Ronchamp: a space made sacred at last

Fifty years ago, Le Corbusier built Notre Dame du Haut, a church that was to become one of the most famous in Europe and came to represent his distinctive style. Its consecration prompts a re-examination of its creator?s spiritual beliefs, and their influence on his designs

WHEN A BUILDING becomes famous, a certain wilful blindness sets in in the minds of its admirers. All that matters is its power as icon. Those details that support its myth ? and all iconic buildings acquire these ? are pushed to the fore, while those that perplex or disrupt this image are quietly smothered. Such is the ruthless tyranny of fame.

The discovery that the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, one of the world?s most celebrated buildings and a significant pilgrimage shrine, has spent the past 50 years as an unconsecrated site, will come as a shock to both the devout and the avowedly secular admirers of its architect, Le Corbusier. The revelation, revealed last month in La Croix, one of France?s leading Catholic publications, is startling and poses a series of questions that, until now, have been kept under wraps. How could this rather crucial liturgical lacuna have remained unresolved? Documentary evidence shows that the chapel was blessed at its inauguration in 1955, but no mention of an actual consecration is available.

This troubling situation was brought to an end on 11 September when the chapel was finally consecrated. The relics of two locally important saints ? Th?r?se de l?Enfant J?sus and Jean-Marie Vianney ? were solemnly interred in the building. The odd thing is that these relics had resided in an earlier chapel on the site which was completely destroyed during the Second World War. Why these relics hadn?t just been moved back into the new building after its inauguration is puzzling.

Consecration of a church involves not only the deposition of relics, but also the recitation of the Litany of Saints, the anointing of the walls and the altar, followed by their censing, and the lighting of candles.

According to Michael O?Boy, sub-administrator at Westminster Cathedral, ?It?s possible to conduct Mass in an unconsecrated building, such as someone?s home, but it?s only usually possible to do this with the express permission of the local bishop.? So far, I have been unable to ascertain whether any special dispensation was accorded to Ronchamp in this regard, but I wonder what the chapel?s regulars will have made of this apparent bureaucratic blunder.

Unpicking the history of the chapel, however, reveals some intriguing possibilities, subtle cracks in the otherwise unblemished reputation of this building, that strike at the heart of Catholic patronage in twentieth-century France. Its creator was of course Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1966), otherwise known as Le Corbusier. Most people still characterise him as the pragmatic rationalist behind the cool, etiolated villas of the 1920s and the urban planner who told us how to rethink our cities and what one senses was his perception of our fairly insignificant place in them. But this easy caricature ignores the radical change in his practice that came about during the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period when his measured, intellectually driven geometries were replaced by a violent swing towards an interest in plastic, highly sculptural forms. His apartment block projects for the Unit? d?Habitation in Marseilles (1947-52) and at Nantes (1953) announced his interest in strong, gestural forms boldly wrested out of concrete, massive creatures that possess an archaic sensibility. Marseilles was also influenced by the monastic simplicity of form that inspired him all his life: that of the Charterhouse of Ema, near Florence, with its small, calm monks? cells and the great communal spaces of cloister and church.

At Ronchamp, his church is architecture as incarnation of something much older, perhaps, of something found and adapted. It?s often been said that his inspiration for the famous roof at Ronchamp ? a vast brown concrete affair that billows up from the profoundly asymmetrical core of the building underneath ? was a shell he picked up on the beach. This is another one of the ur-myths that iconic buildings require, and it provides a visual key to the mysteries of the building. He is documented to have made more than 100 sketches of the landscape of the site, a small hill nestling in the stretch of land between the Vosges and Jura mountains and near the large industrial centres of Belfort and Montb?liard. Fifty years ago, Roland Hill, writing for this paper, quoted the Almanach of the Archdiocese of Besan?on, in which it was stated that ?those who saw his designs, his calculations and drawings, which he repeatedly revised, and over which he continuously meditated, were deeply impressed by the great humility and seriousness in which he approached this undertaking.?

Designed and completed over a five-year period (1950-55), his design for Ronchamp responded to a dynamic decision by Mgr Dubourg, the region?s then Archbishop, that Modernism offered the Church a way of expressing its living, eternal nature. Dubourg was friends with P?re Couturier and P?re R?gamey, the two Dominican Fathers whose taste and patronage of the arts was highly influential throughout France due to their relationship with leading avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Matisse, whose Chapel of the Rosary at Vence was commissioned by Dominican nuns. The degree to which Le Corbusier?s devotion to this project reflected a formal Christian belief is not clear, but it?s notable that he personally painted the little colourful windows seemingly randomly sprinkled on its southern flank and inscribed on them the words of the Magnificat. His association with the Dominicans continued with his next project: the design for a Dominican convent at La Tourette.

Brought up in Switzerland as a nominal Protestant, Le Corbusier appeared drawn to the inner truths of Catholicism and, it must be said, of the religious mysteries of India and the Far East. It was during this fertile period that he wrote his strange and mystical book Le Modulor (1951), a philosophical tract that stressed the physical proportions of the male figure ? the ?Module? ? as the key unit by which the appropriateness of architecture should be measured. His drawings of the male figure in this treatise echo, even if only slightly, the famous ?universal man? by Leonardo. According to the architectural historian Dr Flora Samuel of the University of Cardiff, Le Corbusier was highly interested in the lessons of the Renaissance and became enamoured of mathematics. ?Le Corbusier had earlier been asked to produce designs for the Grotte de la Sainte Baume near Marseilles, but that project was scotched. P?re Couturier was soon condemned by the entire Church for entertaining what people suspected were Orphic heresies ? a belief held by some in the early Church that Christ, though a remarkable figure, was not resurrected and that he was in some way prefigured by Orpheus, the magical musician of Greek myth. There was a sense that Couturier and Le Corbusier might have been meddling in what was effectively a Platonic mystery cult. Corbusier was very guarded about this, as you can imagine, as he wasn?t keen to upset his ecclesiastical clients,? she explains.

THERE ARE, she claims, several clues in the design for Ronchamp that hint at Le Corbusier?s interest in blending Marian devotion with a sensitivity towards older mother-goddess cults ? something that the discovery of the remains of ancient temples on the chapel site only reinforced. ?There?s this idea that the three towers of the chapel represent Mary; his mother, Marie; and his wife, Yvonne; and the swollen, rounded and curved shape of the building suggests an interest in expressing an ancient female archetype,? says Dr Samuel. Other people would point instead to the seemingly emphatic Christian references in the building ? the roof representing St Peter?s barque or Noah?s ark itself, or even the Church. Whether the official disquiet about the theological adventurism of Couturier and the spiritual pluralism of the chapel?s architect would have prevented its consecration is not known, but it does suggest a desire by the central ecclesiastical authorities to withhold their full sanction of the project and a wider unease with the then emerging cultural and generational shift towards the exploration of non-Western systems of thought. ?All works must be formed spiritually first,? said Le Corbusier, and it only takes a visit to Ronchamp to realise that a convincing sense of the sacred doesn?t require official approval.

Mark Irving is The Tablet?s architecture correspondent.