Still Life With Le Corbusier: A Study in History, With Artistic License

Just a couple dozen grainy photographs and a few sketchy plans are all that remain of Le Corbusier’s revolutionary Pavilion of the New Spirit, a model apartment the early Modernist architect made in 1925 for a decorative arts exposition in Paris. But those few documents have marked the pages of history books ever since and remain shocking for how much they were able to foretell the look of today’s built landscape.

They are also all that curator Carol Eliel had to work with when she decided to re-create the home’s main salon as the centerpiece of “L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925,” the exhibition of early Modern painting and architecture that opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Le Corbusier’s room, which existed only for a few months before being disassembled, is a design icon that now looks so contemporary it could almost have been built yesterday. In reality, however, it is filled with myriad once-common objects and special pieces that are hard to find anymore. And when historical accuracy is the goal, as it is in any such undertaking, putting enough of those pieces back together to make the room look real takes a good deal of building, shopping and sleuthing.

“There were no color photos, just black and white, and the remaining plans at Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris are not the most detailed in the world, I would say,” the sprightly yet academic Eliel said with a chuckle as she put the finishing touches on a show that took nearly five years to assemble. A curator of Modern and Contemporary art at LACMA since 1984, Eliel says the museum had previously put together “period rooms” evoking a particular era, and it had reassembled preserved spaces--such as a tearoom by the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Macintosh that came to the museum in 1997 as part of a traveling exhibition--but LACMA had never before tried to replicate a full-scale room. And she readily admits she had no idea just how much work it would take.

Le Corbusier’s project was made for the enormous International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. In addition to the fully realized model home, only one room of which LACMA has reproduced, his pavilion also contained a diorama proposing a radical redevelopment of Paris that never was realized; the architect dreamed of creating affordable housing in identical multiples, though little of that ever got built.

Crucial to the success of LACMA’s remake is that it reunites four still-life paintings by friends of the architect that hung prominently on the original walls. Le Corbusier painted one--signed with his birth name, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. Two others he borrowed from his collaborators in the Purist movement, a post-Cubist style emphasizing classic, recognizable imagery. Those are by Amedee Ozenfant and Fernand Leger. And the fourth is by the Spanish-born Cubist Juan Gris. The Jeanneret comes to LACMA from the Le Corbusier Foundation, the Ozenfant had to be tracked to an art gallery in Paris, the Leger is now a prized work in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Gris came from a private collector. Getting those paintings may have been the most straightforward part of Eliel’s job.

Le Corbusier’s apartment is a basic design he intended to duplicate and stack infinitely in new skyscrapers in his ideal city. Its main living room, which was also reproduced in 1987 for an exhibition in Zurich, consists of an uncluttered boxy space furnished with just a few useful objects that eschew decoration.

Walk into the room and distances of time and place collapse. Two stories high at one end, the salon breaks into a loft above and a more intimate living space below halfway through the room. At the front, windows stretch from floor to ceiling, shining light on plain yet elegant furnishings that include classic leather club chairs from the British firm Maple, modular cabinets designed by Le Corbusier and unadorned rectangular tables that seem to float above thin, tubular legs. If it all looks like the subject of a design magazine today, it’s hard to imagine how Le Corbusier’s vision must have appeared in 1925, a period when Beaux Arts flourishes still prevailed and luxurious Art Deco dominated the supposedly up-to-date exposition.

To put the room together again, Eliel assembled a team that included Arthur Ruegg, a Le Corbusier expert based in Zurich who had worked on the 1987 show; Roy Thurston, a Los Angeles-based artist and craftsman; and Danny Forrest, the museum’s resident architect. Ruegg, by fax and phone, focused on the big picture--the room’s basic dimensions, the details of Le Corbusier’s taste for “typical objects.” He even lent from his own collection a cane-seated chair that was a favorite of the architect, as well as some Berber pottery and laboratory glassware of the sort the architect favored, such as a beaker to be used as a vase and a mortar that serves as an ashtray. These, as well as books and magazines from the period, adorn the table tops to complete Le Corbusier’s living still-life.

Thurston served as project contractor, overseeing building the room, from the modular shelves and compartmentalized desk to the custom windows and now-quaint fabric curtains. Forrest, a recent UCLA architecture graduate, translated Le Corbusier’s modular drawings into working plans and admits that while he didn’t study the architect much in school--calling him a “god of architecture” who seems less relevant today--he was struck in the process of making the room by how “normal” the work seems today.

Eliel herself also did a lot of shopping, stretching her art historical training to new dimensions. Like many artists of the period, Le Corbusier loved new technology and science, so he included symbolic touches like a butterfly specimen box on a shelf top and a model airplane hanging above a window.

“The butterfly box had completely disappeared,” says Eliel, but she knew Le Corbusier often shopped at Veyrolle, a science shop in Paris that still exists. There she bought a wood specimen box, which she took to the Museum of Natural History and to a supplier to buy butterflies known to be in Europe in the 1920s.

The airplane was built from scratch by Ted Mayer, an L.A.-based industrial designer who is an avid model-plane hobbyist. Here again, the documentation was pretty fuzzy, Mayer recalls. “I presumed that because of the nature of the expo the plane would have to be French, from around 1915 to 1925,” he said. It turned out only a few from that era had the same configuration. He narrowed it down to the Spad, a fighter plane considered the height of modernity at a time when planes were only beginning to develop sophisticated aeronautics. Mayer also discovered precise documents for the plane, which he reduced to a 37-inch wing span accurate enough to fly--”if it had an engine.”

Wall sconces that light the room would probably look comfortable today in a shop on Beverly Boulevard, but they, too, posed challenges. Eliel enlisted the help of Judith Sheine and Hofu Wu of the Department of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, as well as their students Jeff Temple and Phillip Lee, to re-create these as part of a lighting seminar; the result is a group of exact working replicas, minus the clunky electric cords that Le Corbusier couldn’t avoid.

Some pretty basic questions could never be answered accurately, however. For example: What color were the walls? Ruegg pointed out that the architect wrote just about everything down, including the palette for the pavilion. A classicist, Le Corbusier used “eternal, archetypal colors,” Ruegg says, but not every green umber, brown or white is the same. So the only solution was to guess and hope for the best. Ruegg, who has written three volumes on Le Corbusier’s palette, sent from Switzerland color chips and samples of finishes for the museum to follow. Thurston then went to Westmark Paint on Pico Boulevard, who matched the colors precisely enough to earn Ruegg’s seal of approval.

But there are also places where a little fudging seemed fine to some members of the team and not to others. Just days before the show was to open, Ruegg arrived from Zurich and was surprised to find the museum had added new ceiling lights at one end of the room--conventional modern recessed lights.

A stickler for detail who has made something of a career re-creating Le Corbusier environments, Ruegg was clearly disturbed by the intrusion. It might seem a simple decision since that portion of the space is low and slightly cavernous, but the museum had taken a liberty.

Who won?

History, of course. The lights are turned off.