The Ronchamp Chapel in eastern France is a landmark building in the history of architecture. Its designer was none other than Le Corbusier (1887-1965), acclaimed as the greatest architect in the 20th century. Built between 1950 and 1955, Ronchamp would shatter traditionalists’ ideas of how chapels should look like. When it was unveiled in 1955, it left viewers unsure of whether it emanated from the future or the archaic past. Suffice it to say that Le Corbusier’s work has a major influence on modern architecture around the world, an influence that continues to this day. In 2016, Ronchamp was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, along with sixteen other works by Le Corbusier, because of its importance to the development of modernist architecture.
Situated high on a hill overlooking a tranquil landscape, the chapel is unforgettable for its imposing size and minimalist appearance, accentuated by the use of just two colors – white for the walls and black for the dramatic curved roof. From a distance, Ronchamp looks like a gigantic sculpture perched on a hill-top, its very location signifying a strong connection between a man-made construction and the natural landscape.
Nature was in fact a key inspiration for Le Corbusier when he designed Ronchamp. To him, Ronchamp was an amplification of nature in architectural form, with the roof evoking the shape of a crab carapace and the all-white walls conjuring the image of beach pebbles or bones. The root of these inspirations goes back to the 1920s when Le Corbusier began collecting shells, corals and other natural objects strewn on the beach. Thus began a preoccupation with forms spawned by the sea as a fount of ideas to inform his design aesthetics. At a time when the machine was becoming a popular metaphor for buildings, Le Corbusier, ever the visionary, turned to nature. In his writings, he wrote that it was no longer the cool logic of mathematics that guided his vision of architecture but the tactile experience of pebbles, pieces of bone and bricks with worn surfaces. “We fondle them with our hands, caress them with our eyes” he wrote, referring to objects “which nature speaks to us.” Even more explicit, Le Corbusier wrote in 1955, shortly before the completion of Ronchamp that “the (crab) shell picked up on Long Island in 1946 is lying on my drawing board. It will become the roof of the chapel.” And it did.
In short, Ronchamp’s design is inconceivable without the poetic inspiration of nature. That many buildings today are similarly inspired is a tribute to the vision of Le Corbusier, for whom nature, art and architecture can fuse harmoniously, a break from the old idea that architecture is a “pure construction of the mind.”
