Editing Ronchamp (section)

==Notre Dame du Haut==
{{Main|Notre Dame du Haut}}
The chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, designed by [[Le Corbusier]], is located in Ronchamp.
It is a shrine for the Catholic Church at Ronchamp and was built for a reformist Church looking to continue its relevancy.  Warning against decadence, reformers within the Church looked to renew its spirit by embracing modern art and architecture as representative concepts. [[Marie-Alain Couturier]], who would also sponsor Le Corbusier for the La Tourette commission, steered the unorthodox project to completion in 1954.

This work, like several others in Le Corbusier’s late oeuvre, departs from his principles of [[standardization]] and the [[machine aesthetic]] outlined in ''[[Toward an Architecture|Vers une architecture]]''. In this project, the structural design of the roof was inspired by the engineering of [[airfoil]]s. It also resembles a nun's [[coif]].

The chapel is clearly a site-specific response.  By Le Corbusier’s own admission, it was the site that provided an irresistible [[genius loci]] for the response, with the horizon visible on all four sides of the hill and its historical legacy for centuries as a place of worship.
[[Image:Roncamp inside.JPG|left|thumb|250px|Interior of Notre Dame du Haut (looking up)]]
This historical legacy weaved in different layers into the terrain — from the [[Ancient Rome|Romans]] and [[Solar deity|sun-worshippers]] before them, to a cult of the [[Blessed Virgin Mary (Roman Catholic)|Virgin]] in the Middle Ages, right through to the modern church and the fight against the [[German occupation of France during World War II|German occupation]].  Le Corbusier also sensed a sacral relationship of the hill with its surroundings, the Jura mountains in the distance and the hill itself, dominating the landscape.

The nature of the site would result in an architectural ensemble that has many similitudes with the [[Acropolis]],  starting from the ascent at the bottom of the hill to architectural and landscape events along the way, before finally terminating at the [[sanctum sanctorum]] itself, the chapel.

The building itself is a comparatively small structure enclosed by thick walls, with the upturned roof supported on columns embedded within the walls.  In the interior, the spaces left between the wall and roof, as well as asymmetric light from the wall openings serve to further reinforce the sacral nature of the space and buttress the relationship of the building with its surroundings.