In Provence last month attending a friend’s wedding, I took the chance to do a bit of architectural tourism. The night before the wedding we stayed in Marseille, so there was an opportunity to look around Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. The first of his “Unité d'Habitation” buildings, it is a Unesco World Heritage site since 2016 and was a major influence on 20th century residential architecture.
It is built from raw concrete (“ béton brut ”), due to the prohibitive cost in post-war France of building a steel frame, as originally intended. However, this allowed the architect to build something quite playfully sculptural, and this, I felt, was one of the main benefits of seeing the building at first hand.
The intermittent rain and the time constraints imposed by our 8 month old son limited me to a few quick shots, and in fact I missed getting to see the east side of the building altogether.
Inspired by ocean liners, the building sits on top of concrete pilotis. It’s interesting to note how the shape of these was altered in the later iterations of the design, losing much of their sculptural quality. More on that later.
As well as apartments, the building housed two streets of shops, a restaurant, a hostel for residents’ visitors (now a hotel) and on the roof, a running track, swimming pool, children’s art school and a nursery. This was the “vertical garden city” of Le Corbusier’s imagination, and it’s worth noting that some of the apartments are still occupied by their original residents.
There are various sizes of apartment, but most are duplexes that interlock around the access corridors, which thus only occur every third story. Each duplex therefore has a balcony at either end, one of which is double height.
I found this building more beautiful than I had anticipated. One quote I found from a resident said he felt as though he lived inside a work of art.
Still on the trail of Le Corbusier, I also had the chance to spend a few hours in “Firminy Vert”, a suburb of St. Etienne that was masterplanned by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. The name is a clear statement of intent about the town’s future, distinct from the “Firminy Noir” of its mining past. This future was the vision of Eugene Claudius-Petit, who took over as mayor in 1953, having previously met Le Corbusier in the US.
The masterplan included a stadium, cultural centre and a parish church, laid out around a disused quarry, as well as three Unité d’Habitation blocks. In the end only one of these blocks was built, and the church lay unfinished from 1978 until 2006, when it was finally completed under the supervision of erstwhile Le Corbusier apprentice José Oubrerie.
The church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy has been descibed as a truncated cone, or an upturned bucket, but once inside, you realise it makes more sense to see it as a giant bell. The acoustics inside are staggering, particularly whenever a fellow-visitor closes the heavy door behind them. Sadly it’s beyond the abilities of a photographer to capture this, but I hope my pictures give some of the atmosphere and scale of the place.
Even more than Cité Radieuse, this building exists between architecture and sculpture. From the way light enters the structure to the way rainwater is taken off it, everything functional becomes a sculptural element. Three apertures, two in the roof and one in the western wall, project light into the space while forming blocky features on the exterior. A system of concrete gutters for rainwater recovery shelters primary-coloured slots that let light in at head-height, and the eastern wall is drilled through with holes, plugged with glass prisms representing the Orion constellation.
The space below the church, originally intended for parish activities, now houses the “interpretation centre”. Getting all the shots I wanted of the church left me no time for a proper look around an exhibition on the work of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand.
A short drive from the complex is Firminy’s own Unité d’Habitation, the last of the five to be completed, in 1965. By comparison with the Marseille example, which you sense is a pretty desirable address these days, this one feels more working class and, perhaps not coincidentally, a little more neglected.
The rounded, board-marked concrete pilotis of Marseille are not reproduced in any of the other examples, and this seems to typify a more functional, less playful feel to this incarnation of a, by now, well-established model.
