THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

and design development of Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre Dame-du-Haut
Richard Stockton Dunlap
A thes i s submit ted to the Department o f Soc io logy o f the London
School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, May 2014
DECLARATION
I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the
MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political
Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated
that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work
carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
The copyright of this thesis rests with Richard Stockton Dunlap.
Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is
made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the author’s prior
written consent.
I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief,
infringe the rights of any third party.
I declare that my thesis consists of 99,019 words.
ABSTRACT
This dissertation provides a reassessment of the design documents and historical
discourse concerning Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp. My
aim is to reopen this inquiry, which I believe has been prematurely closed. In order to
clear the way for a renewed investigation of Le Corbusier's creative process, I have
resituated the discourse within its original historical setting, and reassessed the sum
total of textual and visual evidence in the context of its initial production: the postwar
controversy about Catholic theology, sacred art, and the role of architecture in
religion that formed its cultural and semantic background. I have thus reevaluated Le
Corbusier's autobiographical accounts of his creative process in light of the
ecclesiastical scrutiny in which they were published, and questioned the reliability of
the explanations that they contain. I have also questioned the credibility of secondary
discourse based principally upon these sources, and assessed the sum total of this
corpus in light of archival evidence.
The primary objects of this study are the architect's primary texts, published between
1953 and 1965; the secondary literature in English and French, published between
1953 and 2013; and the design documents for the Chapel produced between 1950 and
1958. My methodological approach to this documentation includes both textual
analysis of the primary and secondary discourse, and formal analysis of the design
drawings. Through a combination of these techniques, I argue that the primary
literature on Ronchamp is characterized by contradiction; that the secondary
literature has often followed this primary account uncritically; and that the design
drawings suggest a sequence of production that is at odds with canonical account of
the Chapel's design.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.1 Postwar Liberation and Catholic authority
The battle of Bourlémont 7
The purification of the French episcopacy 7
1.2 Postwar patronage strategies
Couturier's role at Ronchamp 15
1.3 Pius XII, the Holy Office, and the French hierarchy
The postwar resurgence of the Vatican 22
Dominican art and doctrinal error 24
The Holy Office and the Inquisition 27
Vatican spies and official sanctions 29
1.4 Le Corbusier and the politics of postwar liberation
The Liberation of Paris 33
The Unité d'habitation 38
The Dominican renaissance 43
2. Reading Ronchamp:
Introduction 47
2.1 Initial reception: the rules of art under Vatican scrutiny 48
2.2 Early architectural discourse: monument of a new irrationalism 54
2.3 Establishing the canon: myths, dreams, and metaphysics 62
2.4 Revision and reassessment: false trails, fetishism, and the enigma of form 68
2.5 Recent developments: religion, spirituality, and the cultural icon 73
2.6 Conclusion 83
Research questions 89
Representing Ronchamp in the Œuvre complète & Forces Vives
Introduction 101
3.2 ‘La Chapelle de Ronchamp, 1950-1953’ 105
Design documents 105
Textual contents 106
Attributing authorship 109
Archival evidence 111
Summary: Ronchamp in the Œuvre complète 118
3.3 ‘La Chapelle de Ronchamp, 1950-1953’, Augmented Edition 119
3.4 ‘Une Chapelle à Ronchamp’ 122
Jean Petit and Forces Vives 122
Le Corbusier, Architecture du Bonheur 123
Intertextual evidence 125
Design documents 126
Textual contents 127
4. Le Corbusier's authorial strategies:
Explaining Ronchamp in the shadow of Rome
Introduction 137
Authorial voice 150
Contradictory context 152
4.2 Inaugural reflections 155
The Archbishop’s address 163
A letter to Marguerite Tjader Harris 164
4.3 Conclusion: Le Corbusier's authorial strategies 165
5. Reassessing Ronchamp:
Introduction 169
5.2 ‘A small chapel near Belfort’ 175
5.3 The first drawings 177
Plan 07470: the Charcoal Plan 180
Plan 07307: the Central Door Plan 182
Plan 07311: the Three Entry Plan 184
Plan 07293: the Foundation Plan 185
Marginal sketches of the chapel’s roof 188
Plan 07321: the Basin Plan 191
Plan 07240: the Colored Siteplan 192
Plan 07463: the Maisonnier Plan 194
Plan 07312: the Sacristy Plan 197
Summary: Reconstructing the early sequence of plans 199
5.4 Conclusion: Reassessing Ronchamp 201
6. Questioning the Canon:
Introduction 205
Elevation Set 07433 208
The 'first sketches' 218
6.3 Early design drawings: a summary of the evidence 227
6.4 Le Corbusier's postwar design methods 230
Soltan’s account of the atelier 230
The role of projective drawings 234
The paradox of the primary literature 236
6.5 Conclusion 237
Appendix B: Secondary Discourse Summary 357
Appendix C: Content Analysis 367
Appendix D: Correspondance 451
Illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The completion of this dissertation has benefited from the assistance of numerous
institutions and individuals to whom I am deeply grateful. I am most fortunate to have
inherited the insights of several generations of scholars, whose publications on Le
Corbusier, Marie-Alain Couturier, and French history provided an initial understanding
of both the architect and the Chapel at Ronchamp, and allowed me to see where
additional research might be productive. Writing history is, in this sense, always a
collaborative process, and I am deeply indebted to the efforts of these scholars, whose
prior research made my work possible.
