LII

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.

—LE CORBUSIER AS PARAPHRASED BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ¹

1

In his chapel at Ronchamp, Le Corbusier transformed rough concrete into an expression of bounteous hope. He made stone seem weightless and captured pure light as if it had mass.

Ca. 1950

When the idea for this hilltop chapel first made the miraculous leap from Le Corbusier’s brain to a hasty pen-and-ink rendition, it was an act of pure creation. One can identify the influences on Le Corbusier’s vision just as one might detail the genetic makeup of a newborn, but the conception of Ronchamp remains in a realm beyond total comprehension.

Le Corbusier had the vision in his very first sketches; only the means to realize it had to be found. His initial conception resembles an ancient megalith, an imaginary mix of dolmen and stone circle from the Bronze Age where so-called primitive people assembled and worshipped the forces of the universe. The finished building that opened a mere four years later on that hilltop in the Vosges remains faithful to that image, while it is at the same time a complex structure of uniquely modern form that looks as if it has descended from the heavens. From its earliest inception to its completion, Ronchamp belonged equally to the ancient mythic past and the unknown future.

2

The cathedral of Chartres had had the effect on me of the most terrible battle. Never say that the Gothic is serenity. It’s a poignant and gigantic struggle, and of the nine towers, only two rise up into the air of the hillside. Chartres is a life of deliberate forces and demoniac optimism, of clenched fists and clenched jaws.

—CHARLES-EDOUARD JEANNERET TO WILLIAM RITTER, 1917

The rural site where Le Corbusier built his masterpiece is in the hilly part of the Vosges region of southeastern France, adjacent to the Swiss Jura. It is 110 kilometers from La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a sparsely populated region of quiet, undulating hills.

“Ronchamp” comes from the Latin “Romanorum campus,” meaning Roman camp or field. The town, at the base of the steep hill, was near an old Roman road. A pagan temple, said to be for the worship of the sun, had been erected there. According to some sources, in the fourth century A.D. a church dedicated to the birth of the Virgin was built on the hilltop, while others date the first Christian church on the site to the twelfth century. By the thirteenth century, it began to attract pilgrims, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the ancient sanctuary was rebuilt in a form that combined an octagon and the Greek cross. In 1873, on September 8, the date on which the Virgin’s birth is celebrated, more than thirty thousand pilgrims from Alsace and Lorraine, their lives changed two years before by the Franco-Prussian war that had made their homeland part of the German empire, flocked to this corner of Franche-Comté to ask Our Lady for their deliverance.

In 1913, the church burned to the ground after being struck by lightning, and in 1924 a neo-Gothic structure was built around the ruins. The new structure was destroyed in 1944 when the German army bombed it during an attack on French soldiers gathered on the hilltop, just as France was being liberated.

In 1950, two officials from the Commission of Sacred Art from Besançon, where the regional government was located, asked Le Corbusier to build a new church where all these earlier structures had existed. The architect turned them down.

As with his spontaneous rebuff of his visitors from Chandigarh, there are various accounts of why Le Corbusier said no to that first approach. Some claim that in his modesty the architect felt he was not ready for such an undertaking. Such humility, however, seems unlikely. Officially, Le Corbusier declared that what he would propose would be yet another source of controversy and would certainly be rejected. He was still smarting from the halt brought to his idea for the underground church at Sainte-Baume. Yet while he pretended to be unwilling, he would certainly have been miserably disappointed if his suitors had not continued their pursuit.

Canon Lucien Ledeur, one of the two officials, begged Le Corbusier to consider the beauty of the site. The distinguished clergyman issued an irresistible mandate: “You will be given free rein to create what you will.”² Father Marie-Alain Couturier also implored him to consider it.

In mid-May 1950, shortly after saying no to the project, when Le Corbusier was on a train between Paris and Basel, he sketched the site and the rough form of the church ruin. He visited Ronchamp itself for the first time on June 4 and made further drawings in a little sketchbook as he sat on the hilltop for several hours. Canon Ledeur observed that the architect seemed to feel an immediate connection to the landscape as he studied the rolling hills and looked at the views of plains and distant peaks.

In 1951, walking through the ruins of the chapel that had been destroyed by German bombs seven years earlier, on the site of the future church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp

This was the moment when he changed his mind. Since it was not a competition, and no jury was involved, it is hard to think that he would have done otherwise. Le Corbusier was moved not just by the beauty of the setting and the freedom he was to be given but also by “the spiritual grandeur of the undertaking.”³ The splendid site supported his faith in a higher being that went beyond any traditional notions of organized religion. A place that had been used for worship of the sun, the deity he revered above all others, was irresistible.

         

THE CLIENTS gave Le Corbusier a straightforward program for a church with a principal nave to accommodate two hundred people for mass, three smaller radiating chapels, and the capacity for ceremonies outside on August 15 and September 8, two annual pilgrimage days. A seventeenth-century polychrome wood sculpture that had been rescued from the previous church was to be placed in the new structure. It was also stipulated that there should be a means of collecting rainwater, because the hilltop was famously dry.

