Every visit to the La Tourette Monastery is a most intense experience, difficult to explain rationally. In these surroundings, one gets the impression of total transcendence to another world. Only Le Corbusier’s architecture has this inconceivable ability to unite the real and imaginary, the unconscious and conscious, the ephemeral and eternal.

Most architects who go to La Tourette also visit the nearby town of Firminy, once a small mining settlement, not far from Lyon, which today boasts of being the town with the largest number of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Europe. The Church of Saint-Pierre was solemnly opened last year, and it is supposedly also Le Corbusier’s work, although the architect died in 1965 – a good forty years ago.