Le Corbusier's Framework

Le Corbusier rose at six and did forty-five minutes of calisthenics, then made his wife's coffee and had breakfast with her at eight. The rest of the morning went to painting, drawing and writing, which he considered the most creative part of his day. He spent hours on canvases that had nothing to do with his buildings and showed them to no one but his wife, yet he credited these private mornings with the deeper meaning of his architecture. At two in the afternoon sharp, an hour his assistants learned to treat as holy, he arrived at the studio on the rue de Sèvres and handed the morning's sketches to others to develop. He left between 5:30 and seven depending on how the work had gone. On bad days he fumbled with his wristwatch, muttered that architecture was difficult, and slipped out early. The week separates the two halves cleanly: five and a half hours of creative work alone, then three of running the practice. A framework for anyone whose paid work feeds on something private.