Duplex apartment in the Cité Radieuse

On the first floor of the Cité Radieuse, this flat spans 90 m² over two levels.

The upper level houses the entrance hall with storage space, the Charlotte Perriand kitchen and the dining room. The Jean Prouvé staircase leads to the lower level, which includes the living room with double-height ceilings, enlarged to take up the entire surface area, the two children’s bedrooms, one of which is now the master bedroom with a custom-made study in keeping with the spirit of the place, a shower room, a bathroom and plenty of storage space. The living room and the two bedrooms open onto a large south-facing balcony, which bathes the rooms in natural light.

Located in Marseille, it is in the beautiful 8th arrondissement. It is set in a three-hectare park in France’s second-largest city, between the hills and the sea. With two levels of services including a shopping mall with local shops and a hotel, as well as a nursery school, a solarium, a swimming pool, an open-air theatre on the roof and an art centre (the MAMO), the Cité Radieuse offers an exceptional quality of life. It has a permanent security service.

The flat has retained its original furnishings.

The integrated storage units, kitchen and bedroom layouts were designed by the architect Charlotte Perriand. She began designing the kitchen for the Cité Radieuse in 1946. With a surface area of around 5m², this square-plan kitchen is integrated into the living/dining room thanks to its bar area. It was inspired in particular by the American kitchen and the “Frankfurter Küche” by Margaret Schütte-Lihotzky in 1928, designed around a desire to optimise domestic work. Vladimir Bodiansky completed the final version.

The bedrooms, all long, have three areas: a toilet area with washbasin, a “rest area” and a play area linked to the neighbouring bedroom by a large sliding partition covered in slate to act as a blackboard.

The interior staircase, designed by Jean Prouvé, has a light metal structure and solid oak steps reminiscent of a ship’s ladder.

Exploiting the plastic and technical possibilities of concrete, Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse is a revolutionary housing unit, a concrete structure on stilts into which duplex flats and services are inserted. The regular grid of its façade, with its prefabricated concrete sunbreakers, is matched on the roof by sculptural forms, like its large chimney. Both inside and outside the building, the architect has developed a chromatic approach to space, based on the primary colours that cover the inside of the loggias and the flat doors.

Based on the measurements of the modulor – a human silhouette whose proportions are inspired by the golden ratio – the spaces in this flat are designed in harmony with the human body and offer a high level of comfort.

Born in Switzerland in 1887 and died in 1965, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was an architect and town planner renowned for his ability to make architecture a total art. He thought about buildings and interior design in terms of both furnishings and comfort, and took the urban planning dimension into account in all his creations. He remains undeniably one of the most emblematic figures of the Modern Movement.

Throughout his career, Le Corbusier shared his visions and theories through his participation in international exhibitions such as that of 1925, where he presented the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, and that of 1937, with his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux.

A defender of modernism and rejecting the decorative arts, Le Corbusier inscribed his architectural thinking in his villas, most notably in the villa Savoye in 1928, where he theorised the “five points of modern architecture” (pilotis, the flat roof, banded windows, the free facade and the free plan).

Although he was one of the most prolific architects of his time, many of his projects never saw the light of day, such as the Neighbour Plan or the Contemporary city of three million inhabitants. Although sometimes too polemical or radical in the eyes of the general public, Le Corbusier’s work nevertheless had an international impact. His last major project was offered to him by the city of Chandigarh, India. He was commissioned to direct the entire urban planning work for the creation of the new capital of Punjab, where he blended raw concrete with lush vegetation.

The construction of the Unité d’habitation de Marseille, Le Corbusier’s first commission from the French government, was part of the reconstruction of the city of Marseille. The city had benefited from the work of great modern architects such as Fernand Pouillon, who rebuilt Marseille’s Old Port under the direction of Auguste Perret for the master plan, combining traditional know-how, innovative construction techniques and respect for the site.

The Cité radieuse in Marseille or “Maison du fada” was the first housing unit built by Le Corbusier in France, before those in Rezé, Briey, Firminy and Berlin. Collective housing played a very important role in the architect’s thinking, and the Unité d’habitation had its origins in the immeuble-villa that he designed in the 1920s, instruments of urban renewal combining housing and services. In the 1930s, he theorised the concept of the “Unité d’habitation” (housing unit), which he used in the reconstruction plan for Saint-Dié in 1944, which was never built, and which he implemented in Marseille. Designed as a vertical garden city, the Unité d’habitation brings together all the functions associated with housing: flats, shops, schools, leisure facilities and living spaces.

This “living machine” is built according to the five points of modern architecture published in 1926 by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret under the title Les cinq points d’une nouvelle architecture (the five points of a new architecture): the stilts, the roof terrace, the free plan, the free facade and the long windows, which Le Corbusier introduced in the late 1920s to create masterpieces such as the Villa Stein and the Villa Savoye.

This exceptional example of housing architecture was listed as a Historic Monument in 1986, and a show flat preserving its original décor was listed in 1995. The building has been the subject of a restoration campaign since 1988.