64 LAUSANNE
that contribute to making the MCBA a sustainable building. North of Lausanne, a drive along Lake
Neuchâtel, is the so-called ‘watch valley’. At its heart is La-Chaux-de-Fonds. (You may have heard reference to the small town more recently for its athletics track. A place where, thanks to the rareified air, national and European records regularly fall faster than the snow.) Louis Chevrolet, he of the car company, was born there, a decade before one Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. Born in 1887, Jeanneret left school aged 13 to attend the municipal art school, l’Ecole d’Art de La Chaux-de-Fonds in the heart of the valley. In 1905 he was commissioned by one of the trustees at the school to design the Villa Fallet. Charles L’Eplattenier, a painter and mentor to the young man, arranged for him to be helped by a local architect, René Chappalaz. Te fee enabled the student to travel to Italy, Budapest and Vienna, following which two more houses in La Chaux de-Fonds were commissioned in 1908: the Jaquemet and Stotzer houses, when he again received help from Chappalaz. Both houses are of wood and stone, in the regional style. Five years later he returned to his home town to design a home for his parents, the Jeanneret-Perret house, together with a house for wealthy watch manufacturer Georges Favre-Jacot, and, during the First World War, the Anatole Schwob House for yet another watchmaker. In 1920, Charles-Edouard restyled himself Le Corbusier. Tose early projects are all still there, not far from Lausanne. To see those houses now – a little too
close together for their size and the amount of money they represent; nice and not too loud – the effect is a little like art nouveau- cum-folkloristic ideals in old prints. Big houses, some in enormous ghostly grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows, high on a hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest – all they need is some soft background music; not so much climb every mountain as the hills are alive with the sound of Corbu. Except, of course, they are not – it is much more Edelweiss, a ‘bless my homeland forever’ in the heart of the lonely goatherd kind of Switzerland as you can imagine. In the dusk, dim, distant yellow windows peek down at you from the crest of some estate agent’s dream that may well have turned into a nightmare. Great, silent estates with high walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges, very quiet, distant clusters of shadowed mansions up on the hills: hardcore Corb they are not. One of them could be the side
Images Olympic House, the HQ for the International Olympic Committee, designed by the Copenhagen studio 3XN in collaboration with IttenBrechbühl
entrance to the Taj Mahal. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. Te larger regional setting did
nevertheless have a very formative effect on the architect’s future direction. Te education Le Corbusier received at the Ecole d’Art, under the remarkable L’Eplattenier – a broad-minded pedagogue open to the most advanced reformist thinking of the day – was unusually sophisticated; he was especially partial to the legacy of John Ruskin and
William Morris, no doubt accounting for Le Corbusier’s tendencies toward both utilitarianism and nature worship. If we try to explain the combination of self- confidence and urgency Charles-Edouard always had in regard to his missionary programme for recasting world architecture, we can find some of the sources in this art school La-Chaux-de-Fonds has the richest
concentration of Le Corbusier’s early work.
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