Visiting Le Corbusier’s Grave
The End is a series about end-of-life issues.
This is the first piece in Gravehopping, a series within The End on visiting grave sites.
Jason is excited that our rental car has a manual transmission. He views it as a perk, though it was our only option. We drive down a steep hill that snakes toward the sea, and follow brown signs marked “Le Cabanon.”
We are on a mission to find the one-room cabin designed by the architect Le Corbusier for his wife, Yvonne. The house is on the French Riviera and is known as Le Cabanon. It is 12 feet by 12 feet with no kitchen, and a toilet next to the bed.
Our interest in Le Corbusier (a.k.a. Corbu) started when we read about Yvonne’s vertebra.
She was cremated at her funeral. Corbu rescued the backbone from the ashes and showed it to stunned guests. For the rest of his life he kept the bone in his pants pocket, except when it was placed on his drafting table, so he could look at it as he worked.
We read the vertebra story in “Le Corbusier: A Life,” by Nicholas Fox Weber. The story was sweet and strange. It made us feel attached to Corbu, and in our travels we began to check if any of his buildings were nearby.
Jason and I are not architecture scholars, but we have been to five of Corbu’s buildings. The spaces inspire thoughts on proportions, history and aesthetics, but more than that, they are fun. Like sculptures you can walk through, or adult jungle gyms.
I hear waves crashing. We go down narrow steps and hit a stone beach.
The brown signs have led us not to a modernist shed, but to a cute snack bar called Le Cabanon. A waiter wants to know what he can get us. Jason asks in broken French if this snack bar was built by Le Corbusier. It was not.
The waiter points to the other side of the cove, explaining that the real Cabanon is next to the white house known as E1027. We race across the beach to Le Cabanon, but stop at some rocks, realizing they must be the ones Corbu climbed down every day for his swim.
“How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun,” Corbu is quoted as saying twice.
When Corbu was 77 years old his doctor forbade him to take long swims. He mostly followed this advice, except on the morning of Aug. 27, 1965. People saw him struggling to climb the rocks, but he waved them off. Later, his body floated to shore.
His death was not ruled a suicide, but it seemed to be, like the rest of his life, designed.
Le Cabanon is under renovation. We knew this but hoped the locked fence would be more see-through. Jason stands on tiptoes.
“Maybe we can find his grave,” I say.
We have never wanted to be buried, until now. Le Corbusier designed the grave site when Yvonne died, leaving a space for himself. It looks like an architectural model of a modernist city block, and stands out in the traditional cemetery the way his Villa Savoye does in the suburbs of Paris.
It’s impossible to know for sure why Corbu treasured Yvonne’s vertebra. Mr. Weber argues that it “had a gruesome truth to it.” One might also imagine the architect’s appreciation for structure. Maybe it was simply a relic from his soul mate. Our guess is that Le Corbusier saw a beauty in death.
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