![]() Another characteristic of the building is its orientation towards one- and two-person households. A shop was added for the residents’ daily shopping needs, and there was a laundry room on the 17 th floor. In the mostly glass entrance hall there were public telephone boxes and a post office. ![]() There were also shared facilities in the building. For ease of orientation, the apartments were given ‘house numbers’ and front doors of different colours. Just like streets in a city quarter, there are ten “streets” inside ( rues interieures), each about 3 metres wide and 140 metres long, providing access to the individual apartments. The concept of a self-contained city is also apparent inside the Unité. Le Corbusier also used the loggias as a striking way to structure the façade horizontally, the elevator tower being the only vertical interruption. As the structure was elevated, the open space could even pass under the building, and each apartment had at least one loggia on the front, allowing a connection to the surrounding green space. As a “vertical city”, the Unité reaches upwards, thereby taking up a relatively small ground area and allowing the surroundings to be shaped into a spacious parkland, offering sun, space and green. The site for the Unité was chosen by Le Corbusier himself because of the area’s size and the good transport connections. A contribution to the international architectural exhibition Interbau, the 17-storey building with its 530 apartments couldn’t be constructed in the Hansaviertel due to the building’s size and the plan for it to be set in a large green area. I am optimistic that I might be able to shine a positive light on the often-negative association’s people bring to social housing celebrate the diversity within, or perhaps reveal that sadly the intentions of its creators are all but lost.A vertical garden city – The Unité d’habitation, ‘Berlin Type’īetween Heerstraße and the Olympic Stadium, on Heilsberger Dreieck, Le Corbusier’s massive high-rise slab apartment block Unité d’habitation ‘Berlin Type’ rises up, visible from afar. Maybe in the aftermath of lockdown, I can get a proper look at what is left of the original concept after seventy years. Shining a positive lightĪs the situation evolves it may be that I’ll be here in France for the whole of the summer and that will present an opportunity to immerse myself in La Maison Radieuse’s communal life. Still, I wish I could talk more from an insider’s perspective and not have to experience it like a visitor buying a ticket to visit a museum. Was its conception something of a hangover from the Second World War?Īs a lover of Brutalist and Modernist architecture, I am lucky to have grown up close to one of his unité d’habitation in Rezé. A space providing essential things only: food and education, is incredibly apt for our times regardless that the project was conceived more than half a century ago. People contained in small familial units within a bigger unit. Being geographically close, confined in my parents’ home, I realised how Le Corbusier’s thinking – answering the need to be self-sufficient and together at the same time works just as effectively today. I thought a lot about this structure when we went into lockdown. There was the issue of critical mass to allow the indispensable shops to remain profitable and for the creation of a school. Through the concept of “vertical village” and “streets in the sky” – which in passing was also championed by architects such as Erno Goldfinger and the Smithsons, Corbusier wanted to gather enough residents within a single volume in order to allow collective life to flourish. Grey is what allows them to blend into one another in the spirit of the community it is carrying, like a “vertical village”. In life in general, something grey never usually presages something good, does it? And yet, it is a neutral colour goes with everything blends in mixes with pretty much any colours, in the case of La Maison Radieuse allowing the musicality of its colourful windows to operate, a sign of the joy emanating from each balcony – each radiant household – rather than the structure itself. Grey can be intimidating if not a little scary – especially when one is presented with something hundred of metres long, fifty metres high and twenty metres in depth. Béton, La Maison Radieuse Image Laurent Etourneau ©
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