Peille - Chapelle Saint-Martin
- department: Alpes-Maritimes
- commune: Peille
- naming: Chapelle Saint-Martin
- author : Georges BUZZI (architect)
- date: 1950-1952
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) du 15 March 2007
In 1950, Georges Buzzi was contacted by an artisan mason sent by Canon Fabron, parish priest of Peille, to design and build a chapel. Established plans are accepted with no changes. The concrete calculations are drawn up by the engineer from Nice, Laborde, and the work carried out by the reinforced concrete company Calori in Monaco.
The architect directed the work from 1951 to 1952.
In 1956 Father Jacques Riousse moved to the chapel of Saint-Martin where he remained until 2004. He puts into practice on a daily basis the courses he followed in his youth at the Fine Arts of the city of Amiens. His interventions on the chapel are numerous: addition of stained glass windows in the bell tower, numerous sculptures and paintings (to quickly say the spirit of these works is close to the art Brut), partition in the mezzanine part, construction of an artist’s workshop below the chapel to the south, etc... His interventions will bring him some difficulties with his hierarchy, but his work, of real interest, seems to us to be one with the history of this building.
Located in a hamlet away from the village of Peille the chapel is visible from the mountain road as a strong signal in the landscape. It opens on each side of the altar by two large bays on this typical landscape of Provence punctuated with olive trees.
The overall volume is the combination of two dynamic forms (the influence of the second Italian Futurism could be evoked here) : on the one hand the nave topped by a large sloping roof terrace which on the side of the entrance forms a very large false door canopy of semi-circular shape in raw concrete of removal; on the other hand in the axis of the volume and at the place of the choir a bell tower in stone of the country, dominated by a hollow concrete spire, each side of which is in the shape of a cross. The architect explains his work by saying that the architectural party wanted to "materialize an impulse, a benevolent welcome, an invitation to meditation,... by focusing all the lines of the building towards the altar and the cross". The latter is made of flat iron, embedded in the raw concrete.
The furniture and decorative program were designed specifically for the chapel.
Decorator P.J. Thebault designed the wooden furniture, in the spirit of the purist furniture of the 1950s. The altar was designed by the architect himself from a huge stump of floating wood tree recovered on the beach of Nice.
Two beautiful stained glass windows adorn the side walls: to the north it is bright and contrasting colors, to the south in more neutral shades of grey. Maurice Chausse, a teacher at the Don Bosco school in Nice, made these stained glass windows with an interesting translucent plastic material (TOLPLEX).
- Editor: Jean-Lucien Bonillo - Laboratoire INAMA/ ENSA Marseille, 2005-2008
Read also in Heritage of the 20th century, the study The Glorious Thirty in the Alpes-Maritimes