Nestled in woodlands near Lyon, Le Corbusier’s Couvent de La Tourette – his final French work – sits like a Brutalist monolith frozen mid-sermon. To bypass the strict 90-minute visitor limit, I booked one of its monastic cells: nine square metres of raw concrete, shared bathrooms, zero frills. Austerity, it transpires, is the entry fee for communion with genius.

Wandering the labyrinthine corridors at dusk, the architect’s late-career spiritual awakening reveals itself. Cloisters cast Bach-like light patterns through rhythmic grilles; warped drainage spouts erupt as sculptural fugues. The same man who declared houses “machines for living” here embraced imperfection – pockmarked concrete surfaces honouring medieval masonry’s honest decay.

In my cell, radiator pipes hummed a warm counterpoint to the howling storm outside. I thought of Corbusier’s own retreat to a similarly spartan cabin, seeking cosmic order in minimalism. The monastery’s dialectic – cramped cells versus soaring chapels – mirrors his own evolution: the rigid modernist who, through raw materiality and sacred geometries, found transcendence.

As dawn lit the honeycombed concrete, those infamous pores became chiaroscuro constellations. A truth emerged: this isn’t architecture as dogma, but as pilgrimage. Every fissure whispers Corbusier’s hard-won creed – that modernity’s soul lies not in clinical precision, but in the alchemy of light, shadow and human frailty.