7.53 View towards main altar of the Church of La Tourette (1956–59).
As at the Maison du Brésil the floor is finished in Le Corbusier’s opus optimum, meaning that the steps of the reader are continually mapped against the sequence of the Modulor. The traditional Dominican liturgy is characterised by its extensive use of bodily gestures: bowing, kneeling, prostrating, processing, all of which involve tactile engagement with the building where it takes place. When a Dominican monk prostrates himself on the Modulor floor of La Tourette its lines are imprinted on his body and he is absorbed into the radiant web of mathematical relationships that govern both the building and its environment. Particularly intriguing is the dark void at the end of the monks’ side of the Church ( Fig. 7.54). Set into the wall, it is a geometric echo of the square in the ceiling above, which this time releases a blaze of light. It is almost as though projected from the dark square is the x-axis of the body set perpendicular to the y-axis of the spirit emanating from the hole in the roof above. All our movements are mapped within this grid. Le Corbusier wrote of Ronchamp that it involved the continual adjustment of a “thousand factors which in a true work, are all gathered and collected into a closely knit pattern – and even in the simple crossing of right angles, sign and symbol of an existence – these thousand factors about which no-one ought or would wish to speak of”.43 Here the right angle is implied within the architecture of the space. As Colin Rowe wrote of La Tourette, those “sceptical of the degree of contrivance” and “temperamentally predisposed to consider the game of hunt – the symbol as an overindulgence in literature” really need to look at the architecture once more.44
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43 Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp, p.6. 44 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, p.189.