Bringing heaven down to earth: reading the plan of Ronchamp

Valery’s cry for clarity stiffens my resolve to write from the position of a working life in architectural practice. Sometimes we need to raise our heads above the heat of daily battle with budgets and restrictive regulations, to remind ourselves of what it was that made architecture such a compelling field of study in the first place. Personal experience of works of architecture persuades us that architectural design provides useful evidence of human intelligence. And there is a case to be made for connecting the widely accepted value of historic architecture to the less well-established position of contemporary architecture in the culture, to pay attention to what Robin Evans once called ‘the small poetic voice of modern architecture’.³