Notre Dame du Haut

On a hilltop above the small town of Ronchamp, Le Corbusier built a chapel that looks like nothing he had done before. The champion of standardisation and the machine aesthetic produced here, in 1955, a curving, almost sculptural building, its roof swelling up like a sail in the wind. It is small, but it changed the course of modern architecture, and in 2016 it was listed by UNESCO together with sixteen other works by Le Corbusier.

The hill had long been a place of pilgrimage to the Virgin, and its chapel was destroyed in the Second World War. The rebuilding was steered by Father Marie-Alain Couturier, part of a reform movement that believed the Church should embrace modern art, and Le Corbusier responded to the site itself, a summit with open horizons on every side and the Jura visible in the distance. The approach is carefully staged: the building stays hidden until you are almost at the top of the path. Stone from the ruined chapel went into the new walls, and the rubble of the old building fills the great south wall, so the earlier sanctuary literally lives inside the new one.

That south wall is the chapel's signature. It thickens from a point at one end to about three metres at the other, curving as it goes, and is pierced by a scatter of windows of different sizes, deeply splayed so that light enters at varied angles through small panes of coloured glass. The roof, two thin concrete membranes with a gap between them, rests on columns hidden in the walls rather than on the walls themselves, so a thin strip of daylight separates roof from wall and the ceiling seems to hover. The floor slopes down with the hill towards the altar. Outside, an open-air altar and pulpit serve the crowds of thousands who come on major feast days, and a statue of the Virgin saved from the old chapel sits in a glazed niche in the wall that can turn to face inside or out. When it rains, water pours off the back of the roof onto a group of sculpted concrete forms below, an improvised fountain.

The chapel remains a working place of worship and receives about 80,000 visitors a year. In 2011 a convent for Poor Clare nuns and a visitor centre, designed by Renzo Piano and dug into the slope below, were completed despite protests from prominent architects.

Getting there

The chapel stands above Ronchamp, about 19 km from Belfort. Ronchamp has a TER railway station, and in summer a local shuttle links the station, the town and the chapel; the nearest TGV station is Belfort-Montbéliard. The nearest international airport is EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg (BSL), about 69 km away.