Le Corbusier was ashamed of the house he built

On the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds, an industrial town in the Swiss Jura, stands one of the most beautiful houses I’ve seen. Elegant and understated, La Maison Blanche is the kind of house you dream of living in. Wide windows overlook a wooded valley. The rooms are bathed in silver light. The ambience is serene and timeless, more like a temple than a townhouse. You’d never guess the man who built it was the bogeyman of modern architecture — the man who began a movement that replaced terraced streets with tower blocks. In this lovely house, and the art-nouveau villas he built beside it, you can see the traditional architect Le Corbusier could have been.

Le Corbusier was born here in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887. Christened Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, his birthplace is a short walk from La Maison Blanche. A modest plaque marks the spot, outside a nondescript apartment block. It’s a perfunctory tribute, inscribed with his name and not much else. ‘Laisse Beton!’ someone has scrawled across it. ‘Leave Concrete Alone!’ It feels like a fitting epitaph. Countless cities bear the scars of Le Corbusier’s love of concrete. Half a century since his death, he remains the architect conservatives love to hate.

Le Corbusier moved to Paris in 1917, where he adopted his famous nom de plume. ‘A house is a machine for living in,’ he declared. ‘A curved street is a donkey track — a straight street is a road for men.’ It’s hard to think of a manifesto less in tune with British tastes. Le Corbusier still personifies the great divide between British and Continental attitudes to modern architecture. In Britain, our clumsy copies of his high-rise housing projects are derided as ugly eyesores. In France and Germany, his Unités d’Habitation are revered.