The Unité d'Habitation is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier, of which the Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the most famous.
The Cité Radieuse (Radiant City) was built between 1947 and 1952 and it proved enormously influential in the Brutalist architecture style and philosophy that was often cited as the initial inspiration.
The Unité, designed as a "vertical garden city," as opposed to the construction of villas, was an innovative integration of a system of distributing goods and services that provides independent support to the dwelling unit, responds to the needs of its residents and ensures operational autonomy in relation to the outside world.
The proposed housing units is made up of the Marseille architectural unit that houses 1600 people. The building is an enormous construction, 140 meters long, 24 meters wide and 56 meters high, and provided an internal operation of more than 26 separate services. Each floor (twelve in total) contains 58 duplex apartments accessible from a wide corridor. Corridors run through the centre of the long axis of every third floor of the building, with each apartment occupying two levels, and stretching from one side of the building to the other, with a balcony Inside the building, the 337 apartments intersect each other in the vast network of reinforced concrete. At half height, a two-storey shopping area extends along the 135m length of the building.
The flat roof is designed as a communal terrace with sculptural ventilation stacks, a running track, and a shallow paddling pool for children. It also has unobstructed views of the Mediterranean and the city of Marseille.
The building is constructed in béton brut (rough-cast concrete, no decorations, no elegance, both indoors and outdoors), as the hoped-for steel frame proved too expensive in light of post-War II material shortages.
For more info check the website http://www.marseille-citeradieuse.org/
