Is architecture merely a collection of walls, roofs, and structures? What if its essence lay in every moment it is inhabited? Can we imagine another way of understanding architecture? By looking at the Sainte-Marie de La Tourette monastery through Le Corbusier’s eyes at the time of its design, we discover that his true focus was neither concrete, nor proportions, nor structure, but rather the way a community of monks would live their daily lives. He had to imagine how each person would wake up, leave their cell, walk through the corridors, join in prayer, share meals, read in silence, and then return to their room at the end of the day. The architectural form gradually emerges from these rhythms of life; the spatial order is constructed from the relationships that develop between everyday actions. At La Tourette, architecture does not appear as a self-contained object, but as the organization of communal life. Every day, the residents move between the cells, the corridors, the church, the refectory, and the courtyards. Between solitude and encounter, silence and conversation, daily life and ritual, they gradually build a collective rhythm.

This experience of perceived and lived space was offered over four days in July 2026 to some 20 students from the Department of Architecture at Shih-Chien University and Taipei University of Technology, under the guidance of arc en rêve. For their first trip to Europe, and their first encounter with Le Corbusier’s work, they had the opportunity to stay at La Tourette, where they followed the monks’ daily rhythm —Lauds, Mass, and Vespers—listened to the sounds of the monastery and observed its silences, and experienced the buildings on a human scale. In parallel, two presentations took place: one led by Greek architect and researcher Giorgos Thalassinos on the relationship between the individual and the community, and the other by Wang Pin-Ho —a master’s student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago— on how spatial experiences can be made visible in art. The students drew, photographed, took measurements, and created sensory maps to document their sensations and perceptions. And to better convey their presence in these spaces, they staged scenes that blend the body with the built environment, adapting their postures to architectural elements in an intimate relationship between architecture and lived experience which la revue invites you to discover in the images that follow.