Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile

In this interesting book, Antonio Amado draws together a number of different topics linking Le Corbusier and the automobile. After surveying the development of automobile culture and Le Corbusier’s interest in it, he takes us through the various cars the architect owned, before focusing on the history of the so-called Voiture Minimum, often dated, by Le Corbusier himself, to 1928 but actually designed in 1936.

In the 1920s Le Corbusier regarded automobiles, along with aeroplanes, ocean liners and the work of civil engineers, as the expressions of modernity by which any modern architecture must be tested. His friend Amédée Ozenfant and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret were real car enthusiasts, obsessed with the performance of engines, always listening for disquieting noises. Ozenfant’s favourite vehicle was the English Morgan three-wheeler, which he had owned since 1915. Le Corbusier’s interest was more formalistic. He looked for the pure geometry and rational solutions of automotive design, selecting details as much as whole views to illustrate his article ‘Eyes That Do Not See … III Automobiles’ (July 1921) reprinted in Vers une architecture in October 1923. But he was as interested in the hand-built coachwork as in the performance characteristics, illustrating the interior of the Bellanger sedan twice in his L’Esprit Nouveau articles, once in relation to a discussion of the Parthenon and once as frontispiece to the essay ‘Mass-Produced Housing’.

An evaluation of Le Corbusier’s interest in motor cars is therefore welcome, and readers will find much to interest them in Amado’s book. Amado brings to the project an enthusiastic interest in car design, and the book will also interest car buffs with no particular parti pris for Le Corbusier. We learn a great deal about the cars Le Corbusier owned and drove, and in particular the splendid Voisin C4, C7 and C11 automobiles which appear in many of the photographs of Le Corbusier’s buildings.

A service to the Le Corbusier scholar is provided by the table of cars owned by Le Corbusier (p. 42). Some doubt hangs over some of these references, however. Further research shows that Le Corbusier apparently bought his first car in February 1919. Le Corbusier wrote to his parents on 9 January 19191 referring to the car which he would have the next month, and which would enable him to visit them in Switzerland. This appears to have been a Ford, registration number 3524E E4, in which he had a serious accident on 11 October 1920 and which he sold in August 1921. There is a letter acknowledging receipt of a cheque from the Motor Union Insurance company on 24 November 19212 and another to M. Maingault on 15 August 1921 offering him a commission of 500 francs if he could sell the Ford for 9,000 francs.3 There is also no proof that the Citroën ‘Torpedo’ 5HP car—offered by Raoul La Roche to both architects on completion of his villa, in a letter of 17 January 1925—was ever owned by them. Instead, Le Corbusier made a deal with Mongermon, one of the directors of Aeroplanes Voisin, whereby he would pay 17,500 francs for a second-hand 8HP Voisin C4, with a further 5,000 francs credit based on the house Le Corbusier was designing for him adjacent to the Jeanneret-Raaf house in the Square du Docteur Blanche. This car (registration number 9079 E2) was second-hand, and a photograph of it is in the Charlotte Perriand archive (illustrated by Amado, on p. 22). The photograph shows Pierre Jeanneret standing proudly next to the car. This vehicle was included in photographs of the Ternisien villa and the Lipchitz and Miestchaninoff studios. A detail Amado missed is that the vehicle is right-hand drive and so probably belonged originally to an Englishman.

At the heart of the book is a careful analysis of the SIA (Société des Ingénieurs de l’Automobile) competition for a small car, launched in March 1935 and its connection with the ‘Voiture minimum’ designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. The competition deadlines were 31 May 1935 for the preliminary designs and the end of September 1935 for the final plans. In October 1935 Le Corbusier wrote to a city councillor Georges Prade, offering to design a small car with superior aesthetic qualities, and the secretary of the SIA Maurice Berger then sent Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret the details of the competition along with some of the seventy-eight designs submitted to date, kindly offering them the opportunity of submitting their own design for publication in the SIA journal. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret appear to have begun work at the end of January 1936 and duly submitted their project in March. Although only six of the thirty-nine drawings in the Fondation Le Corbusier are dated, Amado persuasively argues that only three pre-date the first of the dated drawings (31 January 1936), which is in Le Corbusier’s hand.

