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The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberance

The scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.

With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.

Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.

This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.

Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.

The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.

A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.

Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.

This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.

The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.

The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?

What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?

At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.

There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.

Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?

Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Dubai, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, Le Corbusier, Qatar, The Guardian, World news

The beauty of the golden ratio, surely, lies in the discovery of harmony in imbalance – that is, it's not a symmetrical division, it's not 1+1, but a bit more interesting and lively. In architecture, the piers and windows of Durham Cathedral seem to apply it as assiduously as in the Parthenon in Athens. But why such mystique?

The ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras was moved to find that a string only produces perfect musical notes when divided by exact mathematical fractions. He saw this as a revelation of divine beauty. This attitude to number (that it is the key to the secret harmony of the universe) survived in the middle ages in Muslim and Christian architecture.

In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci took it to new extremes, analysing the perfect proportions of a horse and a human and finding number at the heart of nature. In 1504 he was designing fortifications for an Italian town. While researching this for a forthcoming book, I puzzled over diagrams of pyramids that keep interrupting plans for towers – until I understood that Leonardo believed so passionately in the power of proportion that he thought it could make a castle invulnerable. He illustrated his friend Fra Luca Pacioli's book The Divine Proportion, which praises the golden ratio, and so helped to create one of the most persistent cults in maths and art.

Whether or not the golden ratio really has any special significance in human psychology, it has been given that status by artists like Leonardo. Another is surely the great 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca, whose geometrically pleasing art is rooted in mathematics. The persistent pursuit of this proportion right down to Le Corbusier proves that mathematics and art come from the same beautiful place in our minds.

So how do you find this special proportion? Divide a straight line in two so that the ratio of the whole length to the larger part is the same as the ratio of the larger part to the smaller part. The result (roughly 1.62 to 1) is the golden ratio.

Jonathan Jones's book about Leonardo da Vinci will be published by Simon and Schuster in April 2010.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Features, guardian.co.uk, Le Corbusier, Leonardo da Vinci, Mathematics, Science, World news

BBC4's recent series on 1930s architecture looks at Britain's art-deco history through neon-tinted glasses. The reality is a bit more complicated

There's no denying art deco's attraction: it's the style of 1930s cinemas, ocean liners and flamboyant Manhattan skyscrapers. It conjures Hollywood, Busby Berkeley musicals, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. It makes you think of glamorous climes – whether Miami, Havana, New York or Shanghai – in which buildings that seemed to be encrusted with fashionable jewellery gleam in the summer sun. It's also a style that's been much in vogue recently, because of BBC4's Glamour's Golden Age season, which includes a series of documentaries by David Heathcote on art deco icons.

But here's the funny thing: Britain doesn't actually have much in the way of art deco architecture. Even London has just a sprinkling of buildings: Ideal House, a black granite-clad office block off Regent's Street designed by Raymond Hood; The Odeon, Leicester Square; and the glorious Daily Express building in Fleet Street, with its spectacular, cinema-style entrance lobby by Robert Atkinson. Outside London, cinemas are the most shining examples of the style – Harry Weedon's Odeons are the best (all too many converted into bingo halls or graceless multiplexes), along with shop fronts. Manchester and Glasgow have their own dramatically deco Daily Express buildings, both dramatic examples. If you look hard enough, you can detect deco influences in the buildings of Liverpool's Speke Airport (now a hotel) and even in the suburban stations of the old Southern Railway, such as Surbiton.

But it's never a style that really took root in Britain. Which makes it all the odder that the BBC has decided to label buildings art deco that aren't. In his documentaries, Heathcote devoted much time to Charles Holden's 55 Broadway, the headquarters of London Underground, describing it as "a fantastic art deco building". Holden would have turned in his grave at the description. Influenced by contemporary US architecture, yes. And detailed inside in ways that might suggest art deco. But an art deco icon? No.

