The convent of La Tourette between communitarian utopia and religion, in GAMBARDELLA

The paper will be focused on one of Le Corbusier’s masterpiece: the convent of La Tourette (1952-1960). The convent is an emblematic synthesis of many Le Corbusier’s theories about dwellings and common spaces so that through this work he gave tangible form to his urban imagination. Objective of the essay is to demonstrate how the convent is an exemplary case of realized utopia, with all the contradictions inherent in it: La Tourette remains, indeed, a beneficiary of his ill-fated urban dreaming. Le Corbusier, after years of experimentation and arrived to the to maturity, was able to apply here all his theory. He accepted the religious commission in order to realize his experimentation on housing and on building a community, rather than simply encasing an act of cult. The analogy with the Charterhouse of Ema was fundamental for being the complex similar to a workers settlement, rather that a religious refugee. In La Tourette, the religiosity had to do with the pureness of the shapes and of the volumes, the roughness of the concrete and the minimum sizes of its cells. This approach derives directly from his Calvinist education, which informed his whole weltanschauung. As a fulfilled utopia, La Tourette is an open architecture, able to transform itself over time, according to the needs of its users. Today it is a centre of study on spirituality but also on philosophy, art and architecture and its spaces have been changing, representing the community occupying it.