Eleven minutes to worship concrete poetry. Le Corbusier built a crab shell for God.
Harmonious, inspired by nature, moving, luminous... there is no shortage of words to describe La Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Rochamp (France) and its curves. To create this Catholic place, at the beginning of the 1950s, Le Corbusier was inspired by the mosque of the Algerian Sahara of Sidi Brahim, by a crab shell for the shapes of the roof, and by the nearby Vosges valleys. .. Multiple influences for a building full of contradictions, a mixture of round and square lines, slender or squat depending on the angle of view, apparently vast from the outside, but small and intimate from the threshold crossed. Both a place of contemplation and major architectural innovation, the Chapelle de Ronchamp has been listed as a Historic Monument since 1965. Labeled “Heritage of the 20th century” in 1999, it entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016 with 16 others works of Le Corbusier.
Cinematography
1969 film stock worshipping curves like they're holy relics.
Direction
De Casembroot lets the building breathe—no rush, all reverence.
Sound
Jean Desailly's narration: French poetry meets architectural lecture.
Director
Jacques de Casembroot
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Le Corbusier designed Ronchamp as a rejection of his own earlier 'machine for living' philosophy—this was a machine for feeling instead.
The chapel's roof is actually a hollow concrete shell just 6cm thick at its edges, making it one of the thinnest load-bearing structures ever built in 1955.
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