Review of The Cloister La Tourette by by The Architect Le Corbusier

The Cloister La Tourette, a monastery designed by the Architect Le Corbusier is not only a building, but it is an emotional journey that you take walking through this spiritual environment created by simply using space and “Architectural forms” to evoke serenity and calmness. This building “Santé Marie de La Tourette” is a Dominican order priory it is located on the hillside in Lyon, France, and is one of the last buildings designed by the 66-year-old Architect Le Corbusier, the design started on May 1953 and ended 1961, and was recently inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The reason I decided to select this particular building is because it “speaks to me” personally, I like to think that each building has a soul and this soul has to be cultivated by the type of design the Architect makes and how the Architect translates the landscape and space into something as pure as “Poetry”, here in case of La Tourette, Le Corbusier does the exact same thing, he personifies the landscape and “poeticizes” the Architecture, he use the ideology of “form follows function”, since the function of the building is housing “wisdom”(school), “spirituality”(monastery), “serenity”(Library). This building therefore connects to the human body in a number of cases, as per my take on this building and ideologies of Le Corbusier physically, the building is raised up on stilts, columns, and pillars, just like a human body is “freed from the ground” by the use of legs, the floor plans open up just like a human body torso enlarges from the waist to the chest, the free roof with terrace to act as solar gains shows the human head and the ideology of absorbing wisdom.

The interior of the building is designed to accommodate the Le Corbusier Modular Man which suggest how the interior is organized as per the human form, the interior of the monastery has three fascinating connections to the human, the first character being the minimalistic view point to the interpretation of serenity, spirituality and isolation for a form of focus towards the work at hand, this psychological way of depicting Architecture is poetic.

Another character of the interior of this place is the culmination of “light and space”, the intellectual way of producing light in a certain way takes a lot of observation towards the way light evokes emotions, this idea of “holy light” or “spiritual light” is really well focused on, the light has been controlled in such a format that it touches the human spirit and connects it directly to the Architecture, and also to the function of the space.

Another character of the use of materiality of the interior as compared to the exterior of the building makes us think about, the sort of façade that the human body is made up of and how the interior is more complex in a way, in the same way this building has been created carefully, the materiality on the outside is concrete and glass where Le Corbusier mentions concrete is his favorite material to build with, this exterior façade is more rough and climate resistant like the human skin, whereas the interior of the building is more inclined towards softer skin to create a welcoming emotion, but at the same time some of the parts of the wall have more rough skin to emphasize on the minimalism of the building.

The project that I am working on at the moment is about Landscape, and I am taking a standpoint of how Architecture and Humans give a meaning to Landscape, this idea that landscape has a soul which we cultivate overtime by Architecture, Farming, Housing, its this way that we design the landscape and the Architecture that stands on it to complement each other at an emotional level, we as humans don’t realize landscape until there is a human made form present on it that gives it life, this piece that gives form to landscape is Architecture, Le Corbusier has the same ideology with the landscape when he suggests that the monastery be placed on top of the hillside, for the reason that it can be seen from far away, meaning he wants the building to compliment the landscape, the contour around it, and suggesting that the landscape in-turn compliment the Architecture. La Tourette has been placed on the hill top in a slightly fashionable manner almost suggesting the way a Human Body is dressed and viewed, the building is designed “top-down” therefore creating an irregularity with the relief, Le Corbusier says “let it sit as it will”, this ideology of making the building blend in with the horizon and speak to the landscape is itself fictional.

The building uses concrete as a material and therefore personifying the idea of something being firm and “concrete”, almost like a rock sitting in the landscape. This idea of placing the building where it is and programing it, comes from one of Le Corbusier’s visit to Galluzzo, a “Tuscan town” Florence, Italy which was place on a hill top which was a community with a townhall, church, school with streets acting as corridors to give way, and each of the buildings had a view towards the landscape determining this idea of how Architecture is nothing without the context of landscape, and further the program of the La Tourette is based on this same ideology of creating a town in a single building by creating school space, a town hall gather space, and a monastery space creating corridors in the building as connections to these main spaces, the Architect also makes a ridge into the building separating the main building from the monastery to suggest the division between the functionality in the space, just like the town in Florence the architect uses glass windows divided by mullions to give all the rooms a view out to the landscape, he divides the windows into this rhythmic form to create a view of the landscape through this mathematical equation of creating space and views. The main point I would like to make about the beauty of this building is about its terrace area, when it comes to serenity and calmness the terrace really evokes this emotion inside a human soul since the terrace is covered in earth and is cultivated with prairie like planters and it feels like you are “walking between the earth and the sky” to meditate and connect the physical with the spiritual. A character rather interesting about the building is this way of the entrance of the light and its manipulation to force you to “fake” an emotion, the skylights which look more “enigmatic” and “violent” with their cannon and assault gun like forms in the courtyard with the steep sloping roof of the forum in comparison to the serenity and calmness of the other spaces in the building, but the skylight that is focused below these fixtures is evoking spirituality and “holy light”, the building also uses bright colors at the entry way of the light to create colored forms of light on the walls of the innermost part of the monastery.

This building as per my take on it is perfectly situated and has a right amount of work put into it to create an experience of “being”, but if I had to disagree on the design and architecture, it would be the way Le Corbusier uses these rather “playful” objects like pyramids or cubes or cones in spaces to create light patterns on the building, I disagree with this part since it falls out of the context in the sense that the building is supposed to make the person feel closer to god, I think it is a decision that was made out of pure designing skills but sometimes the design can be interpreted in a different way than what the designer thinks of it. The so called “Architectural Forms” that Le Corbusier uses are to depict the essence of the sun on the building itself through the use of light and shadow, but since the building already creates that type of character with the glass and the horizontal windows, I think it is almost an “overkill”, what I mean by this is that Le Corbusier designs the building to be one with the landscape and is poetic about the way landscape plays a part in the architecture, he designs these perfect window fixtures to create lighting that encapsulates the host to feel the movement of time, But by the end of the project the Architect decides to create forms that will also form shadows on the building itself, that to me is disagreeable since it wouldn’t make sense in an “ethical” manner.

To conclude La Tourette can be called a masterpiece of its own creator since it has this glow of its own where it has all these different phenomena’s coming together to make poetry and to make architecture look as if it is a perfect piece of poetry is something I would admire and like to experience and that is what make great Architecture, it’s not just four walls and a roof it is more than that it is the soul of the place and the intellect of the designer.