This isn't entirely Heathcote's fault. Television thrives on telling stories with the broadest of brush strokes. And art deco has become something of a catch-all title in recent years, used to describe almost any building, piece of furniture, bronze lamp or ceramic dish designed between about 1925 and 1940. I've seen Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery for Adolf Hitler described as art deco and even – a mortal sin, surely? – Le Corbusier's coolly modern Villa Savoye in the suburbs of Paris tainted with the same label. The term itself was something of a latecomer. It wasn't much used before the design historian Bevis Hillier published his delightful book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s in 1968, defining a style that had more usually been known as moderne, modernistic and jazz modern.

The style emerged from the legendary Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 – a grand showing of design and decoration, from furniture and accessories to interiors and architecture, mapped out in acres of precious veneers, marble and onyx, stainless steel and aluminium, all much influenced by Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian archaeology. It was this licentious playfulness that provoked the contempt of the rising stars of the Modern movement – modernism – which had been rooted in the far more serious researches of the Bauhaus and, most notably, Le Corbusier. Modernists held art deco in contempt: it was all but sinful. A travesty. Low and dishonest. Downright vulgar – it was the stuff of fashion rather than function, of escapism rather than realism.

When Nikolaus Pevsner, the architecture and design historian, went to see the cinematic Hoover Factory on London's Western Avenue, built by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners (1931–5), he described it in the Middlesex volume of his The Buildings of England series as "perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories". (A comment that was toned down to something substantially less angry in the revised edition of the book, published in 1991.)

And whereas Modern architecture, for better or worse, influenced the British landscape for decades to come, art deco never really took flight. It remained in domestic settings: hinted at in the stained-glass sunrises of mock-Tudor front doors, echoed in the interiors of 1930s MG sports saloons. It conjured fantasy and escapism at a time when the world could be a very grim place indeed.

Perhaps some of the same escapism touches our view of art deco. It's a way of looking at the past through neon-tinted glasses. By all means, watch Top Hat, gawp at the Chrysler Building, imagine yourself sipping cocktails aboard an ocean liner – let the dark and disturbing interwar era become the stuff of ritzy cinematic dreams. But life in the 1930s was more complicated. And while it's understandable that the BBC should have fallen for art deco's charms, it might have been better if they had got their history straight.

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To mark its 175th anniversary, the Royal Institute of British Architects is holding a season of films in which buildings – fantastical or factual – take a starring role. Here are my top five

In pictures: RIBA celebrates architecture in film

From the silent epics of DW Griffiths through Art Deco spectaculars like Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1933 to Pixar's wonderful WALL-E (2008), the connection between architecture and film has always been intimate. Look at how Le Corbusier defined architecture: "the masterly, correct and magnificent play of form in light." It stands as a great description of cinema as well as of buildings.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that many great art directors and set designers – especially those who fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood – trained as architects. And the influence runs the other way: inspired directors and their designers continue to exert an influence on architecture. The play of light is everything, whether it's in the work of Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott and David Lynch, or of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas.

This month, as part of its 175th anniversary celebrations, the Royal Institute of British Architects is holding a film season devoted to the relationship between architecture and the movies. Below, I've listed five films – the briefest list from all but endless possibilities – I can watch happily over and again, and that bring out the best in both genres. You probably have your own favourites: I'd love to hear them.

Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi may be best known for its wondrous female robot, Eve, but it's the set design that really takes your breath away. It features a cloud-scraping contemporary Tower of Babel, an industrial workers' production hell-hole, and super-modern, master-of-the-universe-style offices – all revealing its creators' in-depth knowledge of the very latest European architectural developments. Whether they're interpreting Art Deco, Bauhaus Modern or Expressionism, all the buildings shown are terrifying. The overall effect is curiously Gothic, shadowy, elongated, chiaroscuro. And scary.

Lang's team of set designers – including Karl Vollbrecht, credited as "film architect", and Erich Kettelhut – were led by Otto Hunte, art director and production designer. Hunte had previously art-directed Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919); a master of dark films, he went on to work on the crudely anti-semitic Jud Süß (Veit Harlan, 1940). Lang and Hunte employed the cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan, who developed a process whereby Metropolis actors could be projected, through mirrors, into miniature sets. This bold play with "futuristic" architecture and newly developed filming techniques helped make Metropolis a powerful influence on real-life architecture for decades to come.