With those requirements and the setting in mind, Le Corbusier began to invent. He summoned ideas unprecedented in ecclesiastical design, just as he had broken the mold of domestic architecture at l’Unité d’Habitation and the notion of civil construction in Chandigarh.

When he was first on the site, he drew only the horizon lines and natural shapes that appeared before him. He kept himself open to inspiration, a process he described as a communion with nature whereby the horizon lines “architecturally released the acoustic reply—visual acoustics in the realm of forms,”⁴ and “the idea is born, sways, diverges, seeks itself out”—as if it just happened like the winds of fate.⁵

Next, Le Corbusier echoed the hills in the sweeping roofline and the trees in the towers of his building design. Canon Ledeur made note of what the architect did during those hours on June 4. Le Corbusier penciled a curve mimicking the shape of the hills; this line based on nature was to become the south elevation of the church. He then quickly sketched the form of the outdoor altar. He furthered the scheme with a series of convex and concave curves and straight lines—ideas he continued to work out in his small sketchbook. Eventually, he developed the scheme to have large gables that were connected by a rigid line, like a tightrope suspended from peak to peak. Over this device, he seemed to throw an imaginary fabric; the result resembles a tent roof with its two main elements sagging under the weight of water. The rest of the forms derived both from the setting and his imagination. The building design that emerged has an affinity with its site—it looks as if it belongs there—while at the same time it boldly declares its completely unusual presence.

3

In designing Ronchamp, Le Corbusier responded to what he saw and let his natural genius for shapes and his instinctive thrill at movement through space take possession of him. The making of architecture was both a physical and a spiritual act, a conjunction of the premeditated and the spontaneous. In determining the form of this rural chapel, he plunged into his own inner depths. Various memories may have figured. There were the outings with his father and mother and brother, where, backpack on his shoulders, he learned at an early age to brave the high winds of mountain peaks similar to this one, if steeper. He had certainly had some residual memory of the ceilings of the barns that had been his bucolic retreats on the outskirts of La Chaux-de-Fonds. The immeasurable power of religious architecture as he had first experienced it before the cathedrals of Milan, Pisa, and Paris, their marvelous spires reaching heavenward as they had for centuries, had imprinted itself on his thoughts. So had his awareness of the primitive need for simple shelter and the wish of human beings to gather for the worship of God as he had observed in the male republic of Athos.

Le Corbusier referred specifically to his memories of a visit in October 1911 to the Villa Adriana in Tivoli as having given him the idea for the remote slip of light near the top of Ronchamp’s tower.⁶ And he also acknowledged a modern hydraulic dam he had sketched at Le Chastang in central France as a further model for the structure of its drainage and overflow.

Le Corbusier was responding again, too, to the powerful idea of a white building on a hilltop, of which the Parthenon was the ultimate example. And he let the cadences of music enter his soul as he had in the small rooms of his childhood and the vast concert halls of Munich and Vienna, where opera first moved him to tears. The chapel in the Vosges was an apotheosis that brought all of this personal history to the surface.

         

MORE RECENTLY, the architect had picked up a crab shell on a Long Island beach. He credited that natural structure as his main source of inspiration, saying it dictated the overall form, which then became modified by, the addition of the element of time. That factor, of architecture being sequential, was central; Le Corbusier explained, “The plan is man’s hold over space. One covers the plan on foot, eyes fixed straight ahead, and perception is successive, it implies time. Perception is a series of visual events, as a symphony is a series of sonorous events; time, duration, succession, continuity are the constitutive factors of architecture.”⁷

In the six months that followed his trip to the site, Le Corbusier and his minions at 35 rue de Sèvres turned his concept into detailed plans. André Maisonnier was the main project architect. On January 20, 1951, Monseigneur Dubois, the archbishop of Besançon, and the members of the Commission of Sacred Art, gave their approval. To agree to something so completely unprecedented in appearance was almost as brave as to design it.

The forward-looking prelate of Besançon offered precisely the sort of support Le Corbusier craved but had found on few occasions in his life. The religious leader defended the project in its early days by publicly insisting that “in a period when art is fumbling, we must avoid all absolutism and all narrowness of judgment. We must have the courage to regard certain novelties with a favoring eye, and not hesitate to make experiments, even if they appear somewhat reckless.”⁸

4

Le Corbusier remained faithful to his original concept, though perpetually modifying the design in a process he depicted as a progression from Zen-like responsiveness to a warrior’s frenzy of action. “When I accept a task,” he wrote, “I’m in the habit of shelving it in my memory, which means not allowing myself to make even a sketch for months. The human mind is so constructed as to possess a certain independence; it is a box into which you can pour any number of the elements of a problem. Then you let things ‘float,’ ‘mix,’ ‘ferment.’ And then one day a spontaneous initiative from your inner being occurs, the catch is released; you take a pencil, a piece of charcoal, some crayons (color is the key to the procedure) and you give birth on paper; the idea emerges.”⁹

