Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette

About this place

La Tourette is the last major building Le Corbusier completed in France, and in many ways his most extreme. Commissioned by the Dominican Order in 1953 and completed in 1960, the monastery sits on a steeply sloping hillside in the Lyonnais countryside — its four wings enclosing a cloister that drops three storeys on one side to meet the ground. The building is uncompromising. Rough board-marked concrete, narrow ondulatory window panels designed by Iannis Xenakis, and a church reduced to pure volume and light. The interior of the church is austere to the point of aggression: a dark rectangular box punched by coloured light cannons — the "light guns" — that Le Corbusier specified to catch the rising sun at specific moments of the day. The monastery is still a functioning priory. Visitors are welcome on tours, and it is possible to stay overnight as a guest, sharing the rhythm of monastic life. The experience of the building at dawn — when the light cannons fire and the bells ring — is unlike anything in modern architecture. La Tourette sits alongside La Chapelle de Ronchamp as evidence that Le Corbusier's late work was capable of a spiritual dimension his early rationalism never hinted at. It is rough, demanding, and completely unforgettable.