The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp was designed by Le Corbusier and is one of the 20th-century’s most important work of architecture. For years now, it has been a heavily frequented site of international cultural tourism. It was so frequented that the site needed urgent attention in order to restore the spirtual and religious dimension originally intended for Ronchamp by its architect. In a wider effort to improve the area, the Œuvre Notre Dame du Haut commissioned Renzo Piano Building Workshop to design a convent for the Poor Clare sisters, as well as a small new building to welcome visitors, the Porterie. Hugging the hill’s slope, the new buildings are protecteing architecture with a resolved interior featuring large picture windows that frame the woods and its light.

When Le Corbusier was restructuring at Ronchamp a small medieval Marian church - a place of popular worship destroyed by the bombs in 1944 - he often went up to the top of the Bourlémont hill “to gain familiarity with the ground and horizons.” The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1950-1955) was to be one of his most intense and unusual projects, a clear and strong work steeped in introspection and worship. It was the building’s sense of silence, combined with the ‘acoustics of the landscape’, which inspired the project for the new Poor Clare convent. Located on the slope of the hill at the edge of a wood, it cannot be seen from the Chapel with which, although physically apart, it has a close spiritual relationship. With this new convent, the site now has a permanent resident community, and this, together with the other improvements made to the welcome facilities and the landscape as a whole, has contributed to the restoration of the site.

The convent is a small building made of pale cement that compliments the red Bourlémont rock that surrounds it. It is composed of a series of living units for the nuns with a common area and offices, and a linear building of the same size housing guest quarters. A small separate oratory built into a hill not far away also blends in with its surroundings. The building’s flat roofs are planted and from there you can see slender strips of zinc window awnings.

The overall design is based on a repetitive pattern of the living units (2.70x2.70x 2.70m), modularity being a very rational principle for construction, but also because this minimalist approach fits in well with the principles of the discrete and active community spirit of the Poor Clares. All of the spaces are imbedded in the hillside and the south western facade of each unit has a small winter garden that looks out towards the acacia and chestnut woods. The repeated use of a single building material – bare pale cement – gives the project a unified visual impact while occasional fields of colour light up the interiors, accompanied by the presence of the wooden furniture, as well as the glass and the aluminium of the window frames. The sense of introspection and peace, together with the spatial quality of the rooms, are further enhanced by the immaterial presence of silence and light.