Description
Primary colors and sea views
Marseille’s Cité Radieuse is an icon of Le Corbusier’s work. Built between 1948 and 1952 in the context of Reconstruction, it represents the culmination of his research into housing and modern architecture.
This superb downstairs duplex boasts sumptuous sea views from its loggia balcony. Located on a high floor, it offers 70 m² of living space. The upper level features an entrance hall and a 26 m² living room, with a kitchen designed by Charlotte Perriand. Served by a metal and wood staircase by Jean Prouvé, the lower level includes an office-library space opening onto the loggia, a bedroom with bathroom and a dressing room.
Located in Marseille, the Cité Radieuse is part of the 8e arrondissement. Set in a three-hectare park, it offers a very pleasant environment in France’s second-largest city, between the hills and the sea. With its two levels of services including a shopping mall with local shops and a hotel, as well as a nursery school, solarium, swimming pool and open-air theater on the roof, accompanied by permanent security guards, the Cité Radieuse offers an exceptional quality of life.
A bright, comfortable living unit
Exploiting the plastic and technical possibilities of concrete, Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse is a housing unit, a concrete structure on stilts into which duplex apartments and services are inserted. The regular grid of the façade, with its prefabricated concrete sunbreakers, is matched on the roof by sculptural forms, such as the large chimney.
Both inside and outside the building, the architect has created a color scheme based on the primary colors that cover the interior of the loggias and apartment doors. Based on the modulor, a human silhouette whose proportions are inspired by the golden ratio, the apartment’s spaces are adapted to the human body and offer great comfort. What’s more, it still features many of Le Corbusier’s period décor elements.
Le Corbusier
Born in Switzerland in 1887 and died in 1965, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was an architect and urban planner renowned for his ability to turn architecture into a total art. He thinks in terms of building, interior design, furnishings and comfort, and takes the urban dimension into account in all his creations. He remains one of the most emblematic figures of the Modern Movement.
Together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, he set up his studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, Paris, after moving there in 1917 (he was later naturalized in 1930). He meets artist Amédée Ozenfant, with whom he founds Purisme, conceived as a return to moral order in the face of contemporary extravagance, which will be disseminated in the magazine de L’Esprit Nouveau after its creation in 1920. It was during this same period that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret first used the pseudonym Le Corbusier to sign some of his articles. Twenty-three of these were compiled in a work that became a veritable reference: Vers une architecture, published in 1923.
Throughout his career, Le Corbusier shared his visions and theories through his participation in international exhibitions such as 1925, where he presented the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, and 1937, with his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux.
An advocate of modernism and a rejection of the decorative arts, Le Corbusier’s architectural thinking is reflected in his villas, most notably the Villa Savoye in 1928, where he theorized the “five points of modern architecture” (pilotis, roof terraces, entablature windows, free facade and 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 “Voisin” plan and the contemporary city of three million inhabitants. Sometimes too polemical or radical in the eyes of the general public, Le Corbusier’s work nevertheless enjoyed international resonance. His last major project was offered to him by the city of Chandigarh, India. He was commissioned to oversee all urban planning work for the creation of the new capital of Punjab, where he blended raw concrete with lush vegetation.
The history of the Cité Radieuse
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. At the time, the city benefited from the work of great modern architects, such as Fernand Pouillon, who rebuilt Marseille’s Vieux-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 de 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 Le Corbusier’s thinking, and the Unité d’Habitation had its origins in the immeuble-villa he imagined as early as the 1920s, as a means of urban renewal combining housing and services. In the ’30s, he theorized the notion of “unité d’habitation”, which he used in the 1944 reconstruction plan for Saint-Dié (never realized), and which he implemented in Marseille. Conceived as a vertical garden city, the housing unit brings together all the functions associated with housing: apartments, shops, schools, leisure and living facilities.
This ” machine à habiter ” 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 : pilotis, roof-terrace, free plan, free facade and long windows, which Le Corbusier introduced in the late 1920s to create masterpieces such as the Villa Stein and Villa Savoye in the late 1920s.
In 2003, residents of Marseille’s Cité Radieuse celebrated the building’s fiftieth anniversary, with exhibitions, flea markets, a film club, a games room and a reading club, all part of the “Corbu spirit” that encouraged a new form of sociability by creating interior streets and living spaces.In 2013, the city of Marseille was named European Capital of Culture for its rich artistic heritage.This exceptional example of housing architecture was classified as a Historic Monument in 1986, and a show apartment preserving its original décor was listed in 1995. The building has been the subject of a restoration campaign since 1988.