I would also like to express my profound gratitude to the following individuals for
their kindness, insight, and assistance along the way: to Nezar Alsayyad, Cris Benton,
Gary Black, Alan Code, Mary Comerio, Sam Davis, Robin Einhorn, Paul Groth,
Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Don Lyndon, Louise Mozingo, Jean-Pierre Protzen, John
Searle, Stephen Tobriner, and Buzz Yudell (University of California, Berkeley) for
professional edification and academic assistance; to Danièle Pauly (École nationale
supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Val de Seine) for establishing a foundation of
research that served as my point of entry into this complex discourse; to Simon
Richards (University of Leicester), Jules Lubbock (University of Essex), Phil Novak
(Dominican University), Christopher Pearson (Capilano University) and Mark Wilson
Jones (University of Bath) for insightful commentary and encouragement during the
initial phase of research; to Ann Pendleton (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
and the late Guillaume Jullian de la Fuente for important information concerning Le
Corbusier's postwar atelier; to Claire Alexander, Paddy Rawlinson, Fran Tonkiss, and
the late David Frisby (The London School of Economics and Political Science) for
helpful advice during the development of the manuscript; to Robin J. H. Kim
(University College London) and Juergen Kufner for critical insight and collegial
support in London; to Ed Bottoms and Hilda Sklair (Architectural Association,
London) for providing timely access to important archival materials that helped me
immeasurably; to Christopher Green (The Courtauld Institute of Art) for his superb
scholarship on French art and several inspiring conversations; to Tina Dickson
(University College London) for lending her family's rare collection of the Journal de
Notre-Dame du Haut and sharing personal insight about René Bolle-Reddat; to Joel and
Noëlle Canat for hospitality and kindness that helped make my years in Paris both
comfortable and productive; to the late Antoine Lion (Centre d'études du Saulchoir)
for providing access to the Dominican archives in Paris and sharing his knowledge of
Father Couturier; to Arnaud Dercelles and Michel Richard (Fondation Le Corbusier,
Paris) for providing access to Le Corbusier's library and graciously responding to all of
my questions; to Jean-François Mathey (Association de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame du
Haut) for kindly providing unlimited access to the Chapel at Ronchamp; and to the
late Peter Lipton (Cambridge University) for providing unparalleled epistemological
insight and scholarly inspiration.
I would also like to highlight the contributions of three scholars whose guidance
served to greatly improve this dissertation: Tim Benton (The Open University) offered
insightful criticism that helped bring the concluding chapter into clear focus; Joseph
Rykwert (University of Pennsylvania, emeritus) shared knowledge of Father Couturier,
Le Corbusier, and the Parisian avant-garde that opened many doors of productive
inquiry; and my supervisor, Robert Tavernor (The London School of Economics and
Political Science, emeritus), provided authorial advice and ongoing encouragement that
helped me find a way through a decade of research. I am ever grateful.
Lastly, I would like to offer my boundless gratitude to my mother, Ann Caris Dunlap,
and my father, Robert Wallace Dunlap, for joining me on the road to Le Thoronet and
staying by my side during an overly long process, which my dad was unfortunately
unable to see me complete. I dedicate this dissertation to his memory.
Richard Stockton Dunlap, May 2014
INTRODUCTION
The Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp, sits high upon a hill in eastern France
overlooking the small town for which it is named. The present church, designed by Le
Corbusier in the early 1950s, replaced a neo-Gothic structure destroyed in a fierce
battle in the autumn of 1944. The commission for a new church was prepared with
the support of the Archbishop of Besançon, Maurice-Louis Dubourg (1878-1954), who
granted the Diocesan Committee on Sacred Art the capacity to preserve, repair, and
conceive anew the liturgical environment of the French Catholic Church then under
his jurisdiction. Committee members quickly summoned the Parisian avant-garde for
this purpose, inviting them to reinvent the Church’s ecclesiastical symbolism. Le
Corbusier was one of many artists offered absolute creative freedom should he accept
the commission. Amid a storm of controversy, he obliged, and designed what is widely
regarded as one of the greatest architectural monuments of the twentieth century.
