RONCHAMP PROVENANCE

Robin Evans, in The Projective Cast, offers an interesting history of Corb’s design of Ronchamp Chapel.  These pages have called for, time and again, the revelation of how our culturally iconic designs were generated.  And Evans offers us just that.  This is not the first time that we have looked at Ronchamp.

In a nutshell, Evans forwards the theory that Corb used the parti of a chapel in Switzerland which was built in 1932.  Ronchamp Chapel was built in 1955.  And from this angle, the similarities between the two buildings are striking.  The church in question, called Notre-Dame-du-Bon Conseil,  was designed by architect Alberto Sartoris at Lourtier, Switzerland.  Link here to pdf of other photographs and a floor plan.

“Contradicting his earlier insistence that a building should be designed from the inside outward, Ronchamp was designed from the outside inward.  The earliest sketches were all of the exterior walls…”  p.  293. 

“Le Corbusier may well have taken everything from Lourtier except the rectangular framework for architectural proportion;  he took everything except that which it was all most impossible to refuse.”  p293. 

This is fun.  This is what we have been talking about.  See the page Design Provenance, for example.  Evans states that since the Swiss piece was published in print, there basically is no way Corb could not have known about it.  

Certainly my impression of the creation of Ronchamp, sitting in architecture school history class, is that it was created by an alien intelligence.  At least, that is the only explanation that I could derive, since we were not given any other explanation.  Another trope is that the building was designed from the inside out.  Yet Evans tells us that the first sketches were done of the exterior, and not as an inside out, bubble metaphor.   

What incredible insight did I knowledge as I drew the Swiss piece?  Well, the Swiss church is cut into a hillside.  The entry sequence makes use of the sloping site, as the entry courtyard becomes shaped by low retaining walls.  The ceiling of the church is flat:  while you would think that the ceiling would slope with the shed roof, it does not.  Light is not brought into the building from the tower.  All in all, it seems like a very sensitive solution.  And the basic analogue with Ronchamp is, to say the least, uncanny.

Fundamental point: this context, this pretext, this causal relationship, this copying absolutely needs to be taught when students learn about Ronchamp and any other iconic piece.  Corb’s copying reduces the authenticity.  Design Blockchain would help to keep this sort of thing straight, since, apparently, historians can’t.  To not teach, that indeed, Corb lifted heavily from another architect for his iconic work, is, without overstating it, a cultural crime. 

1.  Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1995