Boy, I am really falling behind in keeping this thing updated. This is partially due to being busy and partially due to the fact that the internet keeps going out in Lacoste. Either way, there’s finally a new update! Hooray!
This past weekend, I went to Lyon with the other students from Le Corbusier. Most of them are architects, but there are a few outcasts. Namely, me, Miles (Art History), Jamie (Historic Preservation), and Whitney (Metals and Jewelry). Architects or not, most of us are getting pretty tired of and disillusioned with Le Corbusier, but nevertheless, we were happy to take a weekend trip to Lyon.
We left at about 8:30 Friday morning and drove for 3 hours (plus an hour-long stop at a rest area for no apparent reason) to arrive at our first destination: La Tourette, a Dominican Monastery built by Le Corbusier, where we planned to spend our first night. We took 3 vans full of students, so not quite as sophisticated a journey as our charter bus to Barcelona, but I did get in the best van, driven by Professor Daves (not Dave) Rossell. He had me, Jamie, and Miles to ‘entertain’ him throughout the drive, along with 5 other equally insane students, but he was an amazingly good sport.
We were going to see another Le Corbusier site along the way to La Tourette, but it was an outdoor site and the weather was so bad, we ended up having to skip it. At this point it was freezing rain, FREEZING being the operative term. As a result, we were about 3 hours early when we arrived at La Tourette, but the Friar didn’t seem to mind and took us on a tour of the building. The outside of the building was…well…concrete. And concrete against a cold grey sky is just not that pretty or interesting to look at. The inside of the monastery, despite being terribly cold, was pretty interesting. It wasn’t until we got the tour, however, that we realized that the monastery is not currently being used because it is undergoing rennovations. So, we were going to spend the night in a building that not even the Dominican monks were living in because of the rennovations. Very interesting indeed. Anyway, we were shown the parts of the building that were not being rennovated. The dining room had quite an incredible installation art piece in it, with cups, plates, and silverware suspended from the ceiling to give them the appearance of floating in space. I’m not sure what the artist was trying to get across, but it was cool nonetheless. My favorite part of the monastery was the chapel, which is pretty hard to describe. It was a huge, eerily lit space with a large white stone altar. It included a crypt underneath, which could be seen from the seating area. If I had any modeling ability, I would DEFINITELY make a level for a game based on this chapel. Unfortunately none of these things photographed well, and as I said, I have trouble describing them, so I recommend researching La Tourette if you’re interested.
After the tour, which took quite awhile, the freezing rain had become heavy, wet snow which quickly coated the ground. We were given keys and shown to our cells, which were deliberately made to be as wide as a 6 ft. tall man with his arms completely extended horizontally and as tall as the same man with an arm completely extended vertically. This is Le Corbusier’s ‘Modular Man’ proportioning system and he uses it in most of his buildings. In other words everything is that size or multiples of that size. It’s actually not really his idea since it’s based of the Fibonacci Sequence, which has obviously been around a lot longer. But, anyway, we were given free time until dinner which consisted mostly of naps or reading in our cells, which were quite chilly. According to my alarm clock thermometer, mine was 59 degrees. Jamie’s was colder because her little radiator wasn’t working.
We had dinner with the monks and employees of the monastery down in their makeshift dining room, which was significantly warmer. Dinner consisted of a salad, a fish casserole, fruits, yogurt, cheese, and plenty of wine. It was actually pretty good, although I was so hungry at that point, anything would have seemed good. Miles, Jamie, and I sat with Melissa, Leigh, Isaac, and our visiting scholar, Norma Evanson. She is an expert on Le Corbusier and actually met him when he was working in India. I like her because she likes to talk about what an arrogant asshole he was. Most students either don’t like her or just don’t understand her though, because she’s 80 years old and very very very quiet. Even if you say hello to her, the odds of her responding are about 50/50. She’s shy and reserved and strange. However, she did come out of her shell at dinner and told us about working in the underwear department of a store when she was 15 and wondering how women ever got big enough to wear XXL panties, which ‘would have been baggy on a rhinocerous’.
After dinner, most people (myself included) cleaned up and went to bed. The next morning, we were thankfully not snowed in. The snow had turned back into rain. We had breakfast with the monks, which was just cereal, bread, and REAL ORANGE JUICE!!!!!!! Oh, how I’ve missed real orange juice. We visited the information desk/gift shop, and on the way back to the vans, Jamie slipped and fell in the mud, which sucked considering it just made her more miserable in the wet and cold.
We then drove to our next destination, the airport/train station outside of Lyon, which was very cool looking and built by some famous architect I’ve never heard of. As cool-looking as it was, I did not feel the need to spend an hour there. I just wanted to get to Lyon. Nevertheless, we ate our little bag lunches and somehow managed to kill an hour taking artistic looking pictures and browsing the airport newstands. I still haven’t gotten used to seeing skin magazines just hanging out next to Better Homes and Gardens.
After that excrutiating hour, we FINALLY drove into Lyon. And got lost. Well, Brett got lost. And refused to let Daves help him find the hotel. So another excrutiating hour(+?) was spent driving round and round Lyon. We got settled in our hotel rooms and were asked to wait another half an hour, then come down to the lobby and let Daves give us an orientation speech about Lyon and recommend sites to see. At this point, Miles and I were very frustrated because we were quickly losing time in our only day in Lyon proper, prompting Miles (who rarely curses) to say “Let’s get the fuck out of here” when the orientation finally ended.
