ronchamp: sketchbook #01

Back in ‘86 I decided to Eurorail around Europe for the summer before starting at the Royal College of Art in the autumn. Just a few days out I had all my belongings stolen except for my tickets, money, camera and sketching materials. So, with a few days before I was due to visit relatives in Basel I headed to Le Corbusier’s masterpiece Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp near Belfort in France. I spent a whole day there taking in the setting and studying the building, sketching and taking photographs. 

Known by architects simply as ‘Ronchamp’ the design of chapel is organic and deeply sculptural. It may be surprising to those that associate Le Corbusier as the architect responsible for everything that was wrong about 1970’s high rise housing or modernist architecture. But Le Corbusier was also a painter and a sculptor. He designed the church towards the end of his life in 1954 when he was 66 and it exhibits an incredible fluency with form and light. He credited the unique site, atop a hill in the Jura region, with his inspiration for the design.

The sketches were made on these two visits in ‘86 and ‘91. I used a 2B pencil on an A5 smooth bond sketchbook and, for me, they are visual explorations of the building as a way to try and understand the architect’s intention. The first sketch in the series is the only one that shows people. By coincidence I had happened to visit on a rare day when there was an outdoor mass with pilgrims coming in buses from all around. Some years later in 1991 I returned with my wife - there is a slightly different sketching style and it is interesting that I selected different views even though I didn’t have reference to my ‘86 sketches..