This making of a monument to the Holy Virgin, the woman to whom a miraculous birth was attributed, was itself a miraculous organic process. Obsessed with the person in whose womb he had grown, he, too, nourished and developed a simple seed. As the process continued, he referred directly both to the “spontaneous birth” and to the period of “incubation.”¹⁰

         

AFTER HE HAD DEVELOPED the initial design scheme, the architect had to reduce its scale for budgetary reasons. The construction cost estimates made clear that to build the chapel as he had first figured it would significantly exceed the financial limitations. He willingly redesigned the building with smaller overall dimensions.

The office at 35 rue de Sèvres then made a model out of steel wire at a scale of one to one hundred. To confirm that all the curves and angles would work structurally, they took photographs of that model, which they provided to the engineers. The technical experts then confirmed that all was in order.

The measurements of the chapel were based on the Modulor. Charting his use of that sacred measuring tool, Le Corbusier wrote about himself in the third person: “The Chapel (like all of Le Corbusier’s constructions, in fact) is based on the Modulor. Thus it has been possible to reduce the dimensions to sometimes extravagant figures without the spectator’s thereby sensing the smallness of the work’s dimensions. Le Corbusier admits that here is made manifest the plastic event he has described as ‘ineffable space.’ The consciousness of dimensions vanishes before the ineffable.”¹¹ A relatively small building could seem enormous.

5

During the construction of this mountain chapel, Le Corbusier was more actively involved with all the details than in many of his other undertakings. At l’Usine Boussois, a factory in the Department Nord–Pas de Calais, he applied color to some of the stones and painted the glass windows. Le Corbusier also worked with his colleague Joseph Savina on the wooden confessionals and benches and the doors. He designated African wood for seating, an aluminum roof painted gray for the ceiling, and cast iron for the communion bench. No aspect of the building escaped his scrutiny.

On-site, he selected some of the stones from the old chapel to be incorporated into the walls of the new structure. The ones that were not suitable were carted away and piled into a pyramid at the edge of the area of grass that defined the chapel grounds. Then, when the new building was nearly completed, Le Corbusier was asked to erect a monument to the French soldiers who had been killed on the hill in 1944. The pile of discarded stones inspired one of those spontaneous events, governed both by fate and by an attitude of openness, that often occurred in Le Corbusier’s life: he turned the chance pyramid into a monument to the dead.

Church of Ronchamp, under construction, ca. 1953

This bold, minimal sculpture was perhaps the first of the type of abstract war memorial that was to become a staple of late-twentieth-century design. A miniature of the great temples of ancient Mexico and Egypt, it used ordinary stones, rudimentary masonry, and the power of its sequence of ascending right angles to convey with profound simplicity the tragedy of lives lost because people fight.

The pyramid at Ronchamp is, to this day, a mystery to most visitors. There is no plaque, and no explanation is provided. The ambiguity, the sense of the unknown, suited its creator’s taste and intentions.

6

During the design process, not everyone was as open-minded as Monseigneur Dubois. When a plaster model was first shown to the local parishioners, they were appalled at the bizarre form. Many urged that the ruined church on the site simply be rebuilt. The vast majority preferred the non-threatening echoes of tradition; some sneered or laughed, while others became furious.

Le Corbusier’s perpetual champion Eugène Claudius-Petit came to the rescue. He reinforced the approval already granted by the Commission of Sacred Art. But some powerful clergymen simultaneously urged that the financing be halted. The press laced into the proposed chapel as an “anti-atomic shelter,” a “bunker,” and an “ecclesiastical garage.”¹² The full barrage of negative clichés used against all modern architecture in the early 1950s was thrown at the scheme. The local chaplain, Abbé Bolle-Reddat, however, was steadfast. Later, the prelate recalled “in what occasionally nauseating humus this flower of grace has grown” the steadfast chaplain encountered such intense opposition to Le Corbusier’s design that he considered its completion “a true miracle!”¹³

The architect, meanwhile, reacted to his attackers quite differently from his usual way. He did not assume the role of embittered martyr or fly into a vituperative rage. Rather, he calmly defended himself and his proposal against the assaults by pointing out his intention of creating something beautiful and his ideal of service to humankind. He also deliberately distinguished himself from the surrealists and many other modernists, with their intention to shock: “Not for a moment did I have any notion of making an object of astonishment. My preparation? A sympathy for others, for the unknown, and for a life which has trickled away into the brutalities of existence, nastiness, egotism, cowardice, triviality, but also into so much kindness, goodness, courage, energy, smiles, sunshine and blue sky. And the resulting choice: a taste, a need for the true. Ronchamp? Contact with a site, situation in a place, eloquence of the place, speech addressed to the place. To the four horizons.”¹⁴