Canada Nostalgia: Seven Wonders of Canada

In case you’ve missed it so far (and I might just let you of if you have) the Canadian Broadcasting Corportation (CBC) has extended voting in its radio and television feature The Seven Wonders of Canada until tomorrow, 31 May. You can listen to and read nominations and browse all 52 of the finalists on the website before making your selection.

Nominees include Drumheller, AB; the Prairie Skies…

…the trans-Canada Highway; the Ukranian Easter Egg of Vegreville, AB…

…the Cabot Trail, NS; the Dempster Highway from the Yukon to the Northwest Territories… etc etc etc

The usual suspects (Niagara Falls, the CN Tower) are all in there as well. Get voting!

The curious incident of the wallet in the night time

I frequently have conversations in French that I later don’t believe to have correctly understood at all. For instance, last night, my landlady asked me if I had smelt anything burning earlier in the evening. I said no, but I couldn’t be sure. She explained there was nothing to be worried about, but a neighbour had found a wallet on fire in the basket of a bicycle parked in our communal hallway. He had put the fire out with the contents of a bottle of Coca-Cola he had with him.

I smiled politely at my landlady and wished her goodnight, and thought that I really should make more of an effort to go my French classes.

But then as I went out later that evening to find a nightcap, I discovered my French comprehension skills to be in reasonably good state. In the basket of one of the many bicycles parked in our hallway were the charred remains of a half burnt pink lady’s wallet. Charred cinema tickets had fallen onto the floor below, and the stairwell was filled with a strange aroma of burnt plastic and charred leatherette.

Snapshot: late breakfast at L’Épicerie

Action shot of me eating a pear and chocolate tart (it’s as good as it sounds) with a Nutella and hazelnut tartine in the foreground. The Épicerie is a rather good place for a late breakfast. Thank you Marie-Elaine!

La Tourette part two: the taxis of L’Arbresle

In the golden orange afternoon sunshine of Friday evening, I explored the fields and woods around Le Corbusier’s priory at La Tourette, a few kilometers from L’Arbresle in the Rhône region. A five hour train ride through Alsace, the Jura and Franche-Compte to Lyon had brought me a long way from Strasbourg. After another five hours criss-crossing Lyon on foot and by metro, I had retreated to the countryside to one of France’s most famous priories.

Fans of Le Corbusier (or Dominican priories in general) can not only visit La Tourette, but also stay the night. For €45 (students €35) you can enjoy full bed and board in the religious community that lives here. But there are some points to remember. Right now, the convent itself is undergoing major restoration. Let’s just say that while Le Corbusier loved concrete, when he used it at La Tourette the standard of construction was well below what it should have been. And while a roof garden was a vital component of Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture, his detailing around the roof was pretty weak, meaning that extensive restoration work is required on top of the building. So unless you happen to be in a large group of visitors, visitors to La Tourette are currently housed with the brothers in an annex in an adjacent farm complex.

Another point to remember about the full bed and board deal is that it is utterly dependent on the staff of the priory remembering that you are there.

Having checked in late in the afternoon, and having spent an hour or two walking around the outside of the building to sketch and photograph it, I returned to the annex for the communal dinner at 19h30. With me were the only other guests staying at the priory that night: an Argentine couple from Rosario, both practicing architects, who were spending four weeks in Europe. We started chatting as we waited outside the refectory for dinner to start. And we continued talking until about 21h00. Some time between our arrival and the projected time of dinner, the priory had become a landlocked equivilent of the Marie-Celeste. The refectory doors were locked shut, and the kitchens were deserted. We investigated the temporary chapel housed in the annex, knocked on various doors and peered through windows. We were entirely alone. Dinner, it seemed, was not forthcoming.