Blade Runner (1982)

Metropolis translated into another futuristic dystopia, this time a vision of LA in 2019. The opening shots, as the camera pans over a 700-storey skyscraper and the sky glows with industrial smoke, fire and acid rain, is as magnificent as it is disturbing. It's another interpretation of the Tower of Babel, of course; this time the headquarters of the company that makes the humanoid "replicants" that do the dirty work for human beings.

Scott says that the sets were conjured from a variety of haunting images: Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, the skyline of Hong Kong at night, the fiery industrial landscape of Tyneside and Teesside of Scott's childhood, the French comicbook Métal Hurlant [Heavy Metal], and, quite clearly, Metropolis. Scott places these nightmarish exteriors in architectural contrast to the theatrical, spooky inside of LA's real-life Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893, which is cast as the headquarters' interiors. Significantly, the original architect claimed that his style was influenced by Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward (1887) – itself a work of utopian sci-fi. Wyman admired the passage in which Bellamy describes a typical commercial building of the future as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above".

Dr Strangelove (1964)

Ken Adam, set designer of Stanley Kubrick's cold war satire, tells the story of Ronald Reagan becoming president of the US and asking to see the Pentagon War Room. What War Room, asked his aides. The one in the Dr Strangelove movie, replied the president, deadly serious. No wonder Reagan was fooled. This superbly realised space, built in Shepperton Studios, was rooted in Adam's fascination with the sets of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. Born in Berlin, and later trained as an architect in London, Adam gravitated naturally to these darkly inventive productions.

Adam made his name with sets for the early James Bond films – Dr No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever – but this was the most powerful single interior he designed, a stark black-and-white space in which the future of humankind was played out. Adam's drawings for this and other sets, and scenes in the film rival that of any practising architect. Kubrick went on to make a number of films, notably 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), in which architectural design was to play co-starring roles.

Nostalgia (1983)

Some 15 years ago, I spent the best part of a week sleuthing the locations that Andrei Tarkovsky chose for this exquisitely beautiful film set in what – at least in 35mm – was a permanently mist-laced Tuscany. The story is nominally about a Russian writer's research into the life of the 18th-century Russian composer, Maxim Berezovsky, who committed suicide after being recalled to Russia from Italy. Tarkovsky saw this sad tale as a reflection of his own life, alienated from the Soviet Union, and possibly his death, too. Here are composites of remote Tuscan churches and abbeys, a delightfully gloomy hotel bedroom, and best of all, a public square dominated by a sulphurous thermal bath.

It took me a while to find the real-life locations. I'm pretty sure that two of the churches were the 12th-century Abbazia di Sant'Antimo at Castelnuovo Dell'Abate and the ruined medieval church of San Galgano. The thermal baths were, without a doubt, those of the 14th-century St Catherine in Bagno Vinoni. In the saint's day, the waters were said to be laced with gold and silver; they were particularly good for ailments of the liver, spleen, stomach and skin.

Sadly, they could not cure Tarkovsky of the nostalgia that, as much any physical condition, killed him in 1986. He said that the locations in Nostalgia "overwhelmed" him. If you go to Bagno Vignoni or the Abbazia di Sant'Antimo, especially on a misty winter's day, you might well find they do the same thing to you.

Laughing Gravy (1931)

A Laurel and Hardy short in which the lovable idiots try to hide their pet dog Laughing Gravy (Prohibition-era slang for booze) from their grumpy, dog-hating landlord. I've included this in my list of favourites because the entire action takes place inside a deeply shabby, snow-blasted townhouse that is as much a star on the screen as Stan and Oliie. Every last cubic inch, every last feature, is used to get laughs as sash windows drop on heads before the same heads get stuck in chimneys. The house becomes a giant climbing frame for non-stop gags.

