He’s one of the titans of 20th century architecture, but Le Corbusier, the man who created the planned city of Chandigarh, is suddenly feeling the weight of history working against him.
The modernist master’s legacy is coming under pressure after Switzerland’s largest bank dropped an ad campaign featuring the architect last week. The Zurich authorities are now debating whether to dump plans to name a square after him. Letters made public in recent years and a 2008 biography suggest that the visionary known for his cool, spare designs and revolutionary urban planning ideas was a Nazi sympathiser whose fascist tendencies went far beyond what was previously known.
One letter shows Le Corbusier expressing clear enthusiasm for Hitler, though at other times he calls him a “monster”.
“If he is serious in his declarations, Hitler can crown his life with a magnificent work: the remaking of Europe,” Le Corbusier wrote to his mother in October 1940, when he was shopping his radical ideas about urbanism across the continent. That was also shortly after Hitler’s armies conquered France and much of Western Europe. —AP