On The Hill
Learning to see a building you already know
The first time I visited Ronchamp, I was a young architecture student. Film rolls were expensive and bulky, and that was to be a long summer journey with many stops. I dedicated only a few shots to the chapel. I do not know exactly how many, and unfortunately, those negatives have been lost.
For architects of my generation, Notre-Dame du Haut is almost inevitable. Completed in 1955, it stands on a hill in eastern France and, since then, has continued to generate conflicting opinions. Not universally loved, but impossible to ignore. To be honest, I have never particularly liked Le Corbusier’s architecture. But Ronchamp was different. Ronchamp has something plastic, shaped, modelled, alive in three dimensions.
I had always wished to return. In 2007, I did.
The second visit was different. The August light, a particular quality of haze, something in the atmosphere that did not match what I had kept in my memory for twenty years. For a while, I stood still. Without taking photos, probably in an attempt to understand what had changed. Simply letting the building be a presence. Then I started photographing. This time I was shooting digital, but there was no tilt-shift lens, no extreme wide-angle to be corrected in post-production.
A piece of architecture exists first in the architect’s mind, as a simple idea. Then as marks on paper, and finally as a technical drawing precise enough to be built. That drawing is a translation into two dimensions: controlled, corrected, geometrically resolved. Then the building rises. It enters the light, the air, the context. It acquires weight, shadow, and the specific imperfection of materials meeting in real space. The architect’s skill lies precisely in having understood, whilst still working on paper, how the idea would survive that translation into reality.
A tilt-shift lens, or aggressive correction in post-production, reverses this process. It pulls the building back towards the drawing, towards a geometric purity that belongs to the sheet of paper and not to the hill. It is a way of insisting on a reading that some buildings do not offer, and were not designed to offer.
Notre-Dame du Haut was not designed to be legible in that way. Le Corbusier described the shell of the roof as resting not on the walls, but on concrete pillars hidden within them, leaving a ten-centimetre gap through which light enters. It is a crack that should not exist, structurally speaking, and makes no sense until you are inside and see what it produces.
The walls taper and curve. The windows pierce the south wall at varying angles, so the light they let in changes throughout the day. Nothing resolves into a clean orthogonal reading. To correct this photographically would be to miss the point. The distortions, the tensions, the surfaces that seem to push against each other: these are not problems. They are the building itself.
So I let them enter the frame. I let the verticals converge where they converged. I let the curves do what curves do when you are close to them with a standard lens. Almost instinctively, I began to photograph the marks this architecture was leaving on me. The moment when matter ceases to be matter. A curve becoming tension. A wall becoming silence.
On The Hill is not architectural reportage. It does not represent the building. It represents the fragments, the corners, the surfaces that continue to exist somewhere, even after you have walked down the hill. These photographs, taken in August 2007 and left untouched for nearly twenty years, are the result of that encounter. No people, no establishing shots, no wide views of the context. Just matter, concrete, wood, light, faced one surface at a time. One edge at a time, one shadow at a time.
Perhaps the most honest thing one can do in front of a building that resists explanation is to let it resist.
The complete series “On The Hill” is available at meikr.eu.