The canonical explanation of Le Corbusier’s architectural design for the Chapel was
published by Danièle Pauly in her monograph, Ronchamp. Lecture d’une architecture.
Pauly's insightful and groundbreaking work, based upon archival research conducted at
the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris in the 1970s, unearthed many of the architect's
design sources, and placed the Chapel within a long line of expressionist architecture.
Pauly's study quickly became the authoritative text on the subject, and has since
exerted a powerful influence on the secondary literature, which has consistently
referred back to her analysis of the early drawings. However, Pauly's interpretation of
these documents was, by her own admission, strongly influenced by Le Corbusier’s
prior explanations. Her account is thus subtended by the implicit assumption that the
architect's publications on Ronchamp are forthright.
My initial research suggested that this was not a safe assumption. Prior to the Chapel's
inauguration in 1955, Le Corbusier wrote numerous contradictory accounts of his
architectural inspirations for Ronchamp under a variety of authorial and editorial
guises. These texts were first published during a bitter but now largely forgotten
conflict between the Vatican and the Chapel's Dominican patrons, who were then
under the scrutiny of the Holy Office. Members of the Roman Curia were also quite
familiar with Le Corbusier and his avant-garde peers, and highly critical of their
3
involvement with the Dominican sacred art movement. In light of this discovery, it
seemed plausible that the architect's primary accounts of Ronchamp may have been
influenced by the pressure of extenuating circumstances; and this hypothesis, if true,
would suggest that the historical context, architectural discourse, and design
documents for the Chapel merited further review. The present study, conducted in
Paris from 2005 to 2010, was conceived upon this basis.
The following discussion is ordered chronologically, in order to provide a sense of the
social background in which the commission, design, and discourse unfolded. Chapter 1
provides a review of the postwar context in which the commission first appeared, in
the aftermath of the German Occupation and the dissolution of the Vichy
government. Pétain’s capitulation in 1940 had left lasting divisions in French society,
which were exacerbated by the severity of the liberation that followed. Amid the
conflagrations of 1944, members of the French resistance, many of whom were
Catholic, emerged victorious, and the political power that they subsequently enjoyed
had a direct impact upon the reconstruction of churches such as Notre-Dame-du-
Haut. For a brief period of time, the Dominican sacred art movement flourished
within favorable circumstances, which gradually gave way to the resurgence of Vatican
power. Ronchamp was conceived within this window of time.
Chapter 2 includes a review of the secondary discourse on the Chapel, presenting
chronological evidence that the architect’s own explanations of Ronchamp have
exerted a strong influence upon this literature from the Chapel's inauguration in 1955
to the time of this writing in 2013. Chapters 3 and 4 include an exhaustive content
analysis of the portion of the primary literature on Ronchamp published between 1953
and 1955, highlighting the considerable discrepancies that these texts contain. Upon
the basis of this review, I suggest that there is sufficient warrant to be skeptical about
the canonical explanation of the Chapel's design.
The study concludes in Chapters 5 and 6 with a renewed investigation of the extant
archival materials pertaining to the initial phases of Le Corbusier’s design work for the
Chapel. I argue that the canonical explanations of Ronchamp have overlooked many
early drawings that played a fundamental role in the architect's creative process, and,
on the basis of these discoveries, propose a revised sequence of design development
for the first three phases of work within the atelier. An alternate explanation of Le
4
Corbusier's creative process is also proposed, based upon a revolutionary approach
to architectural design that he developed after the war, which, I suggest, he did not
wish to disclose to his professional peers or to the public.
Subsequent phases of design work, as well as the complex issue of the Chapel's
architectural origins, are left as an open question within this dissertation, which I plan
to address more thoroughly in a forthcoming publication. It is my hope that this
pending monographic account will be more convincing if the fine-grained analysis of
archival and textual documents upon which it is based, along with the methodological
procedures by which it was conducted, are presented here first, as clearly and
straightforwardly as possible. The reader will thus find a comprehensive set of
appendices at the end of this dissertation, in which the basis of my arguments are
disclosed.1 This should serve to make the study fully replicable for scholars who might
wish to subject it to further scrutiny.
1 See the Appendices: A: Timeline B: Secondary Discourse Summary C: Content Analysis D: Correspondence E: Published Design Documents
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6
1
THE BATTLE OF BOURLÉMONT
In September of 1944, Nazi troops retreated toward the German border under
Hitler’s orders and occupied the neo-Gothic Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, high
above the provincial town of Ronchamp in eastern France. The Chapel formed part of
a strategic line of defense formulated by Hitler’s director of military planning, General
Alfred Jodl, which was to be anchored on the Vosges Mountains, from Lunéville
through Ronchamp to the Belfort Gap.1 Allied forces quickly converged upon the area
and engaged enemy fire. Throughout the autumn months, Ronchamp and its
neighboring Chapel were caught in some of the heaviest fighting of the war.2 When
German forces were finally cleared from the area in mid-November, (FIGURE 1.01)
members of the local parish returned to find their Chapel in ruins.3
THE PURIFICATION OF THE FRENCH EPISCOPACY
Ecclesiastical authority for the Chapel's reconstruction lay with the Diocesan
Association of Besançon, under the responsibility of Archbishop Maurice-Louis
Dubourg.4 But at that very moment Dubourg's authority was under attack.
