A few minor acoustic problems with the nuns’ concrete quarters aside, Mr. Piano and his team (Paul Vincent was the partner in charge at Renzo Piano Building Workshop) have created remarkably light and peaceful spaces that are virtually invisible from the chapel and gracefully connected to nature. Competing with Le Corbusier’s masterwork would have been a fool’s game and an affront, Mr. Piano clearly realized; spoiling it, a cinch. Doing neither, the additions insert new life onto the hill, and in the process remove a despised 1960s gatehouse that had obscured sight of the chapel from the town below.
Humility is a virtue. That’s the obvious lesson, but doing anything, even constructing a few self-effacing buildings at Ronchamp, is a big deal. Mr. Piano solved the riddle of adding to a site without appearing conspicuously to do so by burrowing into the brow of the hill, below the chapel, and inserting the convent and visitors’ center into the cuts, half buried, with zinc-and-glass facades to let in light. He placed the visitors’ center beside the old pilgrims’ path, which winds through woods from the valley all the way up the hill, and adjacent to a parking lot, which has been usefully trimmed.
A fire was crackling in the fireplace at the center when I stopped by to browse through the bookshop. A ramp led from there onto the dirt path rising to the chapel. Behind the opposite end of the visitors’ center, set apart by a tiny gate, the convent wrapped several hundred feet farther around the slope.
It looked like a miniature hill town. Two stories of concrete cells, the nuns’ quarters and workrooms, fronted by winter gardens and linked on the inside by somber corridors and stairs, opened to trees and sweeping views. Simple corrugated zinc roofs on slender steel pillars shaded the cells, which fanned outward like the leaves of folding screens. The materials — concrete, zinc and wood — created an atmosphere chaste and calm, the smell of cedar scenting the halls, the oratory — a trapezoidal room topped by a gently vaulted roof like the keel of a boat — sparingly decorated with an olivewood altar and bright orange floor.
Of course imposing anything on this hill, even half-buried buildings, impinges on what Le Corbusier saw in the 1950s as the “poem” of the larger site, with its interplay of forest and chapel, the chapel’s curves gesturing explicitly toward the Jura and Vosges Mountains, as if to embrace them in the poem’s narrative.

April 18th, 2012
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