When in 1940 the Italian architect and industrial engineer Angelo Mangiarotti photographed for the Domus magazine (founded by Gio Ponti in 1925) the Maison Blanche with a part of the roof covered by a red canvas due to some works, it aroused the anger of Le Corbusier, who since Paris picked up the phone to call Milan and say: "it was bad enough, you didn't have to mess it up even more". Twenty-eight years had passed since the great Swiss architect projected his first work and, from afar, he no longer looked at it with the same eyes with which he created it.
La Maison Blanche is located in La Chaux de fonds, a Swiss city in the Canton of Neuchâtel where Charles Edouart Jeanneret was born in 1887, who later, already in Paris, would adopt the name Le Corbusier, based on the surname of his Belgian great-grandfather Monsieur Lecorbesier. Here he studied as a child, when logic said that he would end up working as a watchmaker like his father and as was appropriate in a city dedicated to that industry. But at the age of 13 he entered the School of Applied Arts, where he would be deeply marked by a teacher named Charles L'Eplattenier. It was the time of art Nouveau, here called the Sappin style, and something -or everything- deviated from the expected path. In 1908 he traveled to Paris and met the great Auguste Perret, in 1910 he traveled to Germany and met Peter Behrens, in 1911 he traveled to the East and got to know the popular architecture of the Balkans, the mosques of Istanbul, the monuments of ancient Greece, and Rome, sure.
While traveling, he received the news that the family home in the center of La Chaux de Fonds had caught fire. That day he began to germinate the idea of a new construction for his closest relatives. That day the Villa Jeanneret Perret was born, his first great building as a professional, a true foundational declaration of intent, because in this house, today a pilgrimage center for scholars and consolidated architects indebted to his principles, Tadao Ando visited it twice, Le Corbusier distances himself from the prevailing decorative, regionalist and picturesque art nouveau, from other previous works in which he collaborated, such as the neighboring Villa Fallet or Villa Stotzer, and specifies the knowledge and constructive and aesthetic experiences acquired on those trips, while at the same time manifests an impressive knowledge of space and light.
Located on the edge of the forest, halfway up the hillside, the Villa Jeanneret Perret dominated then and still dominates the heights of the city and opens up to the horizon of the peaks of the Jurà. Since it stood out on the mountain, from afar it was perceived how its façade returned the sun's rays, making them explode in an integral white, which is why little by little it became known as the Maison Blanche.
Managed and preserved with dignity by the Maison Blanche Association (Maison blanche.ch), guided tours are organized that reveal the significance of a pioneering project. Access from the north is through an intricate path at a right angle. The architect intends with this that we appreciate the entire house before entering it. Given that we are in the watchmaking city par excellence and that Le Corbusier's father worked in the industry, the presence of openings in the roof is explained, as was common in the rest of the buildings that were built at that time (all clearly focused on the search of light, so necessary for the work of watchmakers who occupied such a particular gridded urban layout that in 2009 it was declared a World Heritage Site)
Once you have climbed up the Alpine-style lower garden, you go through a portico and through an open-air staircase you access the upper garden -la chambre d'été, as Jeanneret called it-, closed on three sides and whose geometric layout, corner pavilion , cloister, pergola painted in ultramarine blue and red brick paving suggest the Mediterranean world more than the Jurà environment. Here are the Aegean Sea, Greece and Turkey... The garden, the terraces and the volume extend to the west giving the building an unmistakable air of a packet boat.
In the Hall or Rez-de-Chaussé there is no lack of the piano, an instrument played by Le Corbusier's brother, nor the original fireplace with the edge painted by the architect. This apartment is characterized by the harmonic proportions of the volumes, the fluidity of the space and the radiant light that takes over everything and that explains what planet this great exponent of the modern movement came from, one of the most influential architects of the 20th century.
