Revisit Colin Rowe at La Tourette

There is kind of a novelty attached reading Rowe's essay on La Tourette describe the architecture in a form of critique that emerges out of a close examination of the building itself, and providing at once an experiential analysis and also a way of viewing the object that situates the reader spatially and visually. And yet Rowe can talk about the building in such abstract intellectually  as well as highly particularized statement.

When you talk about Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, you must examine his ideas on architecture to see that the genius of the form meets the theoretical standard (The Modulor measurements). In Rowe’s article, Nor the Five points of architecture or even six in this case was mentioned. How about the modulor merged with the musical compositions which dictated the language of the pans de verre ondulatoires, the pinwheel fenestrations and other proportions of the monastery.

La Tourette is not just the beauty of pure forms or the genius of Le Corbusier’s geo metric rule. The building encompasses the underlying forms of prismatic solids that fascinate us. There is also his profound understanding of the monastic lifestyle of ‘ indissoluble binomial of individual-collective’ through a series of dualities, his own dialectic; individual – collective; light – dark; secular – religious; licid – obsure; incremental – continuous. These dualities combined with his understanding of monks daily life style generate a series of forms in an almost harsh contrast to one another that expressed his notion of pure and beautiful geometries.

In his conclusion, Rowe wrote ‘To a block one attributes a structural continuity, Iinking textural consistency of space and a homogeneity of spatial grain or layering. While recognizing it to be a hollow and to be empty, one still conceives its emptiness as, in some way, the metaphor for a block of stone or a block of wood. It is exploitable only on the condition of collaborating with the nature which it has been assumed to possess. Or so it might have been thought. But at La Tourette, these precepts which one may often believe Le Corbusier himself to have taught and which one has sometimes felt to be a norm of procedure, are conspicuously breached, and breached with a sophistication so covert that only retrospectively does one become conscious of this means by which he has been able to charge depth with surface, to condense spatial concavities into plane and to drag to its most eloquent pitch the dichotomy between the rotund and the flat. By violating a unity at conception, by jamming two discrete elements within the same block, Le Corbusier has been able to instigate both tension and compression, sensations of both openness and density and he has guaranteed a stimulus so acute that the visitor is not aware of the abnormality of his experience.’

To me, Colin Rowe’s critique on La Tourette is more about his experiential perspective of a casual journey, he moved easily among all these areas sustained by an extraordinary faculty of visual memory that allowed the recall of any space, plan, facade, or image he had ever encountered. He uses these to influence us with his series of abstract intellectual images. By visualising his images is like being in a story, by being in a story, we become part of that emulsion reality, of time and space. As in a love affair, as in an accident.