REVISITING LE THORONET
This past week I found a copy of the 2001 reissue of Lucien Hervé’s 1957 “Architecture of Truth” which was originally published as La plus grande aventure de monde. So I’m revisiting images of le Thoronet, Hervé’s and my own photos, in a rock house while listening to cicadas which were also the sonic background to my visit to the abbey in 2018 (cicadas are the soundscape to all of southern France). Most interesting, though not surprising, is that Le Corbusier wrote an introduction to the book. I’m looking for the original in French but the translation goes, “stone is man’s best friend; its necessary sharp edge enforces clarity of outline and roughness of surface; this surface proclaims it stone, not marble; and ‘stone’ is the finer word.”
As the pandemic was finally easing summer 2021, we booked a trip to France for most of July. After a few days in Paris and en route for Marseille, I decided to stop over in Lyon and visit le Couvent de la Tourette again. The site of my first architectural epiphany and the building from which I have probably learned the most about architecture. And which is so closely linked to la Thoronet.
On 28 July 1953 Father Marie-Alain Couturier wrote Corbu “J’espère que vous avez pu aller au Thoronet et que vous aurez aimé ce lieu. Il me semble qu’il y a là l’essence même de ce que doit être un monastère à quelque époque qu’on le bâtisse, étant donné que les hommes voués au silence, au recueillement et a1la méditation dans une vie commune ne changent pas beaucoup avec le temps.” Corbu had visited on 26 July making two drawings in his sketchbook that day. Critics are still arguing over Corbu’s synthesis of various influences; but the affinities between la Thoronet and Corbu’s work at la Tourette are clear.
Corbu wrote of la Tourette, “Mon métier est de loger les hommes. Il était question de loger des religieux en essayant de leur donner ce dont les hommes d’aujourd’hui ont le plus besoin: le silence et la paix. Les religieux, eux, dans ce silance placent Dieu.”
I had been prepared for a hot and dry summer in Provence, but not for the heavy rain that fell all that day in l’Arbresle. As always, I walked up from the l’Arbresle train station and was completely soaked through when I eventually came up the allée to the priory. Having been effectively baptized. The visit was constrained by time and the omnipresent docents so it was possible to see only the salle de lecture, oratoire, réfectoire and église. After the formal tour I was able to stay on another hour to draw. Not the visit I’d hoped for but enough until the next one.
