Monsieur Le Corbusier, meet Signor Palladio - how delightful to find you both in London. Sir Edwin Lutyens wants a word with you.
Text and photographs © Hugh Pearman. An extended version of the article first published in The Sunday Times, London, on February 15, 2009.
It was that blistering 40 degrees plus European summer of 2003 when - since we were on holiday in Alsace - I bundled a puzzled family into the car and headed off through the Vosges mountains of eastern France to look at a small church on a hill in a semi-industrial landscape. I had wanted to see this building for decades. We arrived panting, heat-struck, ill-tempered. But not for long. We had entered the presence of greatness.
Our destination was the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, better known as Ronchamp after its nearest village. It is the best-known work of one of the most celebrated and reviled architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier. Built in the mid 1950s, it marked a decisive break from his earlier machine aesthetic - what you might call the boxes-on-stilts look.
Ronchamp was and is weird, primitive, hand-crafted, powerful, It was the first postmodern building - before the term was coined - and the best. Critics have argued about it loudly and continuously from the moment it was completed. It receives many more architectural pilgrims than religious ones. But then, you come across a surprising number of people for whom Corb (or Corbu as the true believers call him) is God. And at least as many for whom - because of his provocative and influential early city plans full of skyscrapers - he is the very devil.
Corb, with his endless manifesto pronouncements and aphorisms ("a house is a machine for living in"), wrote the book when it came to architectural arrogance. "I don't care about your church, I didn't ask you to do it," he coolly replied to the artist-priest who hired him at Ronchamp, Father Couturier. "And if I do it, I'll do it my way. It interests me because it's a plastic work. It's difficult."
At the time the Roman Catholic church, with Couturier in the van, was in one of its phases of embracing modernity. Corb's prickly attitude did not dismay Couturier - he recommended his architect for the scarcely less celebrated later monastery of La Tourette, then died. It's true what they say - great architecture only happens with great patrons. And Ronchamp, though of course it has its detractors, is without question great. You know that the moment you see it, walk round it, into it. It is a small building on an extraordinarily epic scale. It is condensed genius
Ronchamp was and is weird, primitive, hand-crafted, powerful, It was the first postmodern building - before the term was coined - and the best. Critics have argued about it loudly and continuously from the moment it was completed. It receives many more architectural pilgrims than religious ones. But then, you come across a surprising number of people for whom Corb (or Corbu as the true believers call him) is God. And at least as many for whom - because of his provocative and influential early city plans full of skyscrapers - he is the very devil.Corb, with his endless manifesto pronouncements and aphorisms ("a house is a machine for living in"), wrote the book when it came to architectural arrogance. "I don't care about your church, I didn't ask you to do it," he coolly replied to the artist-priest who hired him at Ronchamp, Father Couturier. "And if I do it, I'll do it my way. It interests me because it's a plastic work. It's difficult."
At the time the Roman Catholic church, with Couturier in the van, was in one of its phases of embracing modernity. Corb's prickly attitude did not dismay Couturier - he recommended his architect for the scarcely less celebrated later monastery of La Tourette, then died. It's true what they say - great architecture only happens with great patrons. And Ronchamp, though of course it has its detractors, is without question great. You know that the moment you see it, walk round it, into it. It is a small building on an extraordinarily epic scale. It is condensed genius
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Gabion: Monsieur Le Corbusier, meet Signor Palladio - how delightful to find you both in London. Sir Edwin Lutyens wants a word with you.
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