Precedent Analysis - Unite d’Habitation. – A Vertical Garden City

Unite d’Habitation. – A Vertical Garden City

The ebb and flow, the expansion and contraction of societies, civics, and economies informs the way that the human lives. In times of great prosperity societies expand geographically as seen in the rise of all the great societies. In times of hardship and depression these same societies contract for many reasons, economy, efficiency or society. It is my opinion that due to a growing problems in the American economy, especially related to the housing industry, combined with an explosive cost of living, and the interest in global climate change, and sustainable living, the way that Americans live and are housed is teetering on the verge of dramatic change. Just as there was dramatic changes during the Great Depression, and post-war Europe in the way people lived. In terms of my thesis I am researching ways of solving this housing problem. To further frame the idea of housing: housing will not only refer to the places that individuals and families reside, but of the all the spaces in which these same individuals and even broader societies reside in the functions of daily life.
There are documented times of civic hardship, and how this changes the way people live. During the Great Depression, “all across the country farms were being foreclosed in rural districts. People who lost homes naturally gravitated towards the city”5, and in response to the influx of people came the Hooverville phenomenon.

Another time period of hardship is postwar Europe in the mid 1940’s. At this time there was a great need for large scale public housing, and in the words of the architect Le Corbusier there was a great need to ‘deliver a radical solution to the problem of collective housing in both architectural and urban terms’1. Out of Le Corbusier’s desire to examine this problem sprang his idea of ‘une nouvelle Unite d’Habitation’ translated ‘a new housing unit’. Corbusier spend many years developing this concept, but it came to a culmination in the development of Unite d’ Habitation, Marseilles. This paper will further examine this concept in the framework of providing a foundation in precedent for my thesis on vertical cities.
Unite d’Habitation Marseilles

A new urban object

The Unite d’Habitation Marseilles, designed by French architect Le Corbusier is a 19 level, reinforced concrete building. There are 337 apartments designed to house up to 1600 people. The living quarters begin on the second floor set on huge concrete piers, where the first floor is mostly an open sheltered plaza, except for the entrance to the building. Most of the 337 apartments are double height units that wrap vertically around horizontal ‘streets’ that only occur on levels 2, 5, 10, 13, and 16. (See the building section, the ‘streets’ are shown in blue, and the dwelling units are shown in alternating colors to show how the double height spaces wrap around the street.) The design planned for a 24 unit hotel with restaurant and bar (shown in the section in purple) and a variety of shops including a laundry, bakery, butcher, salon, pharmacy, and real estate and commercial offices on the seventh and eighth floors accessible from a double height gallery on the west side of the building. “The flat roof is designed as a communal terrace with sculptural ventilation stacks, a swimming pool with children’s play area, a gymnasium, nursery school, solarium, open air theater and running track.”4




The planning of Unite d’Habitation Marseilles, according to Le Corbusier is rooted in the ideals of his concept of the garden city which he describes in his book The City of Tomorrow and It’s Planning. Le Corbusier describes the status quo of the typical suburban garden city, and then proposes a solution so wonderfully it should be included here verbatim.

