The Tourette's Chapel

Le Corbusier – Convent of Sainte Marie De La Tourette – Eveux-sur-Arbresle, 1957-1960

The convent of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette It is a religious building belonging to the Dominican Order, designed by Le Corbusier and located in the municipality of Éveux located in the area of ​​L'Arbresle near Lyon and not in the territory of La Tourette.
The convent complex includes a church, a cloister, a chapter house, classrooms, a library, a dining room, various rooms, kitchens and a hundred individual cells.. It is built in a steep valley surrounded by forests and plains; to give a less massive appearance to the structure, it was decided to support the mass of the convent on pillars of varying heights given the slope of the land. Inside there are one hundred cells for the monks. Even lower are the study rooms, lower down the refectories and finally, in contact with the ground, the kitchens. In the adjacent areas are the church and the sacristy. There is an internal courtyard directly connected to the outside.
The convent grounds are located on the side of a ridge road that slopes down towards the valley; Le Corbusier exploits the slope of the land to better organize the functional distribution. The layout used is very formal, in fact it is not easily recognizable as a convent; the building can be defined as belonging to brutalism, concrete is present everywhere, there are no moldings and no decorative elements, in line with the principles of poverty and simplicity of the Order. The elements are articulated with the right angle, furthermore the openings are designed to be ribbon-shaped, often occupying most of the wall.
The building is designed primarily for the relationship that those inside have with the outside and not the landscape impact that the building has on the context, this is because the friars belonging to the Order of Preachers must have a high education, and the convent is the place where this preparation takes place.

In the sacristy and in the altar of the church the relationship with light was studied mainly, some “cannons” of light were inserted, windows specially modeled to be able to have different internal behaviors of light at different times of the day. In the nave of the church there are two windows, one positioned in the center of the nave and one placed at the top of the wall opposite the altar; this play of light gives a different internal effect during the different hours of the day.
Le Corbusier varies the height between the floor and the ceiling depending on the importance of the space, the church has the greatest height and the corridor that leads to it changes height as you walk along it, to signify the fact that you are entering an important space. The entrance space has a low height, but as you approach the center of the building the ceilings change height.