Location: Éveux-sur-l'Arbresle, Rhône-Alpes, France
Architect: Le Corbusier & Iannis Xenakis
Completed: 1953 - 1961
22 Photographs
Of all the buildings I have written about so far, none have been harder to write something meaningful about than this one. Even harder still were my attempts to convey a building like this in a limited number of photographs. The long list was 95, the shortlist was still 47 and the final selection still feels like it leaves out almost everything. There is so much richness and interest to this building, that one can only visit it to really understand it. In that way, I am reminded of Corbusier’s other seminal work, the chapel in Ronchamp, one of the central modernist buildings from which today’s sinuous buildings have evolved. Compared to Ronchamp though, La Tourette is something altogether different. It is an incredibly rigorous building, vast in its scope and ambition, a courtyard building evolved around the programmatic order of the priory and the monastic tradition.
It’s a building which you might easily dismiss from afar as a severe and unforgiving structure, cold and imposing on the hill like a concrete sentinel, but inside the playfulness and rich complexity of form and plan, interposed with bright programmatic use of colour, makes for beautifully lit warm and compassionate spaces. The unusual design collaboration with musician Iannis Xenakis is evidenced in the rhythm of the windows in the façade, which relate both internally to the spaces and externally to the massing, giving the building a kind of pulsating rhythm that echoes throughout the place.
A lot of the time, when I travel on architectural adventures, it’s a whistle-stop tour of electric pace. There are always a million things to see and not every building is well understood or researched in advance, some are just names or coordinates on a long-forgotten map, but some buildings you do know well, having studied them at length at university or since. With Corbusier, they always feel like the former and not the latter, no matter how well you think you know them. I have several books on La Tourette and have admired it as a masterwork for as long as I can remember, but visiting it was reminded of how little I really understood it at all and I felt like a green student again. It’s a terrible way to write about a building, to state outright that it feels pointless to try to describe it, but if there is a central theme to my writing about photographing buildings, it’s probably about the importance of visiting them to understand them. I can’t think of a better example of this than La Tourette. Like discovering that a lifelong friend has a previously unbeknownst fascinating side to them, or that they are someone else completely beneath the façade. Buildings, at least the good ones, are almost always like that. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to read space from afar, or from drawings, and I’m not ashamed to say that sometimes I don’t feel very good at it.
Visiting buildings multiple times is something which doesn’t happen too often. There are a few places I have gone again and again. Sometimes I visit somewhere, and I end up returning to show someone else, maybe my brother, or a group of students, or I just happen to be passing by, but occasionally simply visiting once just is not enough and you yearn to return. Therme Vals springs to mind immediately, the Mariendom Neviges as well, and La Tourette is another. Of all the wonders of the oeuvre of Le Corbusier, this one has always fascinated me the most and I walked away from it vowing to return. Like a lot of these journeys, they happen on the way to somewhere else, and for obvious reasons, I haven’t been ‘on the way somewhere else’ in quite some time, so I haven’t been back yet but hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, I will. It might be some time before that happens, but when I do, I’ll plan to stay the night in one of the cells and explore a little more on my own terms.
I have loved going through the process of editing all my old photos and reliving the experiences of visiting the buildings. I have tried to unlock and understand the buildings and the visits at an arm’s length, and it’s been a rich and rewarding experience, almost like traveling, just without the hassle and significantly cheaper.
HWLK