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Ronchamp, France
Warm summer breezes, French wines and cheeses
A pilgrimage in every sense of the word, this is Notre Dame au Haut in Ronchamp, France, Le Corbusier’s single best piece of work and one that is just as impressive as it should be in person.
I had never heard of this building until my first architecture lecture class in my first year of undergraduate school, a lecture I still remember because in my notes I wrote “bozar” when they started talking about the Beaux Arts. I still maintain that bozar is a better and far more fun way to spell it. Anyway, the professor showed an image of this building from this angle and asked the students what this was supposed to be. No one said anything and he eventually gave in and told us it was a chapel. Which of course now seems pretty obvious.
I think there is no better way to understand a building than to see it in person, but it’s also always a bit strange when you actually see it in person after seeing so many pictures and hearing about it so many times. Everything in person always seems just a bit different.
There was no interior photography allowed, and my camera is really loud when I take pictures. Inside at the same time as me was another guy with another loud camera, and we took turns sneaking pictures when the other person wasn’t looking.
My trip to Ronchamp wasn’t easy. From Nice, I took an overnight train to Strasbourg, then rented a car (a Mercedes CLK, the only automatic transmission that the Hertz at the Strasbourg Rail Station had available), then drove just over two hours to get there. After Ronchamp, I drove back through the Alsace region and stopped here at Kaysersberg, where a scenic castle had some scenic views of the vineyards.
Mr. Wonka, I can see my house and the school and the chocolate factory from here!
From Kaysersberg, I drove to Colmar to stay the night. Colmar is deep in the Alsace wine country and close enough to Germany to get itself into trouble every world war, and, as you can see, is as scenic a town as possible.
