He was the most admired architect in the country, but Zionism interested him only as an opportunity to realize his planning concepts.
In 1938 the famed Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier wrote a now little-known article about the state of the Jews, in which he asserted that dramatic and exceptional circumstances had generated a period of mass Jewish emigration.
“This emigration will spread across one day to all countries,” wrote Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris. “This enormous Jewish experiment, which opens an entire decade, deserves particular and generous preparation.”
Tzafrir Feinholz, a doctoral student in architecture, opened his dissertation about Le Corbusier and the Zionist movement with this article. He summarizes his research, which examines the relations between the Zionist project, Le Corbusier, modernist planning and the personal ties between architects and Zionist institutions from 1910 to 1948.
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Encounters with the ‘Jewish question’
Le Corbusier had already encountered the Jewish question in the 1910s in his native Switzerland, to where many Jews immigrated, and more forcefully in the 1930s when he was living in Paris, to where many Jews arrived from conquered parts of Europe.
Switzerland, which didn’t look kindly on Jewish settlement within its borders and refused to grant them equal rights, cooked up the transmigration solution, which modern Israel refers to as the third-country solution. The government of France, whose concentration of Jews in its cities aroused hostility, raised the possibility of resettling them in outlying villages.
The two solutions constitute the basis of Le Corbusier’s article. While written as a response to the Evian Conference, which had failed to resolve the Jewish refugee problem, Le Corbusier framed the Jewish question in relation to the problems of a modern industrial society in general. He noted that Nazism and Bolshevism had become global phenomena. These terrors of the mechanized age, the detachment from nature and loss of solidarity were the reason for the Jews’ woes, he argued. Considering his fear that “the trouble would spread to all of Europe,” he called on resettling the Jews and returning them to “nature.”
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Le Corbusier envisioned Jews living in housing units of 2,000-3,000 people each. These units would preserve the social communal experience Jews were used to in their traditional places of residence while guaranteeing hygienic and creative ways of life. Such units were built in Marseille, France and Berlin in huge blocs.
Experimenting on Jews, architecturally
However, Feinholz’s research clearly shows that the Jews’ fate did not particularly interest Le Corbusier. Zionism only interested him as an opportunity to implement his ideas on an essentially captive population. As he wrote, “Through their suffering and bad luck, the Jews are ready to bypass the trivial and reframe themselves under a new order. Anything is better for them than what is now happening. ... One can imagine how it is possible to exploit these spontaneous circumstances to take the first steps to organize a mechanical society on a natural basis.”
Despite his ties with Zionism, his familiarity with the Jews’ travails and his friendship with Jewish artists and architects in Paris, and despite planning homes of established Jews in his hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds, La Corbusier was a profound anti-Semite, as Feinholz’s research reveals. He wrote to a friend in the 1910s about installing “smoking rooms for fat Jews” and wrote during World War II that Jews got what they deserved. He wrote of 1943, when the Jews of Paris were sent to their destruction, that it was “a year in which nothing special happened.”
He was much less a political man than a technocrat, according to Feinholz.