Day 16 Part 1: Modernist architecture in Le Havre

I woke for my last day in France having slept for twelve hours. The last three days had taken me over fifty miles and I was pleased that my body has held up to the strain. In fact, the injury to my leg which has given me a bit of anxiety over the last ten days is looking a lot better.

The eighth of July is a national holiday in France, commemorating the victory of the second world war in Europe. So it was a very quiet Le Havre, cold and drizzly, that I toured on foot. Le Havre was very badly bombed in September 1944 and almost every building in the centre and at the docks was built in the 1950s. Auguste Perret, the architect who designed the church of St Joan that I visited in Rouen, was given free rein to create a new Le Havre. Some of the new structures, like the 'Volcan' entertainment centre (pictured) just don't work for me. It looks as though a couple of power station cooling towers have been dropped lop-sided into the city centre.

I headed for the tower of St Joseph's Church and was pleased to find it open for visitors. The interior is completely bare concrete, with no pictures or statues, save for one madonna and child. The altar sits centrally, beneath a canopy, under the hollow tower.

Thousands of square and diamond-shaped coloured glass panes allow in just a little light, so the dark grey space has a cavernous feeling. There's just a hint of natural daylight coming in from clear windows at the very top of the tower.

After a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness. I noticed that the multi-coloured glass in front of me, the east side, was mainly yellow and white, to the sides and behind there were darker hues of green and red.

For quite a while i was the only person in the building. I heard some faint musical sounds, which I thought at first must be being played in another room. They weren't quite melodious; I wondered if musicians were tuning their instruments in a rehearsal room somewhere. Then I realised the notes were descending softly from the heights of the hollow tower above me. Barely audible, sustained high string sounds were accompanied by occasional, slightly louder bass chords.

It certainly sounded ethereal, as if the strains of heaven were being beamed down. Gradually I realised that the wind itself was reverberating the structure of the tower and that what I was hearing were the natural resonances of the building.

The two-tone horn of a passing ambulance filled the church with sound, which was then spun upwards into the tower. The notes fused and then fell again in a single lingering diminuendo.

I wondered what characteristics of God were emphasised by this remarkable architecture. To me it suggested permanence and immutability - a natural response perhaps to the calamity of war and the devastation all around. But the height and brutal bare concrete also implied strength, praiseworthiness, and a masculine kind of lordship. I thought it would be hard for a community to laugh or love in this space.

As I looked around at the empty chairs, i wondered if any of today's congregation remembered the opening of the new church in the late 1950s. I suspected that today's worshippers were few in number
(there was little evidence for community life on the notice boards, which only displayed the history of the building and publicity encouraging vocations to the priesthood).

Perret's vision can't be dismissed out of hand. It feels brave, optimistic and powerful. But perhaps its modernism hoped too much for human achievement and was too reliant on industry and manufacture. It leaves no room for grace, for playfulness or the peculiar movements of God who comes among us in person.

(Continues in Part Two)