«It was the Dominican priest Père Couturier, we are told, who was behind the building of the monastery. Himself a painter and a friend of Matisse, Braque and other artists, he had long felt that there was too wide a gap between the living church and the creative architect. So it was that he persuaded the Dominican Fathers of Lyons to ask Le Corbusier for designs. That this was a right choice there can now be little doubt. For Corbusier – strange though it may sometimes seem – is firstly an architect concerned with human values, and the problems of designing La Tourette were essentially human problems. Père Couturier explained to him the daily life of the monks – the processions in two rows, the chanting of office in two rows, the custom of prostrating themselves full length on the ground. All these were to be factors in the conception of the monastery. “You see”, he concluded, “it’s simply an exercise in human scale”.»

George Perkin, “Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette – a simple, austere, and powerful building with subtly calculated crudities” in Concrete Quarterly, 53 (Summer, 1962)

Convent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette,
Éveux, Rhône-Alpes, France, 1953

Le Corbusier