Marseille Housing Unit

Le Corbusier – Unité d'habitation in Marseille France, 1946-1952

L'Unité d'Habitation de Marseille (Marseille Housing Unit) represents one of the practical realizations of Le Corbusier's theories on the new way of building the city and is one of the fundamental points of arrival of the Modern Movement in conceiving architecture and urban planning. The Housing Unit, 17 floors high, is composed of a succession of 337 apartments, almost as if they had been built in series and then assembled, to testify to his idea, according to which the house should be transformed into a "machine for living", adapting to the historical period revolutionized by the invention of machines, in which up to 1500 people could live there.

Each housing unit is of the duplex type, that is, arranged on two different levels accessible by an internal staircase. The entrances are arranged along a corridor-street located every two floors. On the seventh and eighth floors there are some of the general services needed by the population (nursery, shops, laundry, restaurant, etc.), so as to eliminate, according to Le Corbusier's theory, the dimensional gap between the single building and the city, so that the first becomes a submultiple of the second. For him there is no substantial distinction between urban planning and architecture and his attention was turned to studying a system of relationships that, starting from the single housing unit, understood as a cell of a whole, gradually extends to the building, the neighborhood, the city, the entire built environment.
Another innovation is represented by the habitable roof (or garden roof, according to the very famous “Five Points”), which, thanks to the use of reinforced concrete, can be used for various social functions and could have become, according to the architect's ideas, an enormous hanging garden.
Looking at the base, one can notice the adoption of pilotis, in the shape of an inverted truncated cone, to support the entire body of the building, separating the homes from the darkness and humidity resulting from their location on the ground, but, above all, definitively renouncing load-bearing walls and therefore entrusting the support of the floor to the pillars alone. Yet another intuition can be seen in the retreat of the pillars themselves with respect to the line of the floors. This technique allows for the development of the façade independent of the rest of the apartment and in particular allows the use of ribbon windows, capable of sliding along the wall and providing excellent lighting.
After the Second World War. Le Corbusier's brutalism takes on tones even more charged with immediacy and, in a certain sense, tragedy. In a world now dissolved in rubble, what sense do concepts such as the machine for living, the white surfaces free of imperfections of the free facades of the Villa Savoye, the pilotis and the ribbon window have?

With the Unité d'Habitation the most architecturally classic compositions of Le Corbusier's brutalism are realized, as in these building organisms the decomposition of the project elements into classes is operated: the volume of the building, the structural cage, the volume of the megaron constituted by the double-height living cell, the balcony, the brise-soleil. This approach of breaking down the project into parts that go on to constitute a system of multiscalar elements, if on the one hand registers the research in progress on the theme of infinitesimal numbers and fractal geometry, on the other it will contribute to giving vent to those architectural and urban ideas based on fixed supports and mobile parts of the metabolists who propose capsule architecture and of the utopians who go further to prefigure the plug in city, as well as to the actual Dutch experimental realizations carried out by the SAR group. 
The urban planning research carried out in the housing units deals with determining the optimal size to assign to a residential building in which some commercial activities and essential services can be condensed. 137 meters long, 50 meters high and 24 meters deep, the Marseille Housing Unit extends in height over 18 floors in which 320 housing cells and 1.700 inhabitants are distributed, giving rise to a building organism raised from the ground and supported by mighty columns that leave the area below free for public transit and leisure activities. The building compensates for the wound inflicted on the portion of land that it has occupied, through the placement of a roof garden on top, an open space intended for the public, for children, for those who love to run along the perimeter ring or for those who climb up to admire the view.

If in Marseille, instead of building a single building, they had opted for the construction of a residential development modeled after Ebenezer Howard's garden city, the same number of inhabitants would have occupied an area of ​​approximately thirty hectares, in addition to the roads, sidewalks and network of utilities. 
Both the use of beton-brut which does not hide the imperfections of the artifact, and the compositional semantics of a housing system which shortens the distances between the substance and the form of the content with the refusal of an embellishment as an end in itself, and the formal freedom of those elements, structural and otherwise, qualitatively accentuated with plastic modeling at the foot of the building and on the roof, constitute as many linguistic acquisitions of the design experiences of the Unité.