Quiet Additions to Notre Dame du Haut

Architecture Review

Quiet Additions to a Modernist Masterpiece

Iwan Baan

Notre Dame du Haut A new convent and new visitors’ center, designed by Renzo Piano, has been inserted down the hill from Le Corbusier’s hilltop chapel.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: April 17, 2012

RONCHAMP, France — Completed in 1955, Le Corbusier’s hilltop chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in this hardscrabble patch of eastern France attracts some 100,000 supplicants each year, architectural and religious. If critics still sometimes blame Le Corbusier for inspiring generations of soulless, cookie-cutter housing projects and office parks, he remains the high priest of Modernism for singular works like this.

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Michel Denance

Rooms for guests at Renzo Piano’s convent for the Poor Clares. Mr. Piano also designed a new visitors’ center.

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Michel Denance

A patio at the convent, designed to be open to its surroundings.

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Michel Denance

The interior of a cell, painted in orange, in the new convent, which has room for 12 sisters of the order Poor Clares. 

So it was predictable that a firestorm broke several years ago after plans circulated for a convent and new visitors’ center at the site of the chapel. Renzo Piano was the designer. Big-name colleagues like Richard Meier, Rafael Moneo and Cesar Pelli signed an online petition denouncing the $16 million project. The Fondation Le Corbusier, keeper of the architect’s flame, fumed. 

Now the buildings have opened, with some landscaping (by Atelier Corajoud, a Paris firm) and a bit of tinkering yet to come. I took a train from Paris recently and found the chapel empty on a bright, crisp spring morning (a godsend), then visited the nuns. They are not quite a dozen elderly Poor Clares, lately moved from their home of 800 years at Besançon, 60 miles to the south, which they had sold to help pay for the new place. Cheerful in their light gray habits, the sisters were finishing lunch in the refectory around a handsome glazed courtyard open to a cloudless sky. 

A few minor acoustic problems with the nuns’ concrete quarters aside, Mr. Piano and his team (Paul Vincent was the partner in charge at Renzo Piano Building Workshop) have created remarkably light and peaceful spaces that are virtually invisible from the chapel and gracefully connected to nature. Competing with Le Corbusier’s masterwork would have been a fool’s game and an affront, Mr. Piano clearly realized; spoiling it, a cinch. Doing neither, the additions insert new life onto the hill, and in the process remove a despised 1960s gatehouse that had obscured sight of the chapel from the town below. 

Humility is a virtue. That’s the obvious lesson, but doing anything, even constructing a few self-effacing buildings at Ronchamp, is a big deal. Mr. Piano solved the riddle of adding to a site without appearing conspicuously to do so by burrowing into the brow of the hill, below the chapel, and inserting the convent and visitors’ center into the cuts, half buried, with zinc-and-glass facades to let in light. He placed the visitors’ center beside the old pilgrims’ path, which winds through woods from the valley all 

A fire was crackling in the fireplace at the center when I stopped by to browse through the bookshop. A ramp led from there onto the dirt path rising to the chapel. Behind the opposite end of the visitors’ center, set apart by a tiny gate, the convent wrapped several hundred feet farther around the slope. 

It looked like a miniature hill town. Two stories of concrete cells, the nuns’ quarters and workrooms, fronted by winter gardens and linked on the inside by somber corridors and stairs, opened to trees and sweeping views. Simple corrugated zinc roofs on slender steel pillars shaded the cells, which fanned outward like the leaves of folding screens. The materials — concrete, zinc and wood — created an atmosphere chaste and calm, the smell of cedar scenting the halls, the oratory — a trapezoidal room topped by a gently vaulted roof like the keel of a boat — sparingly decorated with an olivewood altar and bright orange floor.   

Of course imposing anything on this hill, even half-buried buildings, impinges on what Le Corbusier saw in the 1950s as the “poem” of the larger site, with its interplay of forest and chapel, the chapel’s curves gesturing explicitly toward the Jura and Vosges Mountains, as if to embrace them in the poem’s narrative. 

The site had held one chapel after another since the fourth century, so it has changed often. Devotees of Le Corbusier have come increasingly to perceive it as an untouchable shrine to him. A characteristically French subtext of anti-clericalism partly fueled the contretemps, which came down to architectural preservation versus prayer, an inviolable site versus a living one. 

The Poor Clares, with the Association de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame du Haut (not incidentally, the organization that first hired Le Corbusier more than half a century ago), commissioned Mr. Piano. The aim was to devise a convent “beside the chapel that could thrive among pilgrims and tourists, and breathe life back onto the hill,” as Brigitte de Singly, the convent’s abbess, put it. 

She turned out to be Mr. Piano’s secret weapon: a once-upon-a-time French television executive and aristocrat with a longstanding interest in architecture, the ideal client who prodded and trusted but challenged the architect to come up with a design aptly quiet, slow, linked to nature and open. 

And beautiful. “Beauty gives you peace inside,” Sister Brigitte stressed to me, then laughed. “It just couldn’t cost a lot.” 

She said the sisters prayed eight times a day, five in the oratory and three in the chapel, navigating several steps and a grassy field, which isn’t easy for some of them. “But then when you are in the chapel,” Sister Brigitte added, “there is a warm atmosphere that helps you get inside yourself, whether you are Christian or not.” 

Le Corbusier’s masterpiece unfolds in the round, offering, like a sequence of Mondrians and Arps, different and uncannily poised compositions from every angle, back and front, side to side, inside and out and, crucially, in relation to the grounds. It commands the hill as the Parthenon does the Acropolis, its immense roof a great airfoil or billowing sail appearing to lift the building off the earth, and simultaneously seeming to weigh it down, compress it.

The paradox reverses inside the building. Panes of disembodied color — rectangles of bright red, green, blue and yellow stained glass — float irregularly in the dimness. A slender clerestory slit, like a halo of light, concealed from the exterior, raises the hulking roof as if magically from the concrete walls. The chapel’s gray floor rushes downhill toward the altar, the roof thrusting heavenward. The place is alive and in motion, as cool and mysterious as an ancient cave. 

What Le Corbusier called the chapel’s “ineffable space” derives not from Zen-like simplicity or Baroque extravagance but from this quasi-Cubist asymmetry of robust, jaunty, sensuous shapes, held in improbable equilibrium as if by a juggler on a tightrope. It’s a sculptural feat. Nowadays architects rely on digital technology to fashion swooping, soaring spaces that look as if they folded in on themselves. Ronchamp, by contrast, is the product of old-fashioned craft and serendipity, every surface different from every other, imperfectly, lovingly made.

 It is to Mr. Piano’s great credit that he didn’t aim for anything nearly as special. Le Corbusier had come to embrace primitive craft. Now buildings are assembled from products and systems. Mr. Piano’s additions are occasionally severe, what with all the glass, metal and hard angles, but light softens everything, especially the oratory, the convent’s hearth, where a hidden slot in the curved chancel wall, a subtle nod to Le Corbusier’s handling of filtered light in the chapel, lets in a consoling ring of sunshine. 

“Space and light and order,” Le Corbusier said, “those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.” Mr. Piano has given the Poor Clares all of those things, save the bread.