Being the only who had a telephone and who could speak French, I offered to try to call a taxi to take us into L’Arbresle to find something to eat. The tourist information that I had spurned earlier in the day had one taxi number, and with surprising ease I was able to call a car to our aid. A friendly driver from the miniscule company of Alizés Taxis (”pour vos petits et grands déplacements”) arrived within minutes and took us down the hill to L’Arbresle. It being after 21h, we did not have much choice in terms of places to find food. A fine little restaurant called Le Capucin in central L’Arbresle was recommended. Over a delightful three course meal, I got to know my gracious new friends. La Tourette was, for them, a stop on a grand tour of France and Spain. They were delighted to be able to visit La Tourette but were, like me, somewhat bemused about being forgotten at the end of the day. We chatted away in English about our respective careers and interests - both their careers and their interests being significantly more developed than mine. I was particularly suprised to enjoy one of the finest meals I’ve had in France: a firm and beautifully textured terrine to begin with, and a soft warm cutlet of veal for the main course, gently spiced with mediteranean herbs. I only regret not having had enough room for the chocolate tarts that I saw being ferried to the other tables, where whole families were dining out together. Having been up since about 5h that morning and having spent much of the day pounding the streets of Lyon, a gorgeous dish of herby veal and a beer was enough to make my eyelids begin to droop. It having been a long day for all of us, we quickly asked for the bill and I slipped outside to call L’Arbresle’s only taxi firm.

It being around closing time on Friday night, the only cab driver in town had (of course) finished work for the night. Noy only is it quite hard to find a place to eat late in the evening, it’s rather difficult to find a taxi. So hard in fact, that requests for taxi numbers made to the proprietors of the restaurant and neighbouring kebab shop produced the same telephone number for Alizé taxis. We were stranded some 3km from ‘home’, which was at least forty minutes walk away, at the top of a hill at the end of a winding and unlit country lane. Frantic calls were made, and remote assistance was also offered via text messages and the internet from a certain long lost architecture student back in Sheffield. Lost, bemused and very tired, the friendly waitress came up with a solution. Her husband - the chef of Le Capucin, who had just spent his evening producing plate after plate of delicious veal - offered to drive us back up the hill in his truck. We were so grateful, we did not hesitate longer than politeness would permit. Thanking the waitresses as we left, I took a card and promised to return. In the mean time, I recommend and head to Le Capucin at 27 rue Pierre Brossolette in L’Arbresle (tel. 04 37 58 02 47, closed Sundays and Mondays, transport home not included) and tell them that the young Englishman who dined with the two Argentines sent you.

Returning to the priory, there were few signs of life. We crept into our beds, and with the window in my room wide open to the noisy background sounds of the countryside at night, I slumped into a deep sleep.

Seventeen hours later, the telephone number for Alizés Taxis came in handy one more time. The driver on duty that Saturday afternoon got a paniced call from an English architecture student standing outside L’Arbresle station… my paranoia for always arriving early for trains, planes and buses had failed me, and I was late for my train. So late, in fact, that I had no choice but to call a taxi to drive me back to Lyon to make it in time for the the last train that day to Strasbourg. The cost of another night’s accommodation and another train ticket would have been more, so I had to swallow my pride, find a cashpoint, and shell out a painful and unexpected €45 to get back to the city in time for my train.

Once in the cab, I related the story of my weekend to the driver. I told him about the previous night’s events, and how the following morning I had been mildly surprised to find that both breakfast and dinner were served as promised. I explained how I’d spent the first part of the morning sketching the convent, before being allowed into the ghostly and empty priory to explore it for myself, before joining a guided tour given in English for the benefit of a group of architecture students from Kansas. It was because I decided to follow the entirity of this guided tour, and because I mis-read my train timetable, that I ended up thinking that my train from Lyon Part Dieu to Strasbourg was at 19h09 instead of 17h09. For the first time in my life, I stumbled over the 24 hour clock and paid the price (€45).

The driver laughed and said that some weekends just don’t work out. I agreed, and said that at least Alizé Taxis did alright out of my weekend in L’Arbresle.

La Tourette part one: I am MODULOR…

If you were to use average terms to loosely describe the average man in France today - dark-ish eyes, dark-ish hair, medium height, medium build - and then you were look at me through a pair of someone else’s average prescription spectacles, you might find that I match that description of the average man. For whatever reason (and none was given) as I stepped off a regional train in the quiet French town of L’Arbresle on Friday afternoon, I was stopped by a police officer. Along with a handful of colleagues, he was demanding identity papers and making random searches of people leaving L’Arbresle station. From a crowd of about thirty people descending from the early afternoon rush hour train, I was one of the lucky ones to be picked, most likely because I looked so average that I ought to be checked.

