Art & Architecture
article | Reading time15 min
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The abbey of Le Thoronet, with its purity and the simplicity of its volumes, essentially dictated by the organisation of community life, has inspired generations of architects such as Le Corbusier. Take a look at the reasons behind this passion...
Minimalism
Inclusion on the first list of French monuments to be saved
As the cistercian order went into decline in the late medieval period, the number of monks at Le Thoronet Abbey continued to fall and the buildings deteriorated. Closed during the French Revolution, the abbey was sold as national property to private owners, who used it as a farm.
Nevertheless, in the 19th century, the abbey attracted the attention of Prosper Mérimée , the French inspector of historic monuments, who considered it to be a major monument of medieval religious architecture. In 1840, it was included on the first list of French monuments to be saved from abandonment and ruin and in need of restoration.
But it was above all in the 20th century that the spirituality based on renunciation and poverty of the first cistercian monks came back into favour, and was extended by a building style based on deprivation and advocating strict utility.
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The modern minimalist movement
The twentieth century was to be the century par excellence of the modern minimalist movement. It was characterised by the use of simple geometric forms, raw materials and pure lines. The cistercian abbeys were to exert a spell with their aesthetic deprivation in line with the sensibilities shaped since the 1920s by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe of the Bauhaus art school in Germany, and in France by architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier.
©Michael / Pixabay
Le Corbusier
A key architect
A Swiss architect who became a naturalised French citizen in 1930, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is one of the leading exponents of modern architecture. His early work was inspired by the Bauhaus movement .
His masterpieces include the Sainte-Marie de la Tourette convent in Éveux (1956), the Villa Savoye in Poissy and the Cap Moderne camping units.
© Benjamin Gavaudo / Centre des monuments nationaux
The Tourette convent
This convent is an example of the modern architecture of which he was one of the great initiators. Its construction was the result of an upheaval in the relationship between the sacred and art initiated by the Dominican priest Marie-Alain Couturier after the Second World War.
His aim was to bring together the creators of modern architecture and the Catholic Church , which at the time still believed that the construction of a religious building required a believing builder.
He encouraged a break with the architectural academicism still prevalent in new religious buildings.
In the article "Magnificence de la pauvreté" ("Magnificence of poverty") published in the magazine Art sacré in 1950, he states: " Today, to be true, a church should only be a flat ceiling on four walls. But their mutual proportions, their volume, the distribution of light and shadows could be of such purity, of such intensity that everyone entering it would feel spiritual dignity and solemnity ".
This definition of what the architecture of a church could be was in line with the ideas of the architect Le Corbusier. He was chosen to build the convent.
© Pascal Lemaître / Centre des monuments nationaux
Le Thoronet Abbey
Father Couturier advised Le Corbusier to visit the Abbey of Le Thoronet: " It represents the very essence of what a monastery should be, whatever the period in which it is built, given that men devoted to silence, meditation and contemplation in a communal life do not change much over time... For us, the poverty of the buildings must be very strict, without any superfluous luxuries, and therefore this implies that the vital necessities must be respected: silence, sufficient temperature for continuous intellectual work, the routes of comings and goings reduced to a minimum... Remember that our way of life is absolutely common to us all and therefore does not call for any personal differentiation within groups ".
© Philippe Berthé / Centre des monuments nationaux
Rational architecture
The construction of the Tourette convent represents a synthesis of the architectural vocabulary developed by Le Corbusier since 1923 in his collection of essays "Vers une architecture", which revolves around five main points: pilotis, roof-terrace, window-bays, free plan (load-bearing posts set back from the wall) and free facade.
Le Corbusier advocated rational architecture. For him, "the house is a machine for living".
The formal correspondences with the Le Thoronet abbey are clearly visible:
- The bell tower;
- The simple volumes;
- The geometry of the different volumes;
- The assembly of proportions respecting the modulor ;
- The importance given to light and the types of openings designed to capture and diffuse it;
© Pascal Lemaître / Centre des monuments nationaux © FLC (Fondation Le Corbusier) - ADAGP
- Alternating solids and voids marked by rays of bright light projected onto the walls. For Le Corbusier, " the architectural elements are light and shadow, walls and space ". He wrote of the Abbey of Le Thoronet: " Light and shadow are the loudspeakers of this architecture of truth, calm and strength ". The church of La Tourette will be the subject of a specific programme on light. Its lighting will be provided by a multiple system of skylights designed as chimneys producing concentrated light spots projected inwards onto the ground (cannons, machine guns, loopholes);
- The design of a plan that plays on interiority. Le Corbusier imagined a convent closed in on itself, in parallel with convent life: an interior courtyard, an internal circulation system almost independent of the main entrance, giving the impression that, once inside, you don't know how to get out.
