The Eternal Building Site of Louis le Roy

MILDAM - For more than twenty years already Louis le Roy has been working at his eco-cathedral. All alone, he piles waste materials of regional building contractors into a temple-like complex, by hand. Recent publications and the winning of a prestigious prize show that he’s long grown out of being the village idiot.

Le Roy, a trained artist, doesn’t want to build a sky scraper. He hates many modern buildings and their soulless prophets, the architects. And he knows what he’s talking about, since he collaborated intensively with architects on numerous projects of landscape architecture in various European cities. But he never managed to realise his ideas completely. After some time the local authorities got fed up with the indescribable structures of the Dutch stone-stacker and demolished them. On his own plot in Mildam, bought cheaply years ago, there are no such worries: he’s free to stack about. And his inseparable ally is Time. The eco-cathedral will not be finished before the year 3000. Le Roy, who was born in 1924, will of course not live to see it, but Stichting Tijd (Time Foundation), established in 2002, will make sure that his work is continued, at least a few years after his death. And Le Roy is training two volunteers in the technique of piling stones.

He knows how to build, this le Roy. In the course of time he stripped and rebuilt his own house, a few kilometres from the experimental building site in Mildam, completely. He also built a house on the site of the eco-cathedral. It’s a traditional building of bricks, cement, wooden window frames and ceramic tiles on the roof. All in the approved manner, no building contractor could say anything against that. And without the help of rope or spirit level. Simply because he does not need them he says. Le Roy builds a 300-feet wall dead straight without the help of any measurement instruments at all.

But that is not the issue in his magnum opus, the eco-cathedral. In nature there are no straight lines either. And nature is an important player in this building. That’s why le Roy does not use cement but just dry materials: it encourages plants to grow in the joints. And plants attract animals, which are also more than welcome.

Principles

2500 ten-ton lorries with building materials have over the last twenty years been emptied on the Mildam site. And le Roy has forced the material into the right place, with his own bare hands. ‘Right’ as far as he did have a plan. Often he let himself be inspired by the place, the materials on offer and natures reaction to his interventions. Even in a two-hour interview le Roy does not really manage to explain the principles on which his work is based. Yet, it is not all accidental. There are walls that have been waiting years to be completed. ‘I’m just waiting for that one concrete left over barrier similar to the ones I’ve already used for the wall. I’m not actively looking for it, I just wait till such a barrier happens to arrive. I have time.’

In other cases he’s not been so patient. The curb stones that mark three corners of a tower are on the fourth corner replaced by a pile of paving stones. This does, however, not disturb the overall view. The inventive joints le Roy has thought out to stack his barriers, curb stones, paving stones, clinkers and other materials offer a calm view in which variations are not disturbing. The building breathes a pleasing quiet. Some of le Roys fans compare it to the quiet found in great monuments, that do not have to prove their right to exist with all sorts of loud interventions.

But already he is inspiring people, according to some of the lyrical paragraphs in the NAi-publication. ‘Even building contractors are often looking at me longingly,’ assures le Roy during the interview. ‘This is real building, many of them say. And then they climb into their truck to drive to the soulless building they are working at and which makes great demands on natural resources also. A disastrous enterprise,’ the master concludes disapprovingly.