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10 m
7.44 Section across La Tourette (1956–59).
case study, was for Le Corbusier the colour of the body and of fusion. The issue in the sensitising curves of the forecourt vestibule of La Tourette seems to be is the relinquishing of the sensual pleasure in favour of something more profound. The reader is inflected from curve to curve along the axis of the bridge to a seat that hangs over the space of the cloister below ( Fig. 7.42), the extreme use of what Geoffrey Baker calls “visual shock tactics” ( Fig. 7.43). 39 Its presence invites the reader to pause and reflect upon the implications of entry, of rebirth, through the violent red door of the monastery. To sit in this seat is to turn your back upon the difficulties and dangers within the cloister, and to view the outer world once more ( Fig. 7.44). At this point Rowe observes: The visitor is so placed that he is without the means of making coherent his own experience. He is made the subject of diametric excitations; his consciousness is divided; and, being both deprived of and also offered an architectural support, in order to resolve his predicament, he is anxious, indeed obliged – and without choice – to enter the building.40
The door into the monastery is given significance by its overpowering redness, but there is little else in its detail to indicate its import. Indeed there can be few more anticlimactic moments in the glossary of Le Corbusier’s architecture than arrival into what I will call the main stairwell of La Tourette (only because it appears near the main door – little else in terms of detail marks its superior position in the hierarchy of stairs). Generally there seems to be no particular justification for the positioning of the staircases which are not equidistant from one another. Nor do they line up with any other major events in the plan. In this way Le Corbusier subverts many of the usual tricks used by architects in the name of legibility, good space planning, economy and delight – tricks that he himself was all too familiar with. Questioning – savoir habiter
There is no obvious pomp and ceremony in the architecture of La Tourette, just constant incitement to thought and reflection. The main circulation corridor at the level of the alley provides access to the oratory, the library and a variety of other communal rooms. It swerves curiously from the inner edge of the cloister to the outer perimeter and back again. The view of the inner courtyard is experienced and once more taken away. The justification for this is unclear.
39 Geoffrey Baker, Le Corbusier: An Analysis of Form (London: Taylor and Francis, 2001), p.307. 40 Colin Rowe, “La Tourette” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, p.188.
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