, and how to fight convincingly. We had another day of wardrobe fittings. Filming took place some months later in farmland outside Sydney. Base camp with its trailers and tents took up most of one field, and there was another encampment closer to the shooting location, which was where we ate. There were people simply everywhere. Make-up took forever (they even put make-up inside my ears) but it was great fun spending a couple of days being blown up or firing cannons. I remember a moment when I looked out over a battle-field with its smoke and explosions, hearing the yells and screams of soldiers, and then watched the cavalry arrive over the hill with flags flying. For a terrifying second I felt as though I’d slipped back in time. At the end of filming, we were presented with a Wolverine shaving brush and released from this curious filmic bubble. Normal life felt rather dull the next day. Une petite morte. (When the film came out, those days of filming were reduced to a few seconds. All that effort, all that energy, all that money. It was a lesson in Hollywood excess.).

Une vrai morte – visiting the tomb of the Le Corbusiers at Roquebrune

It’s yin and yang, of course, the essential balance of opposites. All the upswing of energy and excitement that culminates in the end of a project has to be balanced by a downswing. It’s the silence after the argument, the cool breeze at the end of a hot day. And it’s temporary. Because after la petite morte comes movement and life. For me, my novel is out there and after this passing moment, I will move on with the activity of promoting it with a different kind of vigour. It’s how it is, and I can feel that upsurge dawning now.

 Does this happen to you, too?

It’s easy to forget that most architects head a team. In the case of Le Corbusier, much of his work was completed in partnership with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, and yet Pierre’s name is often omitted in books. And that, I feel, says something about the nature of this rather unassuming man.

When researching my novel Loving Le Corbusier, I liked Pierre from the start. Photographs show him to be a rather small man with a prominent brow, an old-fashioned type in the Fred Astaire mould. His letters showed that he had a strong empathy with Le Corbusier’s wife, Yvonne, understanding that life with Le Corbusier wasn’t always straightforward, and yet it was easy to imagine the three of them meeting up most evenings for a drink after work, either in the Deux Magots or the Café de Flore.

Pierre started to work with his cousin in 1922 and together they set up ‘Le Corbusier: Pierre Jeanneret architects’ in a new office at Rue de Sèvres, gradually building up a team as more work came in. Unlike his cousin, Pierre had a formal architectural training in Geneva but you never have any doubt that Le Corbusier was in charge. Through the Twenties and Thirties they worked together on the startling works that defined the first part of Le Corbusier’s career – the Villa Savoye and other house designs, the huge schemes for the League of Nations  and the Palace of the Soviets (unrealised) and the Centrosoyuz office in Moscow. When Charlotte Perriand joined the office in 1928, the three of them worked on the tubular steel furniture that is again often ascribed only to Le Corbusier.

Pierre doesn’t seem to have minded that his cousin was the bright star. Le Corbusier was the man his clients wanted, the man with the biggest ideas, just as today’s clients want Norman Foster or Renzo Piano rather than just their teams. While Le Corbusier spent his mornings painting, writing or working on specific work problems in the peace and quiet of his home, Pierre was left to run the office and oversee much of the construction work. He had a meticulous sense of detail, which is essential in completing any building. Le Corbusier was a broad stroke, big picture man, restlessly moving on to the next project, not caring too much if there were flaws in the workmanship. When Le Corbusier told off his client, Hélène de Mandrot, for allowing shoddy workmanship in her house, it was left to Pierre to smoothe the ruffled feathers of a doubtless rather perplexed client.

When the Second World War started, the cousins split. Le Corbusier wanted work from the Vichy government, not so much because he agreed with their politics (or so I believe) but because they were in charge of new building projects throughout the country. So far as Le Corbusier could see, there was only one man up to the job of replanning cities or designing temporary shelters: Le Corbusier. It’s clear that Pierre had no desire to work with the collaboration government and made no effort to woo Vichy. In 1940 he tagged along with Le Corbusier and Yvonne when they moved to the hamlet of Ozon in the Pyrenees, after Yvonne’s health began to deteriorate in damp Vichy. When Le Corbusier went off to Vichy, Pierre kept Yvonne company or tinkered with a bicycle and he would often disappear for a day’s cycling. It was in Ozon that he decided to take up an invitation to move to Grenoble to work with Georges Blanchon producing temporary wooden buildings. The team there was also a cover for the Resistance and Pierre was an active member, issued with a gun. In so many ways, he achieved much more than Le Corbusier ever did during this period.

After the war had ended, the cousins reunited when Pierre was enrolled to help on the giant Unité d’habitation building in Marseille. In 1950 Le Corbusier landed the job to design the new capital of the Punjab, Chandigarh. Although Le Corbusier was in charge he wanted Pierre at his side. It was in Chandigarh that Pierre really seemed to shine, no longer in the shadow of his more famous cousin. When eventually Le Corbusier bowed out, having designed the main buildings – the Secretariat, the High Court, and adding his famous open hand sculpture – Pierre stayed on to design buildings for the university as well as a whole range of interior furnishings. They’re rather clumsy looking pieces, quite removed from the sleek tubular steel of the 1920s, and yet they say something for how Modernism was diversifying and leaning towards a less machine-made look. We see it in Le Corbusier’s own simple holiday cabanon of the same time, with its upturned whisky crate stools and rough-barked exterior, and even in the chunky walls of the sublime chapel at Ronchamp. It’s a return to nature. (For photos of his furniture – and for some lucky buyers – see: patrickseguin.com.)

