Museum Curator

My mother, Heidi, was one of the earliest self-made women in Switzerland, a country that gave women their full civil rights only in 1971! By then she had already completed most of her great achievements. As a confidante of Le Corbusier, she had started manufacturing his legendary furniture in 1956 and consequently she became an art publisher, producing most of his graphic/lithographic works. As Le Corbusier’s associate she became his exclusive art representative for 30 years and the summit of her endeavours was the conception and construction of his last building with her own financial resources. The Centre Le Corbusier – Heidi Weber Museum located in a public park on the lakeshore of Zürich in Switzerland, his only building in steel and glass, was inaugurated in 1967. To finance this construction, she literally sold everything she ever owned and moved with me into a rented 1½ room apartment in the old city of Zürich. My mother did not need to educate me; she was and still is a living example. The genius mind of Le Corbusier that incorporated with feminine intuition was always present in our lives. Not only the chain reaction of creativity but also the intellectual heritage that Le Corbusier left to the world was lived almost every day. Respect for details and little things as much as the courage and ambition of great ideas and projects formed my life and destiny. When I was 21 and working as an assistant photographer during my holidays, I was hired by my mother to prepare a photographic inventory of Le Corbusier’s artistic work in the newly-created Foundation Le Corbusier in Paris. I took more than 6,500 pictures of his drawings, water colours and collages and about 500 images of his oil paintings, some of which he had painted over a period of over 40 years as on some he had added the dates when he took them out and worked again on them. All of this gave me a comprehensive overview of Le Corbusier’s artistic output. I will never forget a lunch with Le Corbusier in Paris when I was a young boy in the late 1950s. Now, Le Corbusier had the habit of being early for his appointments, and this time he knew I was coming along with my mother to their regular working lunch. So when we arrived at the restaurant, he got up and after greeting us he changed his seat: he had started a drawing on the white paper napkin (which were common in Paris restaurants in these days) at the seat he left to me, so that I could keep busy finishing off his drawing while they were talking about work. I remember this as a very genuine and respectful way of dealing with my young and impatient age.