Erupting like a strange fungal outcrop from the top of a hill in eastern France, Le Corbusier's chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp has been a place of pilgrimage for devout architects and Catholics alike for 60 years, largely considered the finest work of the 20th-century's most influential architect. Last week, one of its windows was smashed by unknown vandals, who broke in and threw the (almost empty) concrete collection box outside. The action caused international outcry about the protection of historic monuments – for this was not any old window, but the only pane bearing the mark of Corb himself, a small blue square showing the howling man in the moon.
“They broke into a thousand pieces the only glazing signed by Le Corbusier,” said Benoît Cornu, deputy mayor of Ronchamp. “He painted all the other glazing but on this clear panel, where he drew the moon, he had written his signature.”
Set deep into the battered rubble walls of the chapel, which extend up to 3m thick, the stained glass windows twinkle like tiny jewels beneath the heavy hull of the concrete roof. The multicoloured panels, which feature a range of the architect's wild, primitive scrawlings, are set at the end of broad tapering apertures that puncture the south wall in a random scatter, like the windows of an advent calendar. But to one nun's shock last Friday, there was no moon to be seen – only a jagged hole and a pile of glass shards.
Whether the vandals in question were sun-worshipping moon-haters, or hardline modernists still fuming that Corbusier took an organic turn, or merely some of the many locals suffering from desperate poverty that plagues this depressed region of the country, remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: their act of mischief has ignited a furious debate over vandalism of an entirely different kind.
Eminent architectural historian and Le Corbusier scholar William JR Curtis has come out all guns blazing in an article titled “How one vandalism can hide two others”, to be published in the Architectural Review next month, with a fierce attack on how the chapel has been left to rot while being transformed into a “money-making machine”.
In the hands of the Association L’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame du Haut, which owns and runs the site, he says the chapel “is quite literally falling apart, with the white pebbledash cracked and crumbling away and the bare concrete eroding at the edges,” a state he describes as “scandalous” given the income from the 80,000 tickets sold each year.
Over €10m has been spent on a controversial series of works by Renzo Piano, including a monastery built into the side of the hill nearby, completed in 2011, and a new approach route that steers visitors towards the ticket office, out of kilter with Corbusier's original scheme of a ritualistic ascent up the hill.
The Piano project, writes Curtis, “was ‘sold’ behind a smokescreen of sanctimonious incense as enhancing the religiosity of the place. In fact it has done the opposite by treating this universal masterpiece as merchandise, de-sacralising the landscape and destroying the aura … The Chapel itself has quite literally been undercut and trivialised by a host of surrounding mediocre architectural gestures. Far from becoming more ‘spiritual’ the place has become more materialistic.”
He describes the ultimate effect as transforming this once-remote site into a “gated community” with outward signs of prosperity, suggesting it is this, not religious malice, that might be to blame for the break-in.
The president of the Fondation Le Corbusier, Antoine Picon, has joined Curtis's cries, highlighting the “moisture problems, infiltration and poor preservation of masonry,” and calling on the owners to “better protect the heritage of the 20th century”.
“Given the current poor condition of the chapel,” he added, “we ask that, beyond emergency measures regarding the security of the site, long-term building conservation can finally be assured and restoration be begun as soon as possible.”