On a return trip to Le Corbusier's Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haute more than 30 years after his first visit, the co-founder of Henley Halebrown finds there's still much to discover
It’s morning on the 10th of July. We are walking up the hill along the pilgrim’s way to the chapel. It’s a very hot day but we are in a wood, in the shade. It’s 31 years and 11 months since my last and only other visit to Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haute. That summer I had just left the University of Liverpool and was on a bicycle en route from Lyon to London via La Tourette and Ronchamp. Then, it was towards the end of a long day that we made the short but tough climb to the summit. How apt it had been to approach a pilgrimage site in this manner! Since then, Renzo Piano’s additions including an entrance pavilion have been built, creating a barrier to the site and a break in the pilgrim’s path which now makes a detour through these structures.
Curiously, given that the image of Ronchamp is seared into my memory, the building is a surprise. The sharp prow of the south-east corner emerges from behind a mound of grass. My immediate reaction is to head to the ziggurat in the north-east corner to get as high as possible, to survey the building in its hilltop glade. From here my gaze is drawn to the oddest corner where the north wall, punctuated by windows, meets the béton brut concrete roof and the space beneath which frames the exterior altar and pulpit. Strangely, this juxtaposition is typical of the composition, the collage of forms and the manner in which they coexist. This is a complex building; complex in the imagination but incredibly simple in the detail. It is this complex disassembly of a singularity that is so extraordinary – that a pilgrimage chapel can become so many. Every glance, every move of the head, reframes what you see and it is different, completely different. Symphonic. Of course, an encounter with most buildings is by its very nature episodic but not to this degree.
Looking at the plan again, the walls are more like a separate brush strokes, bound together by the floor they shape, the space they enclose and the roof overhead. Each stroke gives form not only to the inside and the outside, but to each element itself. The most extreme is the south wall – its geometries and depth, and the form, space and light that it creates. This incredible balancing act continues within; differences abound in the nature of the rendered walls and the form of the béton brut soffit as it slumps like a heavy fabric from 10m above the midpoint of the altar wall to 4.78m beneath the gargoyle to the west.
Inside it is cool and incredibly comfortable. The darkness is broken by the light that traces a line between wall and soffit, the soft glow of the chapels, the spots of light in the east wall above the altar and the lines of light projected by the many apertures in the great battered south wall. On a day like today the sheer weight of the building offers shelter, a weight in the saddle-shaped exposed béton brut concrete roof that is both matter and form.
What I had completely forgotten but could now see was how the building had been made. Ronchamp isn’t the first church on this site. Its predecessor had been destroyed by a second world war bomb. Through a veil of scaffold and netting I could see places where the sprayed mortar surface of the whitewashed wall of a chapel had been removed to reveal a rough stone wall. Of course, Ronchamp was built from the Vosges stones of the lost church, and it is the curvature of the walls in plan that offer stability. The bombing of one church was a dramatic disassembly. Its reincarnation, in the Chappelle Notre-Dame-du-Haute, is a fantastic case of recycling. Completed 70 years ago, Ronchamp is not only a pilgrimage chapel, but also a monument to the circular economy.
Simon Henley is co-founder of Henley Halebrown
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