El altar y la puerta en la iglesia parroquial de Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert

Abstract

210

The current article studies the evolution of the design for the parish church at SaintPierre de Firminy-Vert (1960-1965) focusing on the relation established between the access to the nave and the position of the main altar. Towards the end of his career, Le Corbusier took Firminy-Vert as a true enhancement of the altar. It would not only mark a virtual plane separating two confronted areas, but it would communicate two spaces linked vertically. In a conceptual path linking the primitive temple from 1921, Le Tremblay church (1929) and the last project dating December 23, 1963, Le Corbusier would keep on adding complexity and significance to the aforementioned relationship. L’Art Sacré, La Maison-Dieu, and the Dominican priests became a new information source that the architect was able to assimilate due to his inborn spatial and evocative capacity. The careful attention poised on the origin and the true significance of the catholic cult elements allow him to discover in them a clear relationship with the most primitive and ancestral human rituals. In the first sketches, the architect had rejected the axis composed by door and altar in favor of an exacerbated prominence of the great pillar supporting the children’s choir. A pillar drawn as expressive materialization of the force tying us to the earth’s surface, gravity, finding its exterior repetition in the bell tower. An obsession the architect had dragged since his youth. In order to adapt to the changing religious situation unleashed by the inevitable II Vatican Council, the chancel acquires an organic complexity where every element will be set according to a scheme of forces finding their epicenter at the altar. This will recuperate the place and importance it deserves. The architecture, led by light and structure, portrays a series of mechanisms that emphasize and guarantee that reality. As usual in Le Corbusier’s synthesizing vision, the final project is transformed due to a number of stimuli, most of them belonging to the architect’s most intimate conceptual strata. This include vital experiences, failed projects, recurrent obsessions, fortuitous encounters, and design toing and froing, that will allow us to recognize the parish church in many other of his projects and vice versa. The end result, as we announced at the beginning of this article, the close cooperation between man and architecture to establish the communication between the earth and the sky, the high and low, the tangible and the intangible.