CONCERNING GARDEN CITIES
… we saw that there were two kinds of population ; the citizens, with many good reasons for inhabiting the city proper, and the " suburbanites," those who could only live to advantage outside the city. These suburbanites, according to their social condition, live in villas, or in dwellings in working-class quarters, or in small working-class houses which they rent.
If we formulate our problem, we shall have :
(a) The present-day solution, which exists all over the world and is looked on as ideal; it consists of a plot of roughly 400 square yards with a little house in the middle. Patt of the plot is a flower garden, and there are a few fruit trees and a tiny vegetable garden. It is complicated and difficult to keep up, and involves endless pains (call it the romantic simple life if you like) for the householder and his wife to keep things tidy, to weed it, water it, kill the slugs and the rest ; long after twilight the watering-can is still on the go. Some people may call all this a form of healthy exercise. On the contrary, it is a stupid ineffective and sometimes dangerous thing. The children cannot play there, for they have no room to run about in, nor can the parents indulge in games or sports there. And the result of all this is a few pears and apples, a few carrots, a little parsley and so on. The whole thing is ridiculous.
(b) The suggested solution: the dwelling occupies an area of 50 square yards and is built in two storeys, which gives 100 square yards of habitable floor space. The flower garden would take up 50 square yards. For sports I would allow 150 square yards, and for the kitchen garden another 150 square yards ; so we have our 400 square yards in full use.
The houses and their " hanging " flower gardens are juxtaposed in immense blocks " with set-backs " in three super- imposed double storeys. The sun gets in everywhere, as does the air. The garden is paved with red tiles, its walls are hung with ivy and clematis; laurels and other shrubs cluster thickly in large cement pots ; the place is gay with flowers ; this is a real urban garden easy to keep up. There is a table sheltered from the rain where the household can eat ; one can converse or rest in the open.
At the foot of the building the 150 square yards allotted for games have been added to those of the neighbours. Football, tennis, running tracks, basket ball, etc., are all available. You come home, you change, you can take your exercise just outside your own home.
Close at hand are the 150 square yards of kitchen garden joined up with the similar plots belonging to the neighbours. So we get allotments of 400 yards by 100 yards, i.e. nearly 10 acres. The watering-can is not needed, for water is laid on; the allotments are automatically watered and can be equally well ploughed with tractors and manured systematically. 2
For the Unite, Le Corbusier extended this concept into what he described as the vertical garden city, which was a synthesis of the garden city, and the model of the city proper. ‘From the ‘horizontal’ garden city, …the concept of the individual dwelling unit and the relationship between architecture and nature; from the city proper he distilled the notions of complexity of density…’ 1

To further describe the concept of Unite d’Habitation

‘The aims of the Unite d’Habitation, declared by Le Corbusier were two fold, “The first: to provide with peace and solitude before the sun, space and greenery, a dwelling which will be the perfect receptacle for the family. The second: to set up in God’s good nature beneath the sky and the sun, a magisterial work of architecture, the product of rigor, grandeur, nobility, happiness and elegance.’1

No city or community is complete without the functions and services that accompany housing. Corbusier’s concenpt of “The extended dwelling”1 is evident in the design of the Unite. “Implicit with Le Cobusier’s notion of the Unite as a vertical garden city is the ideal that the community should be self-supportive… the collective mechanical services and social amenities, such as the nursery school, day care center, gymnasium and shops that contribute to, and compliment daily life in the individual unit” should all be included.1 The project from its commission in 1945 to the time that construction had begun in 1947 the project had been through 4 different sites, and many different iterations for each site. The final proposal for the second site of the project; ‘Unite d’Habitation de grandeur conform’ literally a building of ‘appropriate size’, was complimented at ground level the functions of the extended dwelling. By the fourth and final site, these amenities had been integrated into the main structure of the building itself rather than at grade. The logic in this could be a result that in earlier proposals versus the final design was the number a buildings and the size of the development. Earlier proposals included 3 or more buildings on the same campus and where the function of the extended dwelling on the ground floor would’ve been more easily accessible to the residents of the other buildings. The thought behind multiple buildings is inherent in Corbusier’s Garden City, while the density of these proposals was much greater.





Closing Thoughts, Observations and Connections –

The Unite is often regarded as an architectural masterpiece. The first example of brutalism, and one of the most graceful, truly achieved a great majority of what Corbusier set out to accomplish. The building is successful in providing dwelling units on a scale that was necessary for the time that it was built. The ‘complex density’ allowed for the generous surrounding area of park land that was a quality of the Garden City. The arrangement of the dwelling units in the “bottle and wine bin”1 fashion is “In an ingenious use of space, two-story apartments interlock, so that an entrance corridor and elevator stop are required only at every third level.”7 The layout of the dwelling units is valid and logical “and typically combine bright, double-height sitting rooms on one level, with long, narrow bedrooms on the other”7, and provides a flexible usable space for a family, or a single person. The grand building mass reached for elegance and nobility and was true. All of these things are what make this valued architecture in the eyes of all people around the world. In the framework of knowledge though, one should also examine not only the successes but the failures of a building.




As often happens in the field of architecture, and the development of projects, the constraints of site, budget, ‘actual’ user, available material, etc. the ideal that was so carefully considered, hypothesized, tested, and matured gets very quickly watered down. The architect strives though to keep the fundamental components that make a project successful, yet often times fail. From the ideals of the garden city, missing from the Unite, is the garden in the unit.




