John Berger Four Horizons Book Launch

About this event

Join artist and filmmaker John Christie in conversation with writer Ken Worpole for the launch of John Berger's Four Horizons. As part of the programmes of events to accompany the exhibition Visionary Landscapes and the John Berger Centenary , and in collaboration with Objectif Press, Swedenborg House is pleased to announce an evening of conversation with John Christie and Ken Worpole to mark the publication of John Berger’s Four Horizons (Objectif Press, 2026). The writer John Berger was born 100 years ago this year. The author of more than forty books, a Booker Prize-winner, filmmaker and artist, he went on to become one of Europe’s most formidable post-war intellectuals. Objectif Press, in collaboration with Swedenborg House, is delighted to announce an evening devoted to a ‘late masterwork’ of Berger, Four Horizons , edited and published for the first time by Berger’s long-standing friend and collaborator, artist and filmmaker, John Christie. Four Horizons documents in words, photographs, drawings and essays, a journey that Berger, Christie and two Benedictine nuns from Connecticut, Sister Lucia Kuppens and Sister Telchilde Hinckley, made in 2009 to Le Corbusier’s pilgrimage Chapel, Notre-Dame du Haut, at Ronchamp in Eastern France. Here two avowed religious sceptics engage with ideas of spirituality–in both architecture and faith–with two confirmed believers, reflecting on the many human meanings evinced by one of the most extraordinary buildings of the twentieth century. This life-affirming book is a late and unexpected gift to the world, raising questions ‘never intended to be answered’, as architect Paul Clarke notes in his specially commissioned Afterword. On this very special evening, John Christie will recall the visit the four travellers made to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp through photographs, drawings and audio recordings. This will be followed by a conversation with writer and social historian Ken Worpole, in which both reflect on Berger’s life and work which, rather than lose urgency over time, now seem more radical than ever. ‘ Do you know the Corbusier chapel at Ronchamp? It’s an antidote. A place full of something sacred where punishment has no place. ’ — John Berger, from a letter to his friend Iona Heath ‘ In June 1950, on the hill, I spent hours getting to know the ground and the four horizons. Steeping myself in them. ’ — Le Corbusier, from his 1965 book Texts and Sketches for Ronchamp about the speakers JOHN CHRISTIE is a noted filmmaker, visual artist and maker of artists’ books, whose works are keenly aware of the interplay between geometry, colour and space. He co-authored the title I Send You This Cadmium Red —a collection of correspondence considering colour—with John Berger and co-founded the publisher Full Circle Editions. His artwork is represented within the collections of institutions such as the Tate Gallery and V&A. KEN WORPOLE is a writer and social historian, whose work includes many books on architecture, landscape and public policy. He is married to photographer Larraine Worpole with whom he has collaborated on book projects internationally, as well as in Hackney, London, where they have lived and worked since 1969. His principal interests concern the planning and design of new settlements, landscapes and public institutions–streets, parks, playgrounds, libraries, informal education–based on the pioneering achievements of twentieth-century social democracy and the environmental movement. In recent years he has focused on recovering the social history of communitarian experiments in both town and country, drawing lessons for the creation of new residential and environmentally sustainable forms of settlement for an ageing population. In the New Statesman , editor Jason Cowley recently wrote that, ‘Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with an understated erudition’.