But Laughing Gravy isn't all laughs: a large number of Laurel and Hardy shorts were made in response to the Great Depression, and many use grim streetscapes to conjure the comfortless real-life world just outside the studio gates. The house's melancholy, down-at-heel quality – its dreadful bedroom, horrid kitchen, and butt of freezing water by the front door – is a perfect match for Stan and Ollie's glum economic status.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Culture, Design, Features, Film, guardian.co.uk, Le Corbusier, Stanley Kubrick

Le Corbusier's summer cabin - a tiny bolthole built in the south of France for his wife - has been reconstructed at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. Jonathan Glancey steps inside

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Never mind the bread-making and star-jumps – even after a day spent getting into character, 'Corb-hater' Lynsey Hanley is still struggling to find the humanity in the work of Le Corbusier

Utopias are built on peak fitness, I tell myself while limbering up for 45 minutes of "gentle exercise" on the windy concrete concourse of the Barbican. I've reported for duty at 11 on a Saturday morning to take part in A Day in the Life of Le Corbusier, 15 hours' worth of events which broadly represent the strict daily regime of exercise, contemplation and action taken by the "first globally-branded architect-guru" (the curators' description, not mine). He is also the subject of the Barbican's major show.

Winston Smith, the wheezing protagonist of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, wouldn't have lasted five minutes here. Our instructor, Caroline Jupp, faced with whupping a gaggle of architecture students, round-specced design junkies and a recalcitrant Corb-loather (me) into shape, has a whistle and a bunch of colourful flags, which she asks us to hold above our heads while marching on the spot.

While it's hard to envisage the godfather of modernism – who began each morning with an hour of bending and stretching – having much truck with formation star-jumps, I discover that there is such a thing as benign marching: it focuses (or numbs) the mind, creates a sense of collective purpose. None more so, however, than Jupp's claim that "you're the best exercise class I've ever had!" I suspect Corbusier would have withheld that sort of thing for fear of making us soft.

Clutching orange segments and a commemorative balsa-wood medal, at noon we run back across the Barbican's pavement-on-pillars, the Highwalk, for a bread-making brunch session with artist Alexandre Bettler. The idea is to remake in doughy form Le Corbusier's "Modulor" system of measurement, which replaced feet and inches with proportions and ratios taken from the human body. I grab a ball of dough and attempt to shape it into a cortical lobe. Brain food, you see.

Such high-concept activity can't, however, answer my core question of the day, which is whether Le Corbusier's approach to architecture and planning has caused more human pain than it sought to alleviate. So I head after lunch (a warm brain-shaped bread roll) to a talk by one of his many post-war followers, the architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay.

"Le Corbusier was a poet," begins Keatinge-Clay, who is now in his 80s and worked at the master's Paris atelier in the late 1940s (where he recalled having his work trashed by his mentor). One of a handful of students at London's Architecture Association who followed Corbusian principles, Keatinge-Clay says that he and his classmates "were interested in creating a new world". He is a moving, incantatory advocate: at the close, he repeats the words "Le Corbusier, I thank you" like a mantra. All of which leaves little room to ask whether Corb was actually right.

Don't blame the architect if buildings don't work, he seemed to suggest: blame the people who build them, then the people who live in them. A similar line is taken an hour later by Eva Branscombe of the Twentieth Century Society as she tours us round the Barbican Estate, taking in the residents' secret water garden, with its ingenious traffic noise-drowning fountains and several maddening kilometres of walkway – Barbican architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's clearest nod to Corb.

The curious thing is, after six hours I'm even less enamoured of Le Corbusier than I was to begin with. He dealt in "habitation units", "machines for living in", days divided into productive hours. Today I've built a miniature city in a box, helped to paint an "exquisite corpse" by stencilling a wine bottle on a wall, broken bread with bespectacled Corb fanatics, and still I can't find the humanity in his work. None of it dents the impression that he was a man who felt his ideas were nothing if they couldn't be imposed on other people. If everyone got to live the kind of life he did – gentle exercise, leisurely breakfast, daily thinking time – perhaps they'd make more sense.

