TOWERING

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Many years ago, a few times in a row, I visited Corbusier’s chapel on the hill of Ronchamp. It is elegant, yet bulky – a huge mass of stone. The hill on which it is built is steep all around. Climbing it, it becomes clear that with the equipment of those days there was no way of transporting the materials up the mount in a technical manner; all of it had to be brought up by men with carts and horses. The massive bulk is all the more astonishing. Thus, it did not come as a surprise to read that the enormous hat-like roof is in fact an empty shell with only a thin, reinforced cement skin.

This also explains that, once inside, the visitor may be awed by the fact that the whole of the roof is balancing on small stilts, placed on seemingly fat walls, leaving open a slit through which sunlight peeps in – without the mass collapsing. The sublime in architecture…

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When confronting the outside of the chapel, what struck me already the first time was the optical illusion Corbusier had produced. Standing close to it, yet in the precise position from which the first photo has been taken, the edifice was towering above me. Stepping backwards, thus descending the hill and taking distance, something curious happened: instead of the building getting smaller, which one expects when taking distance, it actually seemed to grow in size, getting bigger and taller. As I stepped away from it, it began to tower all the more so. Being a good Popperian, on my next visit I tried to falsify this weird impression; it remained the same.

This illusion seems to be the effect of the immense, empty, cement-shelled eaves. This idea was reinforced, when I began to analyse the impression made by one of my favourite aquarelles, watching it from a certain distance, in an almost meditative way, lying on my siesta couch – Plokker’s group of buildings in Thiers, France.

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Observing an aquarelle, there is of course no way of taking distance from the building painted; I made a visit to Thiers. As the small town is built ‘against’ a steep mountain, each street dropping before one’s eyes, buildings always ‘up there’ like Corbusier’s chapel, the experiment worked – no falsification, indeed. On a sunlit day, similar to the one the painter used to produce his image, descending backwards down the sloping road, the building was progressively towering over me. Again, I am convinced, that it’s the generously large eaves that performed the trick.

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Sierksma, Montmorillon, 28.3/2024