I’ve always found Chandigarh a hard place to love although I can only judge it from photos. New towns take time to settle in and I’m eager to visit but I fear Chandigarh will disappoint. I think it’s the way the spaces between the buildings seem simply too big and that the scrubbiness of the landscape doesn’t balance the raw concrete buildings – they need lushness. Perhaps it’s a different place after the monsoon rains.

Le Corbusier wrote often about the warmth of the Indian people and Pierre loved the country, too, staying in Chandigarh until ill health forced him back to Switzerland where he died in 1967. His ashes, though, were scattered on the lake at Chandigarh. His personal papers are now held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture but oh, I wish he had written an autobiography.

Pierre in massive trousers, with his taller cousin

In my novel, Le Corbusier treats Pierre in the impatient way a brother treats a sibling. At one point he calls Pierre ‘a drone’ but really, there’s much more to Pierre than that.

I’d love to know more about him so drop me a line if you can shed more light on the man.

I just had to share this photo.

It shows a jokily mocked-up hard copy of my novel Loving Le Corbusier sitting proudly on the roof terrace of one of Le Corbusier’s beautiful houses in the Cité Frugès at Pessac. It was sent to me by Jean-François and his partner Maryvonne who own not one but two houses at Pessac. This one is the Harg House, a Type Gratte-Ciel, or skyscraper type, which has stunning views over the whole development. The other is a Type Zig-Zag which they are currently restoring back to its former glory after reclaiming it from years of neglect.

I’m particularly touched by this photograph because it also shows the only remaining detached house in the development, and this is the house into which Le Corbusier took Yvonne when they first visited Pessac together in 1926. It’s a scene I write about in the novel. The house had been furnished by the local Aux Dames de France department store as a showhouse but due to the frightening modernity of the whole place, local plumbers refused to link the development to the water supply and the houses remained unlived in until the end of the 1920s. In my novel, Yvonne is unsure what to make of it, especially all the coloured walls. She has never really visited any of her lover’s buildings before and he is snappy when she says so little. It’s a sign of the communication problems they will continue to suffer, even when married.

LC with Yvonne at Pessac – Harg House to the left (photo courtesy of the Fondation Le Corbusier)

The Cité Frugès recently celebrated its 90^th anniversary with festivities, including a vintage car parade and a Le Corbusier lookalike. Everyone is waiting to hear if the development is to be granted World Heritage Status, along with Le Corbusier’s other major works.

You can keep up with events at the Cité Frugès through www.lamachineahabiter.com and you can also rent Harg House: www.lecorbusier22.com completely surrounded by the glory of Le Corbusier. For the moment, I’m happy to see my book sitting there. Among friends, in all ways.

If you’re curious to see what the home of Le Corbusier was like, I’ve put together a slide-show on YouTube to show the apartment he built at the edge of Paris, at 24 Rue Nungesser et Coli, or 24NC as Le Corbusier called it.  For those of you who’ve read my novel ‘Loving Le Corbusier’ then you will perhaps understand why Yvonne was reticent about moving here in 1934. The apartment faces a sports ground, which is now enclosed by a sub-Bird’s Nest superstructure, but there are still distant views to the centre of Paris from the roof – a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, the monolithic Montparnasse Tower – but they seem far away. At the rear of the block, the dining room overlooks the leafy surrounds of Boulogne-Billancourt towards the distant hillsides beyond. It’s a world away from their cramped home in Rue Jacob in Saint-Germain and it’s easy to see why Le Corbusier adored it – space, light, nature, not to say a rather wonderful studio space. But I’m not sure that Yvonne ever loved it.

What do you think? Could you live there?

I’m aware that this site is beginning to look like one dedicated only to Le Corbusier but you must allow another post to celebrate the news that UNESCO has added 17 of Le Corbusier’s buildings to its World Heritage List, meaning buildings of international significance. These buildings are:

(with links to my written pieces)

1. Petite maison au bord du lac Léman in Corseaux, Switzerland, 1923 – 1924
2. Cité Frugès, Pessac, France, 1924
3. Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, Paris, France, 1923 – 1925
4. Maison Guiette, Antwerp, Belgium, 1926
5. Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927
6. Villa Savoye et loge du jardinier, Poissy, France, 1928
7. Immeuble Clarté, Geneva, Switzerland, 1930
8. Immeuble locatif à la porte Molitor, Paris, France, 1931 – 1934
9. Unite d’habitation, Marseille, France, 1945
10. Usine Claude et Duval Factory, Saint-Dié, France, 1946
11. Maison Curutchet, La Plata, Argentina, 1949
12. Cabanon de Le Corbusier, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1951
13. Complexe du Capitole, Chandigarh, India, 1952
14. Maison de la Culture, Firminy, France, 1953
15. Couvent Saint-Marie de la Tourette, Evreux, France, 1953
16. Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occident, Taito-Ku, Tokyo, Japan, 1955
17. Notre Dame du Haut chapel, Ronchamp, France, 1950 – 1955

It’s a wonderful outcome for those who love his buildings, to know that they will be carefully conserved for the future. And it will no doubt draw a new audience to view them, and that is not half bad. It still surprises me when I meet people – educated people – who have never heard of Le Corbusier. When I’m researching important buildings for my Iconic Buildings series on Blueprint for Living, I am forever coming across architects who have been influenced by Le Corbusier. He is, as people like to say these days, still very much part of the conversation, and that’s what UNESCO has recognised.

Entrance facade, Villa Savoye

So whatever you think of raw concrete, flat-topped houses and strangely-shaped churches, I hope you join me in celebrating the news, and if you haven’t done so already, then do make a detour sometime to visit one of the great works of this clever, confusing, infuriating and utterly wonderful architect. (And yes, most of the buildings appear in my novel Loving Le Corbusier.)