Architect’s Fav 5
Creation is a patient search
It is cloudy outside. The Ohio spring weather is somewhat . The greenhouse doesn’t seem to warm up at 50 temperature range under cloudy skies. But all is well, the seed starts are flourishing. You remember you saw it in Old Architect Myth. The day reminds me of a similar sky view while in France in 1977. That summer we took mini excursions from Paris on architectural pilgrimages to various building sites.
One in particular is one of the great architecture works of all time. Perhaps I should qualify that last statement. One of the greatest Architecture works ‘I think’ of all time. Any guesses? You would need to have gone to France if you did not study about it, you would have to travel to a rural area with a temperate climate to see. You would probably travel by car, between 4 1/2 to 5 hours from the center of Paris in a southeasterly direction to access the site. Once there upon your arrival you would be presented with a unique building design.
The building was inaugurated and consecrated on June 25, 1955. It is a church. The work of architecture we speak is the Notre Dame du Haut (meaning Our Lady of the Heights).
"Surrealism is a key to other late works of Le Corbusier, most notably the church at Ronchamp, France, of 1950-54... Notre-Dame-du-Haut was a more extreme statement of Le Corbusier's late style. Progamatically,...the church is simple—an oblong nave, two side entrances, an axial main altar, and three chapels beneath towers—as is its structure, with rough masonry walls faced with whitewashed Gunite (sprayed concrete) and a roof of contrasting beton brut. Formally and symbolically, however, this small building, which is sited atop a hillside with access from the south, is immensely powerful and complex."1
How did I feel? I was there. It was drizzling rain. We looked at every inch of the structure from the outside to the inside and back to the outside. I may have some slides in the archives somewhere when I captured the moment.
Four remembrances stick in my cognitive mind vividly about this tangible experience of art,
First the floor in the interior slopes. It was a sloping floor made of concrete higher at the vestibule, in the rear, then lower towards the altar in the front. there’s a certain sense of why? The slope is following the natural contour of the site. Magnificent idea. I recall there was other ecclesial reasoning as well. I won’t say the sloped floor was discomforting however one recognizes that you were not in a typical space.
Some of the concrete walls are up to 10 feet wide. Unimaginable. The architect in the design penetrated those walls and inserted colored (red green and yellow) glass into some of the panels that bring striking colored rays naturally presented during certain times of the day from the exterior into the interior space.
Of course it was raining or misting or drizzling and that element of nature was fully revealed that particular day with artistic whim. One can hardly look at photographs to grasp in some sense the same sensation. As it was precipitating at the exterior the roof collected the rainwater and I slid it a huge roof scupper on one side of the building, while it emptied itself at the ground into artful cistern like circular well. This is where it was a good thing that it was raining, mind you, not hard, but certainly enough to see a man-made waterfall, if you wanna call it that, coming from her roof. That’s unlike any roof structure I have ever witnessed at any time, at any place, in the built environment. Brilliant.
Lastly the roof itself appears to float from the walls below. A small light strip allow light to permeate the ceiling, depending on sunshine, providing lucidity to the interior. Enlightening.
Was I ecstatic? 45 years later I remember the exact experience clear as a cloudy day. Yes I was ecstatic, yes I just saw a piece of fine art alive, working simply, yet concurrently complex, managing my own thoughts as to what architecture could and should be.
We weren’t there all day as it was quite a ways from Paris where we were housed. I do remember the day, not the drive, and I have to say it impacted my whole being physically, obviously mentally, bringing emotion to the forefront, and given the history of the church architecture, I have to think it impacted me spiritually as well. I look around and ask myself what kind of buildings do that for me today? There are some however, they would have to make the fav 5 list, yet do not.
I studied le Corbusier in school in college. We began an organization, post university, called the Loyal Order of the Sons of Savoie. Now you need to know that Villa Savoie is another one of these works of art in a fav 5 list, which we can address in a later zoetic message. We were very keen on modern design, not so much contemporary design say, La Défense in Paris.
Thus traveling to the mountains in France to see a church on the hill, next to a convent, impacted how I looked at architecture, setting such a high bar. I will honestly say I have not been able to duplicate a built version of my own Architecture that emulates the same results.
A little bit about the architect le Corbusier.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. 2
Corbu, (if I may) was born October 6, 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland and then died in France on August 27, 1965, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the French seaside, part of the French Riviera, a day’s drive from where he was born.
As a child growing up in a Swiss watch-making town, Le Corbusier gained firsthand knowledge of the tenuous relationship between craft and mass production. It was the workings of the latter, however, that informed the efficiency of his designs for several private villas in France and Switzerland, including Villa Savoye, a commission that Le Corbusier famously nicknamed "a machine for living."3
There are only a few built structures I know of Corbu in the US of A. One is Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Corbu was a consultant with others as we recently discussed in York City found to be at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Otherwise one has to view his exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art. This is hardly the kind of intimacy we seek to feel Architecture.
The architectural periods Corbu worked included Cubism and Expressionism. He was a gifted “modernist”. He says:
To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be.
One worthwhile note about the church previously sitting atop this hill, once demolished, the rubble was placed within the very thick walls of Ronchamp. Its remains, remain.
One of my most read quotes as if spoken from an architectural Torah, Bible, or Koran is:
Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms.
A Zoetic Message
A book by Corbu entitled Creation is a Patient Search, is also the zoetic message of the day, be creative, create and search patiently.
Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p542-4.
https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Le_Corbusier_Charles_Édouard_Jeanneret/
A fabulous creation! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I hope I get to experience it one day.