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…
I am one of these, pilgriming architecture students… I am from Mexico doing an internship in amsterdam.. till december… the two last weeks of july I will be visiting differente architecture sites in frances, switzerland and austria..
Can you tell me if you need to reserve (who and how do i contact) at la Tourette in order to stay to sleep, and will I be sleeping in the farm or in the building?