LA TOURETTE

La Tourette

Going on a tour of Corbusier’s radical brutalist monastery.

Completed in 1960, it’s among the last of Corbusier’s designs that he ever saw built, a brutalist five story priory on the outskirts of Lyon, finished in the style that the architect was arguably the primary champion for. As religious buildings go, Sainte Marie de La Tourette is certainly bold. Like many of Corbusier’s designs, it’s easiest to understand it as a supersized machine, with each of its functions identified and organised in a very logical, one by one structure.

For the monks who would reside here, Corbusier observed that their daily activities could all fall broadly within one of three rhythms: the individual, the collective and the spiritual. For the individual, the top two stories were dedicated to 100 identical cells, each with their own balcony space. Beneath that, a series of common rooms, dining spaces and a library all facilitate collective activity. For the spiritual, there’s a chapel, which of course occupies the largest and most impressive single space here.

The whole thing floats above the hillside on concrete pillars, reinforcing once again the machine-like sense that you get from the place. It is as if it arrived here fully formed, a self contained, plug-and-play unit ready for installation wherever you see fit. As with many of Corbusier’s brutalist works however, that rigid narrative is always contradicted by a few artistic touches that show up to surprise you along the way.

Whether in the unusually curved pillars that hold up some of the building, the oblique angles of certain facades or the multicoloured glazing in the chapel, these little touches rein the design back from the realm of the overly-austere and insert a welcome sense of playfulness. All over, the management of natural light is an especially masterful element and almost defines the building more than the concrete it’s made of.

It is as if it arrived here fully formed, a self contained, plug-and-play unit ready for installation wherever you see fit.

For religious buildings, it was a serious break from orthodoxy. For architecture, it was a new frontier, one that sought to explore just how far modernism could be stretched to re-interpret even the most traditional of institutions.