A MACHINE FOR LIVING

A Machine for Living

Corbusier was never one for small measures. Virtually every one of his designs, many of which were never even built, prescribed broad societal overhauls. He refused to appeal to nostalgia or fashion trends, choosing to approach architecture purely as an engineering problem. His view of the house was that it should literally be “a machine for living in”, in which the mechanical needs of an ordinary human being should be met in an efficient and standardised manner.

Corbusier’s “Unité d’Habitation” idea was billed as the ultimate such machine. He began developing it in the 1920s, but it would be a long time before it could be realised. For much of his interwar career, Corbusier’s built work consisted of private commissions, producing a few well known villas for rich clients. However, during Europe’s post-war reconstruction period, demand for housing inevitably went up and a unique appetite existed for radical proposals. La Cité Radieuse was finally given the green light in 1952.

Its design featured not only apartments, but shops, a restaurant, a school, a gym, even a hotel. Essentially, he identified the basic elements of a typical village, bordered them into standard modular blocks and packed them on top of one another to form a neat, self sustaining community. The entire thing floated on great concrete legs, aloof from the ground as if to emphasise its independence from the outside world.

La Cité Radieuse was completed in Marseille in 1952, but it was only the first to be built from Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation blueprint. The architect often held that his works weren’t site specific, but replicable wherever they were needed. In total, five of these were completed across France and Germany. Most of them were built to stricter constraints than Corbusier would’ve liked though, so the Marseille example is considered the truest to the original intent.

The building’s packaging is easily its most impressive feat. While there are a number of different layouts across its 337 apartments, most of them span the full width of the building, so they’re sunlit at both ends. They’re accessed by five “streets” as Corbusier called them, which were corridors that run the full length of the building. They’re built deliberately wide however, emphasising their function not simply as access passages, but as important communal spaces. The apartments are packed around these streets like Tetris pieces. Each front door opens to a simple reception room, which then leads either up or down to a much larger living space.