Le Corbusier in Bordeaux

2015 is the 50th anniversary of the death of the architect Le Corbusier. This post is about the houses he designed in the 1920s which are located at Pessac, a suburb of Bordeaux in South West France.

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in 1887 in Switzerland where he trained to be an architect. In his twenties he travelled in Europe visiting Vienna and working in Paris for Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete, and for the industrial designer Peter Behrens in Berlin. He returned to Switzerland for most of the 1914-18 period to teach and develop theories about modern architecture for domestic dwellings. After moving to Paris in 1917 his first commission in France was the design of a water tower (below top left) at Podensac, about 30km south west of Bordeaux. Jeanneret-Gris started to use the pseudonym Le Corbusier in 1920, going into architectural practice with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, in 1922. In 1923 Le Corbusier’s influential book, Vers une architecture (below top right), was published and he designed the Villa La Roche at Auteuil (below lower), probably the first building to demonstrate his thinking about the nature of modern housing.

Impressed by the book and by Le Corbusier’s vision of low-cost housing as a means of heading off social revolution, Henri Frugès, a cultured and innovative Gironde industrialist, commissioned his practice to design a small workers’ community around a sawmill at Lège-Cap-Ferret and then a much larger garden suburb of 135 houses at Pessac. This was never completed but Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès, consisting of 51 units of seven types were constructed between 1924 and 1926 and can still be seen (less one, also the only one of its type, destroyed in 1942) in what is now called Le Cité Frugès Le Corbusier.

After a period of decline, the town of Pessac turned one of the houses into a museum (Maison Municipale, open most days) (above) in 1987 and many of the houses have been handsomely restored (below) in the original polychrome (burnt sienna, pale English green and clear oversea blue) used by Le Corbusier on exteriors only at Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès.

However, there are still some remarkable opportunities for restoration (below left and centre), and not all the inhabitants seem to have fully absorbed the modernist spirit (below right):

The “Five Points of a New Architecture” which would feature in Le Corbusier’s later work, particularly the Villa Savoye, arguably remain emergent in Pessac. The ribbon window is certainly there (below upper) but there seems to be limited use of supporting columns (below lower):

There are roof gardens:

but it seems difficult to identify much free use of the interior in the absence of supporting walls, or free design of the façades – but these are fairly small buildings as some interior views of the Maison Municipale below reveal. The extent of the wasted volume over the staircase between the first and second floors (below right) is surprising.

Even in 1924, Le Corbusier anticipated mass ownership of cars and the need for garage space on the ground floor with living spaces upstairs. The garage area of the Maison Municipale is now used to exhibit a model of the planned garden suburb:

The model plaque indicates just how advanced the scheme was in its time with central heating and showers. Unfortunately its cost probably contributed to Frugès’ bankruptcy a few years later.

Visitors to the Maison Municipale are given a booklet (in French) describing Le Cite Frugès Le Corbusier and its history (also available for download as a pdf). One example of each of the six surviving types of house has been classed as an historic monument. The types are:

Maison Gratte-ciel (“sky-scraper”) – see Maison Municipale image above

Maison Isolée (“detached” below left) and Maison Arcade (below right):

Maison Zig-Zag (below top) and Maison Quinconçe (below lower)

Maison Jumelle (“twinned”) no image available. (If there are any errors in attribution of images here, please comment!)

Should you wish to stay in a Le Corbusier house for a few days, apparently the only one available anywhere in the world is the HARG house, a Maison Gratte-ciel, in Pessac.

Noah Baumbach’s ‘Mistress America’

Only four months ago I posted about Noah Baumbach’s comedy While We Were Young and now his Mistress America has just been released in the UK. Although both films are set in current-day New York and both share a theme of the implications for friendships of differences in age, in fact Mistress America has more in common with Baumbach’s 2012 Frances Ha. For a start both those films were co-written by Baumbach with Greta Gerwig who also takes the eponymous leading parts.

The plot of Mistress America spans the eight weeks or so between the start of the university year and Thanksgiving. Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just started her degree in English Literature and is finding it hard to make her mark on campus socially or with the elite Mobius Society of would-be literati. Her mother is remarrying and encourages Tracy to get in touch with her soon-to-be older stepsister, Brooke (Gerwig). Brooke is 30, Tracy 18, ages at which the difference between them ("contemporaries" blags Brooke at one point) is more significant than it would be at 54 and 42, say. At first Tracy is dazzled by Brooke’s knowledge of the ropes and tropes of the youthful Manhattan lifestyle but she soon realises that Brooke is all hat and no cattle. Tracy’s depiction of a thinly-disguised Brooke in a short story gives the film its name and gains Tracy entry to Mobius.

Brooke’s fanciful plans to open a restaurant hit a financial crisis and she decides to seek funds from a wealthy former boy-friend Dylan (Michael Chernus), now married to a former rival of Brooke’s, Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), and living in a splendidly positioned Modernist house in Connecticut. Tracy and a couple of her fellow students in tow, Brooke doorsteps Dylan and with the support of Dylan's paediatrician neighbour and a pregnant friend of Mamie-Claire, a seven-person ensemble piece ensues. Eventually Brooke is extricated from her money problems and decides to leave town.

Frances Ha appears in Wikipedia’s list of Mumblecore movies, “characterized by low budget production values and amateur actors, heavily focused on naturalistic dialogue”. I have to confess that the early parts of Mistress America, set in a student milieu and with young actors speaking contemporary American, were not easy for my ageing English ears to follow. Interestingly the Connecticut sequence with older actors presented no such problem. There is some very witty dialogue throughout and Gerwig, only 32, has a great comic talent as performer and presumably as a writer. She sees the professional side of her relationship with Baumbach as having parallels with the great song-writing partnerships and she may well be right. Hopefully there is much more to come from them.

I think the critics’ ratings of 4* and 5* for Mistress America are a little generous, perhaps there isn’t much else around in August, although I sometimes wonder whether I’ve seen the same film. In the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews gushed:

It stars a Greta Gerwig more than ever resembling cinema’s earlier Greta G, her tomboy-Garbo features ideal for the title-nicknamed heroine.

Gerwig has many strengths, but being Garboesque is surely not one of them. Andrews then tells his readers that:

During a house-party weekend, half a dozen Brooke-related characters, indentured to her worship, form tableau vivant tribunals to critique Tracy’s acidic, Brooke-based short story, titled Mistress America.

It wasn’t a house-party weekend, two of the three other women present didn’t like Brooke at all and nobody moves or speaks in a tableau vivant. (I guess Andrews is busy brushing up his Kurosawa).

By the way, at one point on her own in Brooke’s squat, Tracy settles down with a drink from a bottle whose label ends “…ET”. Lillet Blanc is an aperitif produced in the Gironde in South West France, not well-known in the UK but popular for a long time in New York and other sophisticated parts of the US  as a cocktail ingredient. Supposedly the American taste for it was acquired on the transatlantic liners. Personally I find Lillet too sweet, even when served well-chilled as recommended. Unlike Mistress America in which Baumbach and Gerwig have the balance between the comic and the acerbic about right.


UPDATE 2 September

Richard Brody, The New Yorker's veteran film critic, whose views are far more worth reading than mine, has a very high opinion of Mistress America:

... “Mistress America” is a masterwork of literary cinema in the other, qualitative sense: it isn’t merely about literature; it’s a work of brilliant writing, one of the most exquisite of recent screenplays.