Being British, I don’t carry identity papers. And being British, I’m not used to be stopped and searched. I knew that this was surely all part of the experience of living abroad, especially in a country where the cops don’t have the best of reputations. It’s certainly not helped by their public image: in almost four months of living in France, I’ve never seen police officers patrolling on foot; they always appear to move around (in groups of at least three) in their cop cars, even in busy city centres.

Rant over… I wasn’t arrested. The bemused cop (who had recently graduated from the school of puberty) had to make do with my British driving license. He poked around inside my bag and discovered no evidence of criminality or malfeasance, and let me go.

L’Arbresle is a pretty little town in the Rhône, about 30km north-west of Lyon. It centres around a railway junction and station where short metallic silver TER trains stop off and are parked for the night. If the flics who were idly stopping and searching passengers at L’Arbresle had been paying attention to people’s occupations, they might have noticed that L’Arbresle station probably receives a higher than average proportion of architects architecture students; all because one of the world’s first celebrity architects came this way just over fifty years ago.

My reason for taking a train L’Arbresle can be found about 3km away from town, up a very long hill to the south-east, just beyond a little village called Eveux. In the stifling late afternoon heat and humidity I began to climb this hill, getting lighter as I neared the top as all the moisture in my body evaporated. The tourist information I had downloaded from the internet had recommended that I take advantage of the fine service provided by Alizés Taxis in L’Arbresle to take me up the hill, but I had stubbornly refused.

I don’t know how Le Corbusier climbed this hill: maybe he trekked up with his notebook in hand, as romantic architects would probably like to imagine him doing so, but since he was brought here by a major commission late in his career to build a Dominican priory, he was more likely to have been picked up by someone in a car. The priory that he eventually designed with Iannis Xenakis was to become known internationally as arguably both the masterpiece of his career and a high point in French modernist architecture. Whether of not I like the building or his methodologies is not important; I’m here to spend the night at La Tourette and to see what all the fuss is about.

Those methodologies are well known and well discussed. One of them was his published in two books as his system of proportions known as the Modulor. The current Wikipedia definition of Modulor explains that:

The graphic representation of the Modulor is a stylized human figure with one arm upraised stands next to two vertical measurements, the red series based on the figure’s navel height (108cm in the original version, 1.13m in the revised version) then segmented according to Phi, and the blue series based on the figure’s entire height, double the navel height (216cm in the original version, 2.26m in the revised), and likewise segmented. A spiral, graphically developed between the red and blue segments, seems to mimic the volume of the human figure.

As you might already have noticed, the flaw in the Modular system is that is bases its entire theory around an entirely arbitary dimension: that of an ‘average’ man. Not a tall man, not a small man, not a child, not a woman and most certainly not a disabled person in a wheelchair. The ‘average’ man as perceived by Le Corbusier was 1m 86cm tall. The idea that Le Corbusier had found the perfect proportional system remains suspect to this day, but he believed in it so much that he returned to it again and again in his buildings. Not only did he use it as a fundamental system for designing and proportioning spaces and structural elements in buildings, he also used the graphic representation of the Modular as decoration on the exterior of the Unité d’habitation he built in Marseilles.

As you can see from this photograph, taken in Marseilles earlier this year, I am pretty much exactly 1m 86cm tall, and with my arm reaching up, I can reach 2m 26cm. So not only am I the average man on the street who might get stopped and searched by the cops, I am also the living average of Corbusier’s proportional system.

Cue robotic Transformers style evil villain voice and evil villain laugh: “I am MODULOR…. mooohooohaaaahaaaaa….”

The priory at La Tourette was built as a living and working educational institution, housing as many as one hundred men who were studying (for up to seven years) to become Dominican fathers. The collapse in broad appeal of the church means that La Tourette is now home to just fifteen monks, who are frequently out numbered by the paying guests who can spend the night in their community (usually architects or students of architecture on personal pilgrimages). While I wouldn’t say that my visit was a pilgrimage - since I don’t seem to follow the French habit of blindly revering Le Corbusier - it was going to be an interesting opportunity to see the building and spend some time getting to know it…