Amado sets the SIA competition designs into the context of streamlining and small car design, including the origins of the 2 CV Citroën and the Volkswagen. Porsche’s designs for NSU and Zundapp, which evolved directly into the Volkswagen, were developed between 1932 and 1933. The Citroën ‘toute petite voiture’ project was launched just before André Citroen’s death in 1935, a prototype was ready in 1936 and the first 250 cars in production by 1939. Amado analyses the relationship between these projects and the Voiture Minimum by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. There is little evidence that their design had any impact on Citroën or Volkswagen although Amado shows that there is a remarkable similarity in the outline of the rear of the Volkswagen and the Voiture Minimum. This is as likely to reflect an influence of Porsche on Le Corbusier and Pierre as the other way around.

Although Le Corbusier repeatedly cited 1928 as the date for the ‘invention’ of this car, with its rear-sited engine and semi-streamlined form, there is no trace of a design from this earlier period, either in the 33,000 drawings in the Fondation Le Corbusier or in the sketchbooks, diaries and correspondence which have survived. Amado points out that in many of Pierre Jeanneret’s drawings for the Voiture Minimum a tracing of the pedals, steering wheel and seat are taken from the SIA competition handbook diagram (March 1935). Le Corbusier’s sketch of 31 January 1936 clearly indicates that the chassis would be based on the design (No. 24) submitted by ‘Gerard’ (of 1 rue de la Châtaigneraie, Sèvres) to the SIA competition.

Almost all the submitted projects for the SIA competition demonstrate a more or less streamlined profile and 60 per cent had rear-mounted engines. The distinctive features of Le Corbusier and Pierre’s project lie in the use of the full width of the chassis to provide three seats in line and a possibility for two of these to fold out flat to create a bed [1]. It is tempting to see here an echo of Le Corbusier’s personal arrangements, with himself, his wife Yvonne and Pierre frequently travelling together to the Bassin d’Arcachon for their vacations. The fact that Le Corbusier also specifies a place for a dog (presumably his schnauser Pinceau), adds to this identification. Amado argues that the profile of the Voiture Minimum is organized around the √2 geometry characteristic of the Purist paintings (pp. 234–5). Where the design parts company with the automotive aesthetics of the time is its surprising angularity. The volume reads as an extrusion of the elevation, and this runs counter to the principles of the streamlined teardrop. Le Corbusier’s argument appears to have been that the priority was to maximize the interior space of the cabin and turn it into a living room on wheels. He also insisted on the importance of perfect visibility forwards.

Until his death, Le Corbusier insisted that the Voiture Minimum design dated from 1928 and thus preceded all the streamlined, rear-engined small-car designs of the 1930s. He wrote plaintive letters to directors of the Automobile Manufacturers of Czechoslovakia, to Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat and to the directors of Citroën, claiming the anteriority of his design. Amado goes carefully through the evidence and makes clear that all the existing drawings for the Voiture Minimum belong to the period between January and March 1936. The finished drawing of the car, with the studio number of V 3392, was entered in the studio logbook of drawings (the ‘Black book’) on 24 March 1936, signed by Pierre Jeanneret and titled ‘Voiture radieuse’. It is rare for Pierre to sign drawings entered into the Black book and this draws attention to the particular interest this project had for him. In fact, Pierre was working on a project for the ‘petite maison de weekend’ for M. Félix at La Celle St Cloud in October 1935, in which can be found the echoes of the streamlined form of the small automobile [2].

This book is a delight to read and contains much food for thought. It is well illustrated and divided into short segments, making it easy to navigate. The bibliography is adequate but might have included the conference papers, Avant Garde und Industrie (Delft University Press, Delft, 1983), edited by Stanislaus von Moos, and his L’Esprit Nouveau: Le Corbusier und die Industrie (W. Ernst, Berlin, 1987), both of which deal with Le Corbusier’s interest in automobiles in the 1920s.