Unforgettable inspiration
The architecture of the monasteries left a lasting impression on Le Corbusier, who visited, among others, those on Mount Athos in Greece and the Carthusian monastery of Ema near Florence (1911). This architecture was to serve as the basis for the design of his housing units(Cité radieuse in Marseille 1945-1952...), a kind of small self-sufficient city for housing, traffic and green spaces.
© Émeric Feher / Centre des monuments nationaux
Fernand Pouillon
Originally from Lot-et-Garonne, it was in Provence that Fernand Pouillon established the foundations of his expertise and reputation. He was one of the great builders of the reconstruction years after the Second World War. His work also developed abroad, in Iran and Algeria.
Fernand Pouillon's architecture has a number of constants, including the use of stone. Stone is his favourite material. He praised it in his novel Les pierres sauvages (1964) and wrote in his Memoirs (1968): "the chapels of modern architecture have always reproached me for it: to be of one's time, you have to build in concrete and steel, otherwise you're out of your depth ".
During the Second World War, Fernand Pouillon spent long weeks at Le Thoronet Abbey, painstakingly recording the plans that formed the basis of both his novel and his future architectural projects.
His lively chronicle of the birth of a masterpiece, based on both historical research and long experience as a builder, is also a reflection on the relationship between beauty and necessity, between the human order and the natural order.
In the aftermath of the war, faced with the immense needs of reconstruction, he built the Cité de la Tourette and the Vieux-Port buildings in Marseille (1951). The quality of his work earned him numerous projects in Provence, the Paris region and Algeria (the Diar-es-Saâda housing estate in 1953 and the Diar-el-Mahçoul housing estate in Algiers in 1954).
His buildings did not follow the avant-garde principles of the time, but renewed the neo-Mediterranean style by reconciling tradition and modernity, rigour and sensitivity, craftsmanship and industry.
His guiding principle was always to " build better, faster and cheaper ". The stone used to rebuild the hamlet of Les Sablettes in La Seyne-sur-Mer (1952), salvaged from the Vieux-Port construction site in Marseille, made it possible to build at low cost.
To find out more, listen to the podcast The architect Fernand Pouillon by Léo Fabrizio.
John Pawson
©Gilbert McCarragher / Avec l'aimable autorisation du cabinet John Pawson
John Pawson, an English architect, is part of the modern minimalist movement, eschewing ornament and seeking the essential in architecture. In his book Minimum , published in 2006, he states that he is committed to establishing the idea of the " minimum " as a way of thinking, living and working.
John Pawson is one of the many architects who followed Le Corbusier to Le Thoronet. A number of lessons learned from his visits to the site have influenced the evolution of his thinking and his architectural creations. They concern the notion of context and landscape, the use of light, surfaces, geometry, scale and proportions.
At the Monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur, near Prague, John Pawson has rethought the cistercian tradition in contemporary terms. The 2000 construction combines the restoration of the old buildings with the contemporary construction of the elements necessary for monastic life in a style that is in keeping with cistercian simplicity.
Thanks to the use of modern materials such as concrete and plaster, the architect has freed himself from the questions of scope that were inherent in medieval stone architecture. He designed a cantilevered cloister that has no precedent in the history of cistercian architecture.
Influenced by the abbey of Le Thoronet, John Pawson has taken its forms - in this case, the semicircular vault - and freed himself from the constraints associated with the material, in particular its weight. He created galleries that are completely open to the centre of the cloister, with no intermediate support.
The new abbey church is characterised by the importance given to the pure white colour of its walls and the light that accompanies it. It is lit by a diffuse light whose source is not visible from the nave. At no point in the nave should the eye be distracted by a view of the outside or by too much light. The aim is to create the same sense of interiority as that felt in cistercian churches.
To achieve this effect, light boxes were hung on the walls of the nave to capture the sunlight and channel it inside the church. The apse, on the other hand, is lit directly through a window.
Considered by himself to be "his life's work", this construction underlines the link between minimalism and spirituality.