Throughout the German Occupation, he had spoken out in adamant defense of
Marshal Pétain, under whom he had served during the First World War.5 So when
1 A: 1944-07-31 (Jodl Diary, cited in Blumenson 1993: 419) 2 A: 1944-09-11; 1944-09-20—10-19 (Clarke 1993: 565) 3 A: 1944-09-20—10-19 (Bolle-Reddat, JNDH 51, 1974, pp. 8-10) 4 A: 1945-08-31 (Caussé 1999: 550-1) 5 A: 1954-01-31 (L. Ledeur 1954: 15)
7
Pétain called upon all Frenchmen to remain neutral in June 1944,6 Dubourg, along with
the vast majority of the French Catholic hierarchy, clung loyally to the Vichy regime
on the eve of the Normandy invasions.7
Three weeks later, the Provisional Government of the French Republic in Algiers
declared Pétain's government a "pseudo-government,"8 and promulgated a decree
charging all those who had published writings or given lectures in favor of the enemy
with treason.9 Few French bishops could evade guilt on such terms. They sealed their
fate in early July, eulogizing Pétain's secretary of propaganda, the Catholic
collaborationist and militant anti-Semite Philippe Henriot, during a special funerary rite
at Notre-Dame in Paris that was attended by leaders of the Wehrmacht.10 Henriot
had been assassinated in June by the Resistance.11 The bishops’ actions also left them
marked men.
Their political standing was further discredited by Henriot's successor as Vichy
propagandist, Xavier Vallat.12 On 9 July, during his national broadcast on "Christianity
and the State,"13 Vallat defied the proclamations of the Provisional Government and
dismissed De Gaulle's appeal to Pius XII for a "purification" of the French episcopacy.14
He called instead for loyalty to Pétain, and defended the fealty of six French bishops,
including the Archbishop of Besançon, whose wartime colloquies he quoted at length.
"Listen to Mgr. Dubourg," he implored,
"to refuse to follow the Maréchal would be to criminally accuse him of betraying the
country, when his entire life has been a life of honor and devotion in service of France,
when he has given himself to her on that day when she was vanquished, to save her
from complete ruin. When a man assumes such a burden, informed by his
experience and by his sense of responsibility, he has a right to the recognition and
devotion of his Country, and those who are under his orders must follow them to the
point of forsaking their personal convictions."
6 A: 1944-06-06 (Paxton 1972: 326) 7 A: 1944-06-06 (Halls 1995: 174) 8 A: 1944-06-26 (François de Menthon, judicial decree: AN BB 30 1729, cited in Lottman 1986: 46) 9 A: 1944-06-26 (‘Rapport reçu de France’, in Cahier Français, n. 51, 1943, cited in Novick 1968: 146-7) 10 A: 1944-07-07 (Press cuttings, July 1944: AN 72 AJ 250, cited in Halls 1995: 356) 11 A: 1944-06-28 (Marrus & Paxton 1981: 338-9) 12 A: 1944-07-09 (Marrus & Paxton 1981: 339) 13 A: 1944-07-09 (Vallat 1944, cited in Halls 1995: 157, 368-80) 14 A: 1944-07-09 (Latreille 1978: 43; Halls 1995: 368)
8
The broadcast was intercepted and transcribed by members of the French
Resistance,15 who were undoubtedly already aware of Dubourg's doctrine of
submission. The elder prelate had preached loyalty to the Pétain throughout the
war,16 and his blind patriotism stirred the ire of the French Committee of National
Liberation, who sought to 'purify' the French Catholic Church of its Pétainist traitors
as quickly as the Germans could be cleared from French soil.
The National Council of the Resistance called for immediate action. A memorandum
dated 26 July 1944, probably written by its leader Georges Bidault (1899-1983), placed
the bishops in imminent peril: “It is advised,” he began,
that the government negotiate with the Holy See so that the latter accepts to
undertake the measures necessary to obtain the demission of those members of the
episcopate whose attitude has caused the greatest scandal under the Occupation.17
Bidault, like many members of the Resistance, was a devout Catholic.18 Following the
decrees of a ‘social’ faction of French Catholicism, he saw the wartime actions of
French bishops, who had preached loyalty to Pétain and Vichy, as both political
treason…