Religion: Monks in Concrete

In the low hills near the French town of Eveux, 15 miles from Lyon, workmen were busy last week putting the finishing touches to what a Paris paper called one of “the celebrated ruins of the 40th century.” It is a Dominican monastery —Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette.

But it is like no monastery ever built before. Its architect: France’s famed Le Corbusier.

“Corbu” began “sniffing out the site,” as he puts it, in 1953. He chose a slope to back his monastery against, propped on pillars. Then he listened and took notes while the late Dominican patron of the arts, Pere Couturier, explained the and problems of the Dominican discipline (“Here we walk in double file. Here we prostrate ourselves”). For three years Corbusier and his associates worked over the plans. The result is a rugged interplay of concrete masses and angles—a top example of the architectural style that is sometimes referred to as “the new brutalism.”

The roof of the monastery is a terrace, seeded with grass and surrounded by a high parapet so that those on the terrace cannot see the ground below but must look out toward the horizon. At first Corbusier planned to make this the cloister, where the monks walk and meditate, but abandoned the idea because “it would be so beautiful that the monks would use it for an escape, which might prove perilous to their religious life.” But he urged the Dominicans to “go up there from time to time. Let them allow you to go up as a reward for those who have been good boys.” Presumably to make it more rewarding, he has made the doors leading onto the roof exceptionally narrow.

The two top floors consist of 100 cells in a double row of matchboxes—one to a monk. Each is a narrow, barely furnished room of white granular cement applied with a high-pressure hose; each is 7 ft. 5 in. high (Corbusier’s standard human measure—the height of a man with his arms raised); each has its own balcony, separated from its neighbor by solid concrete partitions. Monks reach their cells from the lower floors by means of a corridor with walls that grow increasingly somber as the men approach their devotional solitude.

But in the communal rooms below-refectory, library, oratory and classrooms —Corbusier’s creative fancies take over in a profusion of pyramids, cubes and parallelepipeds, doors in solid primary colors against the white concrete walls. Water pipes (painted bright blue) and electrical conduits are everywhere exposed. The building’s insides, says Corbu, are nothing to be ashamed of.

In the pyramid-topped oratory, the church and its curvilinear chapel (which Corbusier calls “the rock” and the monks, despite his protests, call “the ear”), there are no statues. “There will be no distraction from images,” Corbu told the monks. “If you want to be good fellows and show some friendship for your poor devil of an architect, you can do it by formally refusing every gift of stained glass, or images, or statues, which kill everything.”