But neither the exhibition, nor the Barbican's attempt to help us enter the mind of Le Corbusier through his daily routine, challenges the received wisdom that only philistines and dimwits can't get a handle on modernism. If there were ever a name that needed rehabilitating in the minds of those who, like me, have wasted too many hours of their short lives getting lost on Corbusian concrete walkways, it's his.

Yet throughout the day there's no one who is prepared to explain how his 1925 "Plan Voisin", for instance, which would have turned central Paris into a giant banlieue, was sensitive to human needs. As a piece of draughtsmanship, it's extraordinary to look at, and it's important to remember that his ideas evolved – even softened somewhat – in the later years of his career. We're often tempted to blame Le Corbusier for everything that was wrong with modernism. The awful thing is, I think I still do.

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The only building the modernist master made for himself was a primitive log cabin – the inside was pretty impressive though

Roquebrune – the rocca bruna citadel of Conrad, Count of Ventimiglia – is one of the classic villages perchées of the Riviera. Below it, beyond the Gorbio torrent, is a fragrant, romantic pine- and olive-covered promontory called Cap Martin. Because of its harsh rocks and uncomfortable pebbly beach, Cap Martin never developed as a popular tourist resort, but did lure the Empress Elizabeth of Austria to winter in its hotel and became the site of some of the most fantabulous real estate of the Mediterranean, including the Villa Kyrnos built by Eugenie, last Empress of France ... after she left exile in Chislehurst and Farnborough.

And it was here that Le Corbusier, the most mercurial, influential and reviled architect of the 20th century, chose to build his own holiday home. So. Le Corbusier: concrete pioneer, machine-lover, moving spirit of brutalism, skyscraper prophet, modernist-collectivist, flat roof enthusiast, urbanist-extremist, unbending pedagogue, what did he do in the only building he ever designed for himself? The answer is on show at the RIBA in an engrossing exhibition that reconstructs his cabanon. It is strange, surprising and wonderful.

Cabanon is a diminutive of the French word for 'cabin', but carries a number of additional meanings. One is mad-house, another is bucolic-primitivism: scattered all over the south of France are little structures used by shepherds. These cabanons are a reminder that the very origins of architecture lay in the design of the primitive hut. Le Corbusier's own cabanon shows us the other side of the modern maestro.

A recent book by JK Birksted called Le Corbusier and the Occult (MIT Press) explains that freemasonry was a continuous influence on the architect. And so too were the semi-secret societies of his native La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura: Birksted has a wonderful photograph of the muscled, toned and rather scary Groupe de Gymnastique de l'Union Chrétienne de Jeunes Gens. Their abs and pecs were surely an influence on 'Le Modulor', Le Corbusier's human-based system of proportions which dominates the design of this primitive hut of his own.

Le Corbusier found the Cap Martin site just as he was masterplanning the city of Bogotá and work on his Marseille Unité d'Habitation, his vertical concrete garden city (one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century or a hellish abomination, according to taste) was coming to an end.

He was drawn to the area because the Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray had already established a much reported and photographed modernist villa there. A note in his journal for 30 December 1951, says he sat at a table in a Côte d'Azur café and sketched the cabanon in 45 minutes as a birthday present for his wife, Yvonne. Even the earliest, most free-hand sketches show a maniacal attention to dimensions and proportions.

Outside, the cabanon was roughly hewn halved tree trunks and no attempt has been made at the RIBA to replicate the exterior. It is the interior that is important and beautiful. You enter the tiny space of 14 square metres (which the modernists had determined was the essential minimum for social housing) through a narrow corridor. On your left, a painting of La Mer covers the entire wall. Inside, a plywood cocoon. Square ceiling panels of different colours and different heights allow storage above. Most of the furniture is built-in, including the bed whose chestnut headrest apes classical prototypes (he was reading Homer at the time). Fittings are from railway carriages and the focus is a work table. The window shutters are partially mirrored to bring the ravishing landscape inside, as well as to make it a 'repository of sun and light', as Le Corbusier said every home should be.