“The sun gets in everywhere, as does the air. The garden is paved with red tiles, its walls are hung with ivy and clematis; laurels and other shrubs cluster thickly in large cement pots ; the place is gay with flowers ; this is a real urban garden easy to keep up. There is a table sheltered from the rain where the household can eat ; one can converse or rest in the open.”2

As you can see in the image of the terrace, about all that is left is the red tiles, and barely enough room to ‘rest in the open’. In the framework of my thesis and its foundation in the squares of Savannah, keeping the garden is an extremely important part of the equation.





Additionally, Corbusier’s ‘streets’ of the project, are the hallways, and as hallways they are nothing more. They are described by visitors as gloomy, and dark, and even scary at times. ‘The internal streets here are oppressive, windowless corridors’6 They are wide, but have none of the elements that could ever be described as a street. The importance of bringing natural light into the corridors of a building are evident in the weakness of the corridors of this project.
In preliminary proposals that included more additional buildings, the public space was located at the ground level. Shops, clubs, restaurants, pools, community space could all be accessed without entering the building. I think it is unfortunate that in the final design these spaces became integrated into the building in a fashion that was less than accessible to the public at large. It is difficult to find data on the success of the ‘shopping street’ on the seventh and eighth floors of Unite. The lack of recent descriptions, and a tourists description of, “(on) the third and fourth levels, an airy Japanese-inspired gallery is a sudden surprise”10 ,would lead me to believe that the shops, besides a small grocery, are no longer there. This may be due to the lack of access. It may however have been a different story if they were located at ground level as was originally proposed. Additionally, the rooftop terrace with its communal spaces seems much more like a barren concrete rooftop than anything else. Corbusier’s idea of “reclaiming the lost land beneath the building for recreation”7 may have been lost in translation, and as described in his accounts of the garden city, recreation belongs “At the foot of the building the 150 square yards allotted for games have been added to those of the neighbours” 1.

There are many great things to be learned from examining the Unite d’Habitation as a work of architecture in and of itself. More importantly though are, Le Corbusier’s theories behind the design and development of the building. The vertical garden city, the extended dwelling are all important and relevant theories still today. Though, as is evident, and even to a greater extent in some of the later Unites in Berlin, and what became a model for social housing in the U.S., what in the end finally gets built is not always the unadulterated fruit of the intent of the architect or his theories.
















References:

1. Jenkins, David. Unite D'Habitation - Le Corbusier. London: Phaidon P Limited, 1993.
2. Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1987. Originally Published by Payson & Clark Ltd NY 1929
3. Le Corbusier, as edited by Stanislaus Von Moos. Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.
4. Wikipedia contributors, "Unité d'Habitation," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unit%C3%A9_d%27Habitation&oldid=198023947 (accessed April 5, 2008).
5. Library of Congress and American Memory – 09/26/2002 http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/depwwii/depress/hoovers.html (accessed April 5, 2008)
6. Berman, Jay - 1999 for Galinsky.com “Unité d'habitation Flatowallee 16 Berlin-Westend, Germany” http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/unitedhabitation/index.htm (accessed April 5, 2008)
7. Glinn, Simon – 2001 for Galinsky.com, “Unité d'habitation (Cité Radieuse) 280 boulevard Michelet 13008 Marseille, France” http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/marseille/index.htm (accessed April 5, 2008)
8. Divizia, Caudio – 2006 for Galinsky.com, “Espace Le Corbusier Rue de Saint-Just-Malmont 42700 Firminy, France” http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/firminy/index.htm (accessed April 5, 2008)
9. Wikipedia contributors, "Athens Charter," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Athens_Charter&oldid=188990011 (accessed April 5, 2008).
10. Arfin, Ferne “More About Marseille's Hotel Le Corbusier” March 24 2007 http://gofrance.about.com/od/provence/a/Lecorbusier_2.htm (accessed April 5, 2008)

Images: All are from; “Unite D'Habitation - Le Corbusier”. With the exception of the photos of the Hoovervilles which come from “Library of Congress and American Memory” and the photo of the corridor which is from “Unité d'habitation Flatowallee 16 Berlin-Westend, Germany”