“The demands of religion had little influence on the design... the form was a response to the psychophysiology of feeling.”
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier: Texts and Sketches for Ronchamp
1950-1955. Freedom: Ronchamp. Totally free architecture. No program other than the service of the mass - one of the oldest human institutions. Present, however, was a personality worthy of respect; it was the landscape, four horizons. They were what provided order. A real phenomenon of visual acoustics, “visual acoustics, a phenomenon brought into the realm of forms”: forms create noises and are silent; one speaks, the others listen... from a strange unity, world opinion gathered, even including the Roman. A place of pilgrimage on firmly set days, but also a place of pilgrimage for individuals who came across the four horizons, by car, train, airplane. A march to Ronchamp.
In June 1950, I spent three hours on the hill to get to know the land and horizons. I immersed myself in them. The chapel, damaged by shellfire, still stood. The Committee was present - Curé, local entrepreneurs... I took inventory of the situation: there is no good road for normal transportation of trucks to the hill: I will do it from sand and cement: stones from the ruins, burned to powder or cracked by frost, can be used as filling, but cannot support the burden. The idea takes shape. Here, given the existing conditions at the top of an isolated hill, the only organized working group, a cohesive team, teachable technology, free people and masters of their craft. Good luck!
On the drawing board lies a shell collected from the ground in 1946 on Long Island near New York. It became the roof of the chapel: two concrete skins, six centimeters thick, held apart at a distance of 2.26 meters. The shell rests on walls made of old salvaged stones...
The shell settled on the walls madly, but sturdily. However, inside the walls are reinforced concrete columns. The shell will rest at intervals on top of these columns, but will not touch the wall; a horizontal strip of light ten centimeters wide will cause surprise...
The chapel in Ronchamp may prove that architecture is not a matter of columns, but a matter of plastic events. Plastic events are not regulated by formulas from schools or academies; they are free and countless. The chapel in Ronchamp, a pilgrimage chapel in the foothills of the Vosges, is a place of remembrance and prayer. It faces the plain of Saône to the west, the chain of Vosges to the east, and two smaller valleys to the south and north. These landscapes of four horizons are presence; they are hosts. The chapel itself turns towards these four horizons as “an acoustic phenomenon brought into the realm of forms”. It is intimacy that is to enter into each thing and reveal the outburst of indescribable space. Everything is white, inside and out, but everything is truly free, unbound by any program except the short ritual that gives the givens of the problem nobility. A cohesive whole. Lyricism and poetic phenomenon have liberated themselves... by the purity of relationships, everything built on flawless mathematics of combinations. There is joy in playing with the means of the Modulor while keeping one eye open to the play that dazzling oversights provoke, for they want to serve you, cling to you, catch you by the coat tails to drag you into the abyss.
Light is the key, and light shines over the forms. And these forms have the strength of emotions, which owe this to the play of proportions, the interplay of unexpected, unbelievable relationships, but also to the intellectual play of hidden reasoning - their authentic birth, their capacity to stand firm, structure, method of progress, hardness, even daring, the play - of real things that are substantial, the establishing elements of architecture.
Five days before the formal opening, they brought the cross, made to human scale. From that moment, Ronchamp was no longer a construction, a workshop. Disrupting the silence of the walls, the chapel proclaims the greatest tragedy, suffered on the mountain, in the East long ago. When Bona placed the cross on his shoulder to carry it to the middle of the nave, to the altar, there was suddenly pathos. Such that in order to control their breath, the workers began joking to release the choking pressure in their throats.
Your Excellency, in the construction of this chapel, I wanted to create a place of silence, prayer, peace, inner joy. Our effort was invigorated by the sacred. Some sciences are sacred, others are not, whether they are religious or not. Our workers and the foreman Bona, Maissonnier from my studio on rue de Sèvres 35, engineers and accountants, other workers and employees, administrative officials, Savina, these are the people who brought this work to completion, a difficult job, careful in detail, rough, solid in the means used, but sensitive, revived by total mathematics creating an inexpressible space. A few scattered symbols and a few written words speak of the praise of the Virgin. The cross - the true cross of painful death - is installed in this Ark; the Christian drama now claimed ownership of the place.
Your Excellency, I hand over to you this chapel of honorable concrete, shaped perhaps boldly and certainly with courage, in the hope that in yourself and in those who ascend this hill, you will find the echo of what we all had to invest here.”
(Address to the archbishop at the dedication of the chapel.)
As for the bells, there was already a principled decision from the very beginning. Today, electronics is becoming the common practice. Both bells will, however, be placed in the right location. Your directives are entirely correct. But the electronic device cannot be fixed to the base. Nevertheless, we will leave this base empty. I will discuss this matter with the Philips company, which equipped the Philips pavilion in Brussels in 1958, where Le Corbusier's Electronic Poem with music by Edgar Varèse, the French composer living in New York, was played.
Our most majestic commitment is to sound Ronchamp, not with some important or unimportant artist, but with a boundless voice coming from the furthest times and reaching the latest moments of today.
Then a choice must be made directly related to the sound transmitter. And therefore, it will be appropriate for the top of Ronchamp to speak in the early morning wave, in the noon wave, and in the evening wave. Thus, we will be in tradition, and Ronchamp will open up to music, will not close itself off from it. But let us not hold our tongues! I will look into it and I will count on your enthusiastic participation.
