Monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette
VRA Core
Title
Monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette
Couvent de La Tourette
Convent of la Tourette
Agent
Le Corbusier (Swiss architect, 1887-1965)
Location
Eveux, Rhône-Alpes, France
Eveux-sur-Arbresle (in the valley between Eveux and Arbresle)
50.441944
Date
1956-1960
Style Period
Modernist
Modern
Twentieth century
Cultural Context
French
Worktype
building divisions
rooms and spaces
religious building spaces
cloisters
buildings
religious buildings
churches
complexes
religious communities
monasteries
Material
rough reinforced concrete
Technique
construction (assembling)
Measurements
16,500 ft2 (area)
Subject
Architecture and City Planning
architecture
music
Dominicans
Description
[The buildings contain a hundred sleeping rooms for teachers and students, study halls, a hall for work and one for recreation, a library and a refectory. There is also a church, where the monks practice, and the circulation, which connects all the parts (the achievement of the traditional cloister form is rendered impossible here by the slope of terrain)]. In La Tourette, the public spaces, particularly the central atrium, are stimulated by the rhythmic play of the lines of the “musical walls” or “pans de verre ondulatoire,” (designed by Xenakis) whereas the static concrete box of the adjacent church has vertical perforations that reach up behind the altar. The lateral chapels are animated with machine guns of light (mitraillettes à lumière) painted in vibrant colors in the crypt and the sacristy. In 1960, speaking of this convent, Le Corbusier evoked a theme that he had been working on since the 1940s: "When a work reaches its maximum level of intensity, proportion, quality of execution, and perfection, a phenomenon of ineffable space occurs: the places radiate, physically they radiate. They become what I call “ineffable space,” that is to say, an impact based not on dimensions but on perfection. This is about the ineffable domain."
Rights
© Raimund McClain
The Texas Tech University Libraries has been granted the nonexclusive world wide rights to digitize and distribute the collection online in any way that furthers the educational, research and public service purposes of the Texas Tech University Digital Library.
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ID
RMEAS305
State Edition
20061024
scanned from 35mm color slides with Nikon Super Coolscan 5000
Citation
Corbusier, Le and Pierre Jeanneret, Monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, 1956-1960, Eveux, Rhône-Alpes, France, TTU Arch Design Images. https://archimage.lib.ttu.edu/items/show/11106.
Item Relations
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