So far from being a sinister and soul-less machine à habiter, Le Corbusier's cabanon is satisfying, subtle and perfect proof of the architect's essential belief that good proportions and ample light are the constituents of excellence in building. The cabanon inspires contemplation; it is not surprising that the young Le Corbusier studied Cistercian cells. With exiguous resources and minimal cost, the cabanon shows how richly rewarding simplicity can be. Anyone who doubts the scripture of modernism should visit and be promptly disabused.

But there's one flaw. Just as Thoreau wrote his wilderness masterpiece at the bottom of his mother's garden, so Le Corbusier's cabanon was adjacent to his favourite Etoile de Mer restaurant, which provided his meals. Intended as a prototype for a Unité de Camping holiday village that was never realised, it is a paradoxical memorial to a contradictory genius. He spent his last night here before drowning on 27 August 1965.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Le Corbusier, Reviews, The Observer

Paffard Keatinge-Clay worked with the greats - Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Jonathan Glancey meets the 'Zelig' of modern architecture

Paffard Keatinge-Clay was almost broke when he set out from Chicago for Frank Lloyd Wright's studio in Arizona. The year was 1949. "I ended up walking the last bit," he tells me. "Miles through the desert. Wright sent out a Jeep to save me, as he put it, from being 'bitten by rattlers'."

On arriving at Taliesin West - Wright's beautiful desert oasis, crafted by students and apprentices out of red, yellow and grey boulders set in concrete - Keatinge-Clay asked the architect where he was going to stay. Wright looked him over and said: "You want to be an architect? Go build yourself a place." Which is exactly what he did, constructing a pavilion nearby.

In the course of a career that took him from Wiltshire to Paris to all over America, Keatinge-Clay worked with the three giants of the Modern movement: Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. This Saturday, Keatinge-Clay will give a talk at the Barbican in London, where he will relive a day in the life of Le Corbusier's Paris studio; he was employed there shortly after the second world war.

He recalls that Wright did not think highly of Le Corbusier. "One day, Wright asked me to write down a list of things Le Corbusier had done that he and Louis Sullivan - who he worked for in the 1890s - hadn't done years before. It was an impossible task, of course. I'll never forget the way he referred to Le Corbusier, disparagingly, as 'Corboozer'. He didn't like the idea of these European upstarts."

America in the late 1940s seemed to offer the young architect abundance at a time of general austerity. But, while inspirational, life was not exactly a bed of roses. For one thing, the studio where Wright designed many of his most flamboyant buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was ruled by his third wife, Olgivanna. A Montenegrin dancer and a disciple of the Greek-Armenian mystic GI Gurdjieff, Olgivanna was a formidable presence who expected daily confessions from her husband's pupils.

Keatinge-Clay recalls being summoned one evening because a goody two-shoes student had told her that he had described a Wright house as looking like a melting ice-cream cone. "She accused me of attacking my host like a sword. It was all very uncomfortable." Wright sat quietly in the shadows, giving nothing away. Keatinge-Clay knew his job hung in the balance. Finally, Wright, referring to his old boss, said: "Do you think we didn't talk about Mr Sullivan behind his back?"

Keatinge-Clay was by then used to working in unusual studios housing monumental egos. While a student, he had moonlighted at London's Architectural Association (AA) with Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian émigré who went on to design such brutalist monuments as London's Trellick Tower. In fact, it's hard not to see Keatinge-Clay as the Zelig of Modern architecture, a young man who rubbed shoulders not just with Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe and Wright, but also with Charles and Ray Eames, and the brilliant Buckminster Fuller.

We met last month in a bar in Mijas, on the Costa del Sol in Spain, where he now lives. On a clear day, you can see the Atlas mountains in Morocco. Today, however, it's pouring, which puts Keatinge-Clay in mind of 1940s Britain. "You have to remember how gloomy it seemed when I was a student. A group of us wrote a letter to Le Corbusier - architecture's shining light - and asked him to come and give a lecture."

