A
short stay last month at Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles
radically changed my view of
apartment living. Designed and built by Le Corbusier with painter/architect
Nadir Afonso, its ‘brutalist’ architecture is both extraordinarily sculptural
but also communal and intimate. This is one huge building, dwarfing anything
I’d ever been in - 337 apartments over twelve stories suspended on 15
sculptural piloti that lift it up above the landscape like a ship floating in
space.
Remarkable
for its time as a modular design – Le Corbusier saw it as being like a bottle
rack into which complete apartments could be plugged - each apartment lies on two
levels, and stretches from one side of the building to the other with balconies
and light from both east and west. But what’s most subversive is the way he
designed it for social living. He called its corridors ‘streets’ and they run
through the centre of the long axis of every third floor of the building, lined
with shops from architecture bookshop to bakery and businesses from
architecture practice to massage therapist and medical centre. In Corbusier's vision, the building's 1,600 residents
would shop, eat and learn together – while up on the roof they would exercise
as one in a purpose-built gym, paid for by the residents' association.
What’s still there 60 years later are school, library, cinema, bookshop, bakery, and even
a hotel with a gastronomic restaurant, Le Ventre de l'Architecte ("The
Architect's Belly"). The little-used gymnasium had just been turned into a
contemporary art gallery, MAMO, by French
designer Ora-Ito who said when it came up
for sale that he bought it ‘Like you would a piece of art, but architecture. As soon as I heard it was on the market, I jumped on a
train.’ Morabito, who was born in Marseille but now runs his studio from Paris,
says he ‘grew up knowing this building, so I couldn't resist that chance to own
such an important piece of it.’
Le Corbusier’s ideas on mass housing and cities were
revolutionary, and Unite
d'Habitation or Cité Radieuse (Radiant City) as he
called it was his first opportunity to put them into practice. By then he’d
been looking far and wide for partners - from fascist Italy and Vichy France to
post-World War Two Marseilles, whose communist Mayor got behind him, ignoring
city planning regulations so it could go ahead. When it was finished in 1954
much of Marseilles still didn't have electricity or running water after the
war’s bombing and destruction, so Cité Radieuse’s spacious 100 to 200 sq m
apartments, modern bathrooms and kitchens was considered very comfortable - and
the state made them available to anyone who had lost their home in Marseilles,
and later anywhere in France - very cheap.
And
yes, it’s a very social place with enough going on that you could live here
very happily without having to step outside the building. We did, step outside
that is, but mornings had a leisurely start. We’d wander down one floor to the
bakery for fresh croissants and baguette, take the lift to the rooftop terrace
to enjoy coffees or visit MAMO’s opening exhibition with its very cool
giant-size sculpture of ‘Corb’ flanked by sculptural ventilation stacks, a
running track, a shallow paddling pool for children and alcoves for residents
to gather in privacy. Each night we were there friends hung out over wine and
cigarettes, children climbed and swung from the atelier housing their art
school, and on Bastille Day people wandered about in the smoky half-light
enjoying Marseille’s magnificent firework display.
Today the building has National Heritage status with its
apartments sought after, and remains an
enduring example of successful mass housing, of which there are still too few in
the world. A project of vertical villages floating off the ground with private
and communal spaces that truly demonstrate Corbusier’s view that: ‘The basic materials of city planning are sun, sky,
trees, steel and cement, in that strict order of importance.’
And it changed my
view of how I’d like to live because this, to me, is as interesting as it gets
in the city.
