Unité d’Habitation is the modernist housing design concept developed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with painter-architect Nadir Afonso. It formed the basis of several housing developments with this name that Le Corbusier designed throughout Europe. The first and most famous of these, a building also known as La Cité Radieuse (Radiant City) or, informally, as La Maison du Fada (Provencal French for ‘the house of madness’) is located in Marseille and was built between 1947 and 1952. It is one of Le Corbusier’s most famous works and arguably the most influential Brutalist building of all time. Rather than employing the smooth white surfaces that typified many of his buildings, Le Corbusier chose to create this building in béton brut concrete, which takes on the texture of the wooden planks that formed its shuttering. “Made for men, it is made to the human scale,” he said. “It has also the robustness which is inherent in modern technique, and it shows the new splendour of bare concrete”. With its human proportions, chunky legs and interior ‘streets’, it redefined high-density housing by re-imagining a city inside an 18-storey block. La Cité Radieuse has successfully accommodated a mix of uses ever since it was completed. Its 337 apartments are home to up to 1,600 residents, but it also boasts two shopping streets, a hotel and a rooftop terrace.

Le Corbusier believed the tower block was the solution for rehousing the masses who had been displaced during the Second World War and that high- rise building could be used to create spacious urban homes with the same amenities as a typical street. With Unité, his aim was twofold: to “provide with silence and solitude before the sun, space and greenery, a dwelling which will be the perfect receptacle for the family”, and to “set up, in God’s good nature, under the sky and in the sun, a magisterial work of architecture, the product of rigour, grandeur, nobility, happiness and elegance.”

La Cité Radieuse is located at the heart of a large park. 165 metres long and 56 metres high, it soars above the surrounding treetops—its base raised on sculptured legs and its two main elevations facing east and west. These elevations comprise a series of balconies and deep-set windows that reveal the spacing of the internal floor plates. Le Corbusier developed this grid using a proportional measurement system based on his ‘Modular Man’; a concept that combines the proportions of a six-foot tall human figure with the mathematics of the golden section. Inside, most of the narrow flats are arranged as two- storey duplexes with a double-height living room at one end. One level of each apartment stretches the full 21-metre depth of the block, creating a layout where pairs of homes interlock around a central access corridor. Unlike in a typical apartment block, this arrangement meant that these corridors—the ‘streets’—only needed be accommodated on every third floor and so there are just five in total.

When the building first opened, the seventh and eighth floors were home to an assortment of shops, eateries, galleries and a hostel where residents’ guests could stay. Sixty years on, they are much the same, although the hostel has become a hotel and many shops have been taken over by more specialist businesses, from medical practitioners to architects. The roof offered even more amenities, including a nursery, running track and pools for paddling and swimming. These days, this space hosts an arts programme masterminded by French designer Ora Ito, who had the foresight to purchase the building’s rooftop, gym and solarium when they went up for sale in 2010 (he sold his Parisian townhouse and entire art collection to do so). He created MaMo (Marseille Modulor), an exceptional new arts centre and has since used the site for large-scale art installations exhibiting the works of Daniel Buren, Jean-Francois Fourtou and Xavier Veilhan to name just a few.

Today, La Cité Radieuse is still home to many of its original occupants. It is recognized as a world heritage site by UNESCO and has remained a favourite with architects: even before it was completed, the late Italian architect Gio Ponti branded it “a true monument in the history of French construction”.

—Copyright 2015 Mart Engelen