There was no reply, so he set off for Paris with two friends. "We went to the studio in Rue de Sèvres and learned that Le Corbusier was away," he says. His hero was in New York, struggling with his UN complex building. "So we called on his wife, Yvonne. Everyone in the studio said she would be happy to see us. She was, and was happy for us to look around." Yvonne told them she thought her husband was a clever man, but she didn't understand his work - particularly his paintings, which were influenced by Picasso. "Why does he paint such ugly women?" she asked. She said he didn't like classical music; anything he disapproved of was called "Tchaikovsky".

Keatinge-Clay began working for Le Corbusier in Paris, on details of the columns holding up the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles. Built between 1947 and 1952, this remains one of the world's most powerful and considered apartment blocks. Now a national monument, it calls to mind a giant ocean liner berthed by the Mediterranean - although one made, massively, of concrete.

"What a privilege this was," says Keatinge-Clay. "I was shaking when I first met Le Corbusier. He would arrive at Rue de Sèvres at 2pm, after a morning spent exercising and painting. He was friendly at first - but then very abrupt, as he was with everyone. The studio was in a walled-off corridor of a monastery. There were few phones. It was rather quiet - monastic, I suppose. Le Corbusier was very tough. He would come to my desk and draw thick pencil lines through work I thought was done in his own manner. But we learned that he liked to break rules, his own as well as anyone else's. I got up the courage to ask him when an architect could violate the rules. He replied, 'When it strengthens the art.'"

What about Van der Rohe? "Mies was absolutely profound," Keatinge-Clay says. He came to know the architect when he joined SOM in the 1950s, the giant Chicago-New York firm influenced by the German. "This was after Taliesin, after I'd qualified as an engineer as well as architect. Mies's Chicago studio was across the street. He collaborated with SOM, so I was backwards and forwards between the two offices.

"Like Le Corbusier, Mies came to work after lunch. He was quiet. He liked to say, 'The less talking, the better; the more looking, the better.' It was best not to talk about beauty, he said, but to look for the most rational and economical solution to the design. He wasn't talking about cost, but about paring the structure of a building to a minimum.

"Verena and I got up the courage to invite him to dinner. He came and talked until seven in the morning over rum and Cuban cigars. He could be warm, even funny, but his greatest buildings - the German Pavilion at Barcelona, the Seagram Building in New York - were the product of quiet reflection. From Wright, Mies learned how to set buildings in the American landscape."

Having learned from three of the best teachers in the world, Keatinge-Clay set up his own practice in 1961. He produced radical buildings, fusing elements drawn from his mentors. There was the Art Institute of San Francisco and his student union building, for the city's state university; the latter, crowned with an amphitheatre open to the sky, mixes the design ideas of all three, yet has a character of its own. With so many places to hang out in, this is a building that was designed to be occupied. "My studio was an open house, full of music, theatre, poetry," Keatinge-Clay says of this era, which saw him become involved in radical politics and the hippy movement.

Today, he lives in an old farmhouse, with no electricity and few concessions to the modern world. He continues to work as an architect, sculptor, amateur historian and archaeologist from his cool, white modern studio in Mijas.

What did he learn from his modernist masters? That, to touch our souls, great architecture needs to be elemental and pure - like Stonehenge, which made a powerful impression on him as a boy growing up in Wiltshire. He also learned that following other people's rules is no guarantee of success.

"Le Corbusier never won a competition, because he worked against the rules - his own, let alone anyone else's," says Keatinge-Clay. "That made him an original, like Wright, but it also meant that he lost work to much lesser talents. When I think of the sheer ingenuity that went into Unite d'Habitation, I can see why not every client had the stamina for a building by Le Corbusier."

Or for one of Wright's? "Yes, yes," he says. "But Wright descended into kitsch as he got much older. Le Corbusier got better and increasingly profound. I'm glad I summoned the courage to write to him when I did - more than 60 years ago."

• Paffard Keatinge-Clay will be speaking at the Barbican, London, as part of A Day in the Life of Le Corbusier, which starts on Saturday 6 March at 11am. Details: barbican.org.uk

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This exhibition reinforced some of my perceptions about Le Corbusier as an architect - the concrete structures, the giant skyscrapers. But I hadn't realised he was also a superb interior designer and an artist. I could have spent a couple of days here.

