Sainte Marie de La Tourette

Listen for a moment. Wind moves through the grass on the hillside, and somewhere a door closes with a heavy, dull sound. In front of you, raw grey concrete rises out of the slope. It still carries the grain of the wooden boards it was poured against, so the walls look almost like petrified timber. This is Sainte Marie de La Tourette, a Dominican priory in the hills west of Lyon. It is one of the most debated buildings of the twentieth century.

The priory is the work of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect who shaped modern architecture. The Dominicans of Lyon commissioned it in the early 1950s. Construction ran through the second half of that decade, and the building was consecrated in 1960. Le Corbusier was not a religious man. Even so, he accepted the task of designing a home for an order of preachers and scholars. He was asked to shape their prayer, study, sleep and silence.

The key figure behind the commission was a Dominican friar, Father Marie-Alain Couturier. He was a passionate advocate of modern art inside the Catholic Church. He believed the Church should work with the best living artists, whether or not they shared its faith. Couturier also suggested that Le Corbusier visit Le Thoronet, a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey in Provence. The Cistercians were a strict monastic order known for plain, unornamented stone churches. That visit left a clear mark on what you see here.

Notice how the building meets the ground — or rather, how it hardly does. The land falls steeply away, but the architect did not level the hill. Instead, the priory rests on concrete columns and walls, called pilotis, of different heights. The top of the building stays perfectly horizontal while the earth drops beneath it. Walk around the base and you can see daylight and grass under parts of the structure. The hill continues almost untouched below the friars' rooms.

The plan follows the old monastic idea of buildings around a central courtyard. Three wings form a U shape, and the church closes the fourth side. But this is not a traditional cloister garden. The courtyard is crossed by covered passages and odd geometric forms — a pyramid roof, a cylinder, sloping corridors. Here is a surprise many visitors miss. The friars do not walk in circles around a garden. They move through the building on these routes, crossing the open space between their daily tasks.

Look up at the upper floors. Rows of small balconies, called loggias, line the outer walls. Each one belongs to a single cell where a friar or guest sleeps. The rooms are narrow and deep, with a bed, a desk and a basin. Le Corbusier planned them using his own system of proportions based on the human body. The space feels tight at first. Then the window and the balcony open the room to the valley and the forest beyond.

Now look at the long west and south walls. The glass panels there are divided by concrete strips set at changing intervals, like a pattern of rhythm. These are often called musical glass panels. They were developed with Iannis Xenakis, who worked in Le Corbusier's studio as an engineer. Xenakis later became famous as a composer of experimental music. He treated the spacing of the panels like musical intervals. Watch how the light falls through them across the corridor floors.

The church is the plainest space of all. It is a long, tall box of bare concrete, with almost no decoration. Light enters through a few narrow openings, including a thin horizontal slit near the top of the walls. Sound behaves strangely in here. A single voice carries and hangs in the air. For the friars, this hard, empty room is where they gather to sing and pray. For many visitors, the silence is the strongest memory of the whole priory.

Next to the main church is a side chapel that surprises almost everyone. Its walls curve, and its ceiling opens upward into large concrete tubes. These are known as light cannons. They catch daylight from above and pour it down onto small altars. The inside surfaces of these openings are painted in strong colours, including red, yellow and black. As clouds pass outside, the colour and brightness inside change. The effect is simple, but it feels almost theatrical.

On the roof, Le Corbusier imagined a walking terrace for the friars. Today the roof is largely covered by grass and closed to ordinary visits. From below, though, the top edge of the building forms a sharp, level line against the sky. That line is part of the design. The architect wanted the priory to feel like one firm horizontal shape placed over a moving landscape. Stand back on the meadow and you can see the contrast clearly.

The building has not always been easy to live in. Raw concrete ages, leaks and stains, and the priory has gone through major restoration work. The community of friars also became smaller over the decades. Yet Dominicans still live here today. Parts of the priory welcome guests for retreats, and the building hosts contemporary art exhibitions. In 2016, La Tourette joined the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of a group of seventeen Le Corbusier works across several countries.

There is one more quiet detail in the building's story. When Le Corbusier died in 1965, his body was brought here and lay overnight in the church before his funeral. It was a fitting gesture between the architect and the friars. A man without religious faith spent his last night above ground inside the sacred space he had created for them. Whatever you think of the concrete, that night says something about the respect between them.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment on the slope. Look at the board marks on the concrete, the uneven rhythm of the windows, the shadows under the pilotis. Listen again for the wind in the grass. As you walk away, turn back once. The priory looks heavy and closed from the outside. But you now know about the colours, the light and the silence it holds inside.