Cany was invited by BD to visit and write about her favourite building, which is the Unité d’habitation in Marseille, France by Le Corbusier. Extract from the article below:
“The Unité feels like a very special crucible in which people can live, work and play together. It is so much more than the sum of its parts. That first visit was memorable. We encountered it first as tourists; then it seemed as if the building took us in when we made friends with one of the residents as our children played on the roof and she invited us all down to her apartment for lunch. We sat out on the balcony and felt rather blessed. It was fantastic sharing her enthusiasm for the smallest details of her flat — how clever the storage arrangements are in that complicated bit in the middle of the plan that you can never quite get just looking at it on paper, or how thoughtful the variety of alcoves in the stainless-steel splashback behind the sink were.
What’s interesting for me is its ambition to be full of ways that people might meet and knit together. It’s a complete town in the air — there’s the sense of each domain being a very regulated piece that’s repeated to make up the facade. You have a double-height and a single-height apartment module that toggle together beautifully in plan and section. But for such a simple diagram, it feels very complex. It can keep catching you out as you walk around.
Added to this arrangement of apartments are many other uses. The commercial floor halfway up for shops and hotel has such a particular allocation of spaces, for example the fish counter or the place where you could pick up ready-prepared meals or have them delivered to the gorgeously-sculptural grocery deposits outside your front door. There is some very forward social thinking here to lighten the burden of housekeeping — it’s maybe what leads the Le Corbusier expert Flora Samuel to call Le Corbusier a feminist. You could drop the kids off in the nursery then have your hair done, go to the shops, go to the gym, commune with nature and the sky on the roof: the ocean liner ideal of lofty individualism and simple community. It very nearly worked. Only a few years ago when I visited it felt both surreal and straightforwardly obvious to find a working supermarket halfway up the building.”
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