(June 19, 1964, in response to René Bollem's Reddat.)
Petit, Jean. Textes et dessins pour Ronchamp, Paris. Editions Forces-Vives, 1965
for the magazine Stavba, vol.1999, no.1, pp. 36-37, translated by Rostislav Švácha
In June 1950, I spent three hours on the hill to get to know the land and horizons. I immersed myself in them. The chapel, damaged by shellfire, still stood. The Committee was present - Curé, local entrepreneurs... I took inventory of the situation: there is no good road for normal transportation of trucks to the hill: I will do it from sand and cement: stones from the ruins, burned to powder or cracked by frost, can be used as filling, but cannot support the burden. The idea takes shape. Here, given the existing conditions at the top of an isolated hill, the only organized working group, a cohesive team, teachable technology, free people and masters of their craft. Good luck!
On the drawing board lies a shell collected from the ground in 1946 on Long Island near New York. It became the roof of the chapel: two concrete skins, six centimeters thick, held apart at a distance of 2.26 meters. The shell rests on walls made of old salvaged stones...
The shell settled on the walls madly, but sturdily. However, inside the walls are reinforced concrete columns. The shell will rest at intervals on top of these columns, but will not touch the wall; a horizontal strip of light ten centimeters wide will cause surprise...
The chapel in Ronchamp may prove that architecture is not a matter of columns, but a matter of plastic events. Plastic events are not regulated by formulas from schools or academies; they are free and countless. The chapel in Ronchamp, a pilgrimage chapel in the foothills of the Vosges, is a place of remembrance and prayer. It faces the plain of Saône to the west, the chain of Vosges to the east, and two smaller valleys to the south and north. These landscapes of four horizons are presence; they are hosts. The chapel itself turns towards these four horizons as “an acoustic phenomenon brought into the realm of forms”. It is intimacy that is to enter into each thing and reveal the outburst of indescribable space. Everything is white, inside and out, but everything is truly free, unbound by any program except the short ritual that gives the givens of the problem nobility. A cohesive whole. Lyricism and poetic phenomenon have liberated themselves... by the purity of relationships, everything built on flawless mathematics of combinations. There is joy in playing with the means of the Modulor while keeping one eye open to the play that dazzling oversights provoke, for they want to serve you, cling to you, catch you by the coat tails to drag you into the abyss.
Light is the key, and light shines over the forms. And these forms have the strength of emotions, which owe this to the play of proportions, the interplay of unexpected, unbelievable relationships, but also to the intellectual play of hidden reasoning - their authentic birth, their capacity to stand firm, structure, method of progress, hardness, even daring, the play - of real things that are substantial, the establishing elements of architecture.
Five days before the formal opening, they brought the cross, made to human scale. From that moment, Ronchamp was no longer a construction, a workshop. Disrupting the silence of the walls, the chapel proclaims the greatest tragedy, suffered on the mountain, in the East long ago. When Bona placed the cross on his shoulder to carry it to the middle of the nave, to the altar, there was suddenly pathos. Such that in order to control their breath, the workers began joking to release the choking pressure in their throats.
Your Excellency, in the construction of this chapel, I wanted to create a place of silence, prayer, peace, inner joy. Our effort was invigorated by the sacred. Some sciences are sacred, others are not, whether they are religious or not. Our workers and the foreman Bona, Maissonnier from my studio on rue de Sèvres 35, engineers and accountants, other workers and employees, administrative officials, Savina, these are the people who brought this work to completion, a difficult job, careful in detail, rough, solid in the means used, but sensitive, revived by total mathematics creating an inexpressible space. A few scattered symbols and a few written words speak of the praise of the Virgin. The cross - the true cross of painful death - is installed in this Ark; the Christian drama now claimed ownership of the place.
Your Excellency, I hand over to you this chapel of honorable concrete, shaped perhaps boldly and certainly with courage, in the hope that in yourself and in those who ascend this hill, you will find the echo of what we all had to invest here.”
(Address to the archbishop at the dedication of the chapel.)
As for the bells, there was already a principled decision from the very beginning. Today, electronics is becoming the common practice. Both bells will, however, be placed in the right location. Your directives are entirely correct. But the electronic device cannot be fixed to the base. Nevertheless, we will leave this base empty. I will discuss this matter with the Philips company, which equipped the Philips pavilion in Brussels in 1958, where Le Corbusier's Electronic Poem with music by Edgar Varèse, the French composer living in New York, was played.
Our most majestic commitment is to sound Ronchamp, not with some important or unimportant artist, but with a boundless voice coming from the furthest times and reaching the latest moments of today.
Then a choice must be made directly related to the sound transmitter. And therefore, it will be appropriate for the top of Ronchamp to speak in the early morning wave, in the noon wave, and in the evening wave. Thus, we will be in tradition, and Ronchamp will open up to music, will not close itself off from it. But let us not hold our tongues! I will look into it and I will count on your enthusiastic participation.
(June 19, 1964, in response to René Bollem's Reddat.)
Petit, Jean. Textes et dessins pour Ronchamp, Paris. Editions Forces-Vives, 1965
for the magazine Stavba, vol.1999, no.1, pp. 36-37, translated by Rostislav Švácha
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