Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, that concrete sphinx perched on a Burgundian hill for seven decades, remains architecture’s most beguiling paradox. Hailed as modernism’s spiritual awakening yet damned as functionalist heresy, it defies easy reverence.

Commissioned by reformist clerics to replace a war-torn 19th-century church, its choice of architect raised eyebrows: a self-professed atheist who’d championed houses as “machines for living”. What emerged was no machine, but a sculptural oddity – all undulating walls and a roof resembling a stranded crustacean. The theatricality came at cost: hidden steel props masquerading as load-bearing walls, icy interiors in winter (as I can attest), and sloped floors now criticised as accessibility failures.

Yet its genius lies precisely in this rebellion. By embedding rubble from the old church into new concrete, Corbusier made history literal. The roof’s crude béton brut texture birthed Brutalism’s aesthetic, while its structural gymnastics inspired shell concrete pioneers. Here, architecture shed its rationalist straitjacket to embrace raw emotion – a legacy overshadowing its flaws.

Recent additions fuel debate. Renzo Piano’s discreet visitor centre, though deferential, is accused of disrupting Corbusier’s “pilgrimage path”. A fitting coda: when buildings become secular icons, even their context fossilises.

Ronchamp endures not as answer, but provocation. In its concrete curves, one traces modernism’s struggle to reconcile utility with transcendence – and wonders whether today’s starchitects heed its cautionary tale.