Monastic paradigms in modernism: Le Thoronet and the romantic legacy: Fid-Bau Portal

Monastic paradigms in modernism: Le Thoronet and the romantic legacy

Sternberg, Maximilian

This essay explores the role of monasticism as a paradigm in post-war French modernism. It focuses on the interest that architects, most importantly Le Corbusier, took in Cistercian architecture generally, and in Le Thoronet Abbey in Provence in particular. The role of the image of Cistercian architecture in modernism has hitherto received only cursory treatment by scholars. My focus is not so much on historicist stylistic revivals, or the question of an ‘accurate’ historical understanding of the past in modernism, but rather on the spiritual appropriations of architectural motifs by scholars and intellectuals and how this exercised an influence on leading architects. This particular episode of modernist mediaevalism is situated within a broader tradition of the modern reception of the Middle Ages. This essay shows that the Romantic legacy, and the rival national claims to the past it encompassed, have played a significant role in modernist historic consciousness. A contextual interpretation of the limited, though evocative, body of sources testifying to the modernists' elective affinity with Cistercian architecture in the post-war period shows how mediaeval monasticism would surface as a profound motif on the margins of the late-modernist imaginary.