Unité d'Habitation: Encyclopedia - Unité d'Habitation

Unité d'Habitation

The Unité d'Habitation (French, literally, "Housing Unit") is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), which formed the basis of numerous housing developments designed by Le Corbusier throughout Europe with this name. The first and most famous of these buildings, also known as Cité radieuse and, informally, as La Maison du Fada (French - Provençal, "The Lunatic's House") : it is located in Marseille, France, built 1947-1952. Probably the most famous work of Le Corbusier, it proved enormously influential and is often cited as the initial inspiration of the Brutalist architectural style and philosophy.

The Marseille building comprises 337 apartments arranged over twelve stories, all suspended on large piloti. The building also incorporates shops, sporting, medical and educational facilities, and a hotel. The flat roof is designed as a communal terrace with sculptural ventilation stacks and a swimming pool.

Inside, corridors run through the centre of the long axis of every third floor of the building, with each apartment lying on two levels, and stretching from one side of the building to the other, with a balcony. Unlike many of the inferior system-built blocks it inspired, which lack the original's generous proportions, communal facilities and parkland setting, the Unite is popular with its residents and is now mainly occupied by middle-class professionals.

The building is constructed in rough-cast concrete, as the hoped-for steel frame proved too expensive in light of post-War shortages. The replacement material influenced the Brutalist movement, and the building inspired several housing complexes including the Roehampton estate in London and Park Hill in Sheffield. These buildings have attracted a great deal of criticism. Other, more successful, manifestation's of the Unite include Chamberlin, Bon & Powell's Barbican estate (completed 1982) and Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower (1972) in London, and Block A of Davis Duncan's Matrix complex in Glasgow (2004).

Le Corbusier's utopian city living design was repeated in several more buildings with this name and a very similar design. Other Unités were built in Nantes, Briey, and Firminy, as well as in Berlin.

Unité d'Habitation - External link

• La "Cité Radieuse" à Marseille (in French, contains many pictures)
• Map of the Unité
• Unité d'Habitation (in German, contains many links)

Categories: Marseille | Buildings and structures in France | Brutalist structures

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Unité d'Habitation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki