Le Corbusier's Maison Blanche

For students at Franklin, talking about travel is by no means foreign. But as students of travel writing in specific, we push ourselves to articulate our travels in more challenging and perhaps more nuanced ways. And to that end, today’s trip to the Maison Blanche helped pushed us to return to the idea of home as the antithesis of travel.

For Le Corbusier, this was not only his family home, it was where he planted the very seeds of his architectural career. For me, having traveled extensively, home has always been a rather fluid notion, and usually means no more than having a place in the local order. Le Corbusier was no doubt integrated into this house. He was building himself into this space, so there is not question of whether or where he fits in. But it should also be noted that, even as he designed this place to come home to, he designed it as a compendium of all that he had seen on his recent “reverse grand tour”. And so he brings about the question of where exactly we draw the line between home and the world beyond. And what is more, how much of our experience of our travels do we continue live with--or in, as it were--once we have returned home? Corbusier is insulated himself and his space with his experiences as a traveler, and this visual memoir served as a lens and a filter for all of his experiences as a future resident of this house.

All of this we discussed sitting in the living room of the Maison Blanche--definitive tourists, in a definitive tourist destination, and yet somehow making ourselves “at home”. This is the only home we’ve encountered on our journey so far, and Corbusier’s dozen different types of fenestration offer a unique lens through which to see our travels outside this house. We are reminded at least of what it means to not be travelers, which is important, I think, as we loose ourselves in our new experiences. We must not forget that, as traveler writers, our role is to filter our travels through the sieve of our past experiences.

Le Corbusier and some friends in his studio.

It was also exciting to be in a city Sara once called home, which offered us a rather more personal link to the city’s regular fabric. Perhaps we, as a group, do not have a particular place in this city, but Sara’s roots here mean one fewer degree of separation between our hosts and us. It seems, in this light, that making a place for one’s self is more relative than definitive. Sara is relatively more Swiss than me, and I suppose I feel relatively more Swiss as my stitches in the general Swiss fabric multiply. I also wonder if I can say I am any less tourist here than I am in Lugano, where Franklin is still what draws us in and makes us feel like we belong. And to that same end, I wonder if I can say I am leaving this place to eventually go “home” to Lugano, or will I continue to be a “traveler” when I return to my own apartment.

And finally, as a Franklin student, my own identity as a tourist is very much tied up in my idea of myself as traveler. My studies lend my travels purpose, and as I write my thesis on Corbusier specifically, I walk through this city with a feeling that I have a definitive reason to be here. In that sense, this is part of my intellectual home. I once had a travel leader who mentioned that the city were in was becoming a part of our “home equation”. As both student and tourist of Corbusier, I feel La Chaux-de-Fonds has made a definitive place for itself in my image of Switzerland, and my notion of the places I have lived and studied.