![]() ![]() 5 Collins and others have identified some of the Perrets' sources. 4 Architectural historian Peter Collins has noted the influence on the Perrets of the nineteenth-century structural rationalist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whose principles, according to Collins, Notre-Dame du Raincy embodies, blending Beaux-Arts neoclassical language with Gothic structure. 3 Together the brothers quickly established a reputation for high-quality work in reinforced concrete. Auguste and Gustave, having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, oversaw design and construction, while Claude managed the finances. When their father died in 1905, Auguste Perret and his younger brothers Gustave and Claude took over the construction firm he had founded. Lost amid this dazzling interior, the chapel and window seem like afterthoughts. The slope guides the visitor toward the altar and choir, which sit on a raised platform stretched across the width of the church. Below this, the nave floor slopes away from the front door and, thus, away from the chapel of the dead and the stained glass window honoring wartime sacrifices. These reinforce the illusion that the ceiling is a light, billowing canopy perched atop the columns. Perforated blocks identical to those used on the façade are embedded into the apex of the central vault, forming geometric patterns of dark, recessed voids. The vault over that middle section runs the full length of the nave, while the vaults above the side aisles are slightly lower and turned perpendicular to the central vault. ![]() The central bay, located between the innermost rows of columns, is twice as wide as the flanking bays. In its delicacy and upward thrust, this structural system grants the nave a sense of amplitude and openness. The light accentuates the slenderness of the fluted, tapering concrete columns supporting the flattened concrete vaults. Fiery rays of light stream into the church, casting dappled spots of color throughout the interior. ![]() 2 Framed by delicate concrete mullions, the blocks produce a shimmering enclosure. For each, the artist Marguerite Huré arranged sunflower-yellow, blood-red, indigo, cyan, and emerald-green glass pieces into a miniature composition ringed by bright white dots. The majority of the building envelope, however, is made of perforated concrete blocks, with the perforations divided into simple shapes and filled with tinted glass. Denis's windows are positioned toward the top and center of each bay along the building's sides. Thus, the visitor moves into the tall, elongated, airy nave, finding it drenched in colored light pouring in through the lattice-like walls enveloping the space ( Figure 2). 1 These elements are located in marginal positions, tucked in corners around either side of the entrance, and neither calls attention to itself. The first is a chapel of the dead, the second a stained glass window-one of ten that painter Maurice Denis created for the church-representing soldiers headed toward the Battle of the Ourcq (1914). It is only after entering the building that the visitor finds two explicit references to the war. Although the tympanum's subject might seem a nod to the mourning of French war casualties, an observer not privy to the church's memorial function would likely miss the allusion. Above the central doors at the tower's base, a tympanum devised by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (a friend of Auguste Perret) displays an image typical of Christian iconography: women grieving the crucified Christ. Directly to the rear of the tower and aligned symmetrically with it stands a long, rectangular, 14-meter concrete nave with a slightly curved roof. A stepped 43-meter bell tower, composed of bundled concrete columns and concrete block infill, sits back from the street at the center of a narrow urban plot. Nothing on its exterior advertises its role as a war memorial ( Figure 1). Located in Le Raincy, a suburb northeast of Paris, the church was built in 1923 by the brothers Auguste and Gustave Perret (1874–19–1952, respectively). A modern visitor encountering the church of Notre-Dame du Raincy might not suspect that it constitutes a monument to World War I. ![]()
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