Unité d'habitation
A housing block for 1,600 people, built as a vertical city with shops halfway up and a school and playground on the roof. The two-storey flats interlock around internal streets. The raw concrete on massive pilotis made the building the model for Brutalism.
After the Second World War France was short of hundreds of thousands of homes, and the French state commissioned Le Corbusier to build a large apartment block in Marseille. He was given a free hand to test his ideas about how people should live in a modern city. Construction began in 1947 and the building was inaugurated in 1952. The post-war shortage of steel meant that it was built almost entirely of reinforced concrete, and Le Corbusier left the imprint of the formwork boards visible on the surface. He called the raw concrete béton brut, and it became an aesthetic in its own right. All the dimensions in the building were determined using the Modulor, a system of proportion that Le Corbusier had developed from the measurements of the human body and the golden section.
The building rests on massive, sculptural pilotis, leaving the ground beneath it free. The flats are on two levels and interlock like pieces of a puzzle, so that each flat has windows facing two ways and a double-height living room. They are reached from internal corridors, which Le Corbusier called streets, and only one such street is needed for every third floor. Halfway up is a floor with shops, a hotel and a restaurant. On the roof there is a nursery school, a running track, a gym and a shallow pool, and the ventilation stack has been shaped into a sculpture. The façades are covered with loggias with sunshades, and the side walls of the loggias are painted in strong primary colours.
The Unité d'habitation had successors: Le Corbusier built similar blocks in Nantes-Rezé, Berlin, Briey and Firminy. The Marseille building aroused both admiration and criticism, and many felt it was too large and too different. Today it is a sought-after place to live, and the hotel and restaurant attract architecture enthusiasts. A fire in 2012 damaged part of the building, which was then restored. Since 2016 it has been part of the World Heritage listing of Le Corbusier’s works. The raw concrete gave its name to Brutalism, and the idea of a large building as a vertical city with its own services spread around the world. In Sweden, too, large concrete apartment blocks were built in the 1960s and 1970s that in various ways bore traces of the Unité, although they seldom had its communal facilities.