The weather was STILL freezing rain, so it was pretty miserable outside. Nevertheless, we were determined to see some of Lyon’s sites. We started to make our way from the hotel to the Gallo-Roman ruins, and stopped along the way by two gothic cathedrals. One was closed, but we enjoyed the sculpture around the outside. The other was open, but it was pretty standard as far as Gothic cathedrals go…somehow, I’m getting used to them. We took quite a hike from the last cathedral up a hill to the Gallo-Roman ruins, which aren’t ruined at all. The two main features were theaters, which were both incredibly intact, even down to some mosaic work on the orchestra. There were some buildings behind the theaters, which we also explored. They just let you walk all over the theaters, into the buildings, on the walls, anywhere you want to go. In America, that stuff would be surrounded by armed guards and lasers. It was very cool.
From the ruins, we went to the basilica, which can be seen from just about anywhere in Lyon. It’s four massive towers make it look like an upsidedown elephant. So, remember how I said I was used to Gothic cathedrals? Nothing could have prepared me for this one. It was astonishing to the point that it just completely defies description. Everything was so ornate and beautiful and awe-inspiring…I particularly liked the stained glass, which was quite a bit more varied and unique than most of the other stained glass I’ve seen. We only got to spend a few minutes here, however, because the Saturday evening service was about to start. I can’t even imagine attending church service at a place like this, but apparently a lot of the Lyonnais people do.
After the basilica, we decided to take the metro back down toward the hotel. We wanted to go to the mall in Lyon, but first we wanted to warm up and dry off in the hotel. The metro was extremely nice and well-organized, and a day-pass for it was quite cheap. We got off the metro at Place Bellacour, the largest square in France, which features a very cool statue of Louis XIV, a ferris wheel, and is surrounded by high fashion shops. We walked a bit through the fashion district, which I enjoyed even though I probably couldn’t have even entered the stores the way I was dressed. We then grabbed a bit of street food to hold us over until dinner (we learned from Spain that we shouldn’t expect to eat until 8pm or so) and headed back to the metro and finally, the hotel.
At the hotel, we changed into PJs to let our clothes dry out and watched a French series called La Vie est a Nous, and we got pretty into it. After the show ended, we got dressed again and decided to return to Place Bellacour to one of the bouchons we saw nearby for dinner. By this point, it was snowing again, albeit lightly. A bouchon is a special type of restaurant in Lyon where you pay one lump sum for a three-course meal in the Lyonnais tradition. My dinner consisted of a Lyonnais salad (veal feet, beef muzzle, and lentils), hot sausage and potatoes, and dark chocolate mousse. It was all so good! They also brought us fried something (I think it was tripe) for free, but none of us cared much for it. After that filling dinner, we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and decided to head up to the mall, which was open until 11 pm. When we got there, however, we realized that although the mall itself was open, the stores were not. Either way, we got to see another cool part of town before finally heading back to the hotel. Once again back at the hotel, we changed out of our wet clothes and watched the Italian version of Dancing With the Stars, which was way more interesting than its American counterpart.
After a quick breakfast at the hotel Sunday morning, we loaded up the vans and headed for Firminy, our final Le Corbusier destination of the trip. Firminy-Vert is one of Le Corbusier’s only urban planning projects that was ever actually enacted. Firminy is a mining town that had a population explosion in the 19th century. By the 20th century, it was poverty stricken and suffering from horrible housing conditions. In the 50’s, Le Corbusier was asked to try to help remedy the situation. He did so by building a Unite d’Habitation, almost identical to the one from Marseille. He also designed a church, a stadium, and a cultural center. Unfortunately, the plan was largely unsuccessful…none of the buildings are used for their intended purposes except the Unite, which is filled to about half occupancy. Much like the monastery and the Unite in Marseille, the buildings were cold and leaky and in need of rennovation. I think this was probably what most surprised/disappointed me about Le Corbusier’s designs. They are all concrete and have such an image of stability and endurance, yet when you visit them, you find them in rather horrible condition. As we waited to leave Firminy, Miles and Stephen played soccer with some French tweens and got their butts beat. It was fun to see them interacting with the kids though…them trying to speak French and the French kids trying to speak English. It was definitely the most fun we had in Firminy.
We left Firminy and headed back to Lacoste, taking a rural road that led us through a place that I can only describe as Narnia. The ground was covered in snow and massive forests of pine trees lined the hills and mountains, their branches heavy with snow. We could see these forests and the Alps and the tiny towns and homes set into them all covered in snow like something out of a children’s book. It was so beautiful, and I’m really glad we went that way in spite of the winding roads. The last 45 minutes of the drive were spent singing various songs that all or most people in the car could remember the words to. It started out with just 90’s pop/rock, but we ended up adding in some Queen, Van Morrison, and a showtune or two. Daves seemed to genuinely enjoy it and he kept bringing it up to me later in the week, which I thought was both hillarious and awesome. As we drove back into the Luberon, the weather finally cleared up, and the next morning we woke up to the first blue sky we’d seen in weeks.
I have a lot more to update about, including 2 field trips during the week, a trip to Avignon, and a trip I’m taking tomorrow to Saint-Remy-en-Provence and Glanum. So keep an eye out for two more entries before Wednesday, when I leave for Paris.
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