Whatever you might feel about the idea of imposing masterplans on a city, Le Corbusier did it with great grace. Even in his skyscrapers, the individual apartments were spacious and addressed light and shade artistically. The problem is that the planners who followed his example, particularly after the second world war, produced buildings and accommodation that were nowhere near the same quality.

Le Corbusier wanted to use architecture to break down social hierarchies and influence behaviour. That's reflected now in some mixed-use housing projects, where you can't tell which parts are social accommodation, which are shared ownership and which are privately owned. Le Corbusier may well have sown the seed for that idea.

If one of his city plans was dumped on my desk tomorrow morning, I think we'd have at least a basis for negotiation. But the appearance of the buildings might be a problem. Concrete is an issue for me; it's not really a sustainable building material.

Le Corbusier's use of colour and visual imagery was delightful. Just look at his chapel in Chandigarh in India, with its enamels, bas-reliefs and painted walls. I'm not so sure about his idea of razing parts of a city and replacing them with these utopian communities, though. We prefer to be integrated with the existing community and environment - to pay a little more respect to history.

Martin Willey is president of the Royal Town Planning Institute. Interview by Paul Arendt. Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture is at the Barbican, London EC2, until 24 May.

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Xenakis's collaboration with Le Corbusier on the Philips Pavilion was the catalyst for him becoming one of our most important composers

The Barbican's Le Corbusier exhibition opens in a couple of days, promising a life-and-works, in walk-through form, of the 20th century's most famous architect and modernist visionary. One of the images they've chosen as the show's visual signature is the Philips Pavilion, which Le Corbusier made for the Brussels World Fair in 1958.

Except that he didn't: apart from having the grand idea for a temporary piece of architectural sculpture that would house the original and arguably still the best son-et-lumière show ever experienced, Le Corbusier ceded complete creative control of the project to composer Iannis Xenakis, who was working for the firm at the time. Xenakis was no architectural dilettante: before he became a full-time composer, he worked with Le Corbusier for a decade after his arrival in Paris from Greece in 1947.

The Philips Pavilion staged what would now be called a multimedia event, or interdisciplinary poly-art orgy, for the five months of the World Fair. There were projected images (Le Corbusier at least chose these), two hanging, sculptural figures, and two pieces of early electro-acoustic music: Xenakis's Concrète P.H., and Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique. The exterior of the Pavilion was based on the parabolic curves that Xenakis had discovered in mathematics and which he used to structure his early musical works, such as Metastasis; it was a symphony in swooping steel and concrete, and seeing it today in photographs, it still looks like the future made flesh. (Never designed as a permanent structure, the Pavilion was pulled down shortly after the World Fair – a shame, since the theoretically impermanent Eiffel Tower is still going strong).

But even the look of the building was nothing compared to the overpowering effect of the music. You can hear Varèse's Electronic Poem here; but on two speakers or headphones, you're getting only a tiny fraction of the piece. In 1958, the 20,000 people who could process daily through the structure in precisely timed, 10-minute periods (Xenakis's two-minute piece accompanied their walk into the auditorium, Varèse's eight minutes of electronics awaited them inside) would have heard sound projected from 350 speakers via 20 amplifiers. That's mind-boggling enough today, but in 1958, it must have seemed as if a new age of musical possibility had dawned. Not only that, the music's random simultaneity with Le Corbusier's ever-changing visuals – skulls, a bomber plane, the Easter Island sculptures, Charlie Chaplin – incarnated a new relationship between sound and image. Audience reactions were a mix of bewilderment, wild enthusiasm, and sheer terror.

So amid all the fanfare at the Barbican for Le Corbusier, spare a thought for Xenakis and Varèse, creators of a visionary multimedia experience that today's IMAX cinemas would be hard pushed to match. Incidentally, that's more thought than Le Corbusier gave to Xenakis: the two fell out when Le Corbusier took all of the credit for the Pavilion despite not having worked on it closely. Xenakis left the firm, and never looked back. Music's gain was architecture's loss.

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