Le Corbusier and the Occult

When Charles-Édouard Jeanneret reinvented himself as Le Corbusier in Paris, he also carefully reinvented the first thirty years of his life by highlighting some events and hiding others. As he explained in a letter: «Le Corbusier is a pseudonym. Le Corbusier creates architecture recklessly. He pursues disinterested ideas he does not wish to compromise himself.... He is an entity free of the burdens of carnality.» Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as «one unified watchmaking industry.» Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge LAmitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as «my guide, my choice» and as his «time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism.