Now that four years have passed since Le Corbusier’s Dominican church and priory at La Tourette burst on an astonished world with the impact of what was described as ‘the greatest ruin of the twentieth century’, it is possible to have later thoughts and to consider the building not as a major tourist attraction but as a place of prayer and study. It is possible, in fact, to ask whether Le Corbusier’s frequent claims for La Tourette as un lieu de silence, un lieu de repos, are justified. It is good to be there in the empty weeks of early spring, before the tourist hordes descend, and if the endless rains of a wet March have left the concrete mass a leaden grey and the waterspouts are for ever dripping—and the many leaks reveal themselves in new places—then at least one is spared the coloured illusions of the picture postcards.

One’s earlier impressions are on the whole confirmed. The building is a triumphant statement, in terms that match the needs of our time, of what an architect of genius can do to give spatial reality to the sacred. The jeu de volumes—that untranslatable phrase that expresses Le Corbusier’s primary concern with the use of space—is even more effective now that even a brief period of time has given the patina of use to what has too often been a sort of cerebration. These buildings, after all, church and refectory and lecture room and cells, arc to be used, not to be written about or even to be admired. And the marvellous counterpoint of solid mass and floating horizontal surface, of the honest concrete and the progressions of the glass, takes on an altogether different meaning when a bell rings and the cloister fills with friars on their way to church or refectory.