4 unités LC - Architecture Insights

1 Le Corbusier, The Marseilles Block, trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury, The Harvill
Press, London, 1953, p. 45.
2 Extract taken from the translation of the address Le Corbusier gave to M.
Claudius Petit, Minister of Reconstruction and Urbanism at the time, upon
the handing over of the ‘Unité d’habitation’ of Marseilles in 1952.
Boesiger, W., Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Œuvre Complète 1946 –
1952, Volume 5, (text by Le Corbusier), Les Editions d’Architectures, Zurich,
1946, p. 191.
3 Le Corbusier himself actually states that he had spent “forty-three years of
experiment” leading up to the construction of the ‘Unité’ in Marseille (Le
Corbusier, The Marseilles Block, trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury, The Harvill Press,
London, 1953, p. 45), giving this period of time as 1907-1950. This,
however, is the period of time he himself spent considering the ideas leading
up to the ‘Unité’, whereas his first publicly presented works were not the
1920s, with La Maison Citrohan (1919) and Une Ville Contemporaine
(1922).
4 Le Corbusier provides his own version of such a history leading up to the
first constructed ‘Unité d’habitation’ in The Marseilles Block, trans. Geoffrey
Sainsbury, The Harvill Press, London, 1953, p. 45, entitling his list of events,
projects, writings and revelations: The Long Trek 1907-1950. But this too
misses out on many of the projects and influences that other writers have
since noted, such as in Besset, Maurice, Qui était Le Corbusier?, Editions
d’Art Albert Skira, Geneva, Switzerland, 1968; Von Moos, Stanislaus, Le
Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2nd Ed., 1980; Evenson, Norma, Le Corbusier: The Machine
and The Grand Design, George Braziller, New York, 1969; essays such as
Scully, Vincent, Le Corbusier, 1922-1965, Tafuri, Manfredo,“Machine et
mémoire”: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier, Von Moos, Stanislaus,
Urbanism and Transcultural Exchanges, 1910-1935: A survey, Evenson,
Norma, Yesterday’s City of Tomorrow Today, all compiled in Brooks, H. Allen
(Ed.), Le Corbusier, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1987; also
Benton, Tim, Urbanism, published in the exhibition catalogue, Le Corbusier
Architect of the Century, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1987; and
Frampton, Kenneth, The Rise and Fall of the Radiant City: Le Corbusier
1928-1960, published in Oppositions (A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in
Architecture), Winter/Spring 1980: 19/20, MIT Press, USA.
47 48
5 Le Corbusier displayed this interest in Sitte in an early essay written in 1910
entitled La Construction des Villes. Although he later criticised Sitte for his
pitturesque style, comparing it to the path of a donkey that “zigzags and
dawdles, absent-mindedly” (Le Corbusier,Urbanisme, 1925), he was originally
impressed, however, by Sitte’s approach to a city as a whole architectural
landscape and his perceptive analyses of historic cities. See Besset, Maurice,
Qui était Le Corbusier?, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, Geneva, Switzerland,
1968, p. 151; and Benton, Tim, Urbanism, Chapter 4 of exhibition
catalogue, Le Corbusier Architect of the Century, Arts Council of Great
Britain, London, 1987, pp. 200-201.
6 Although Le Corbusier strongly disapproved of the ‘de-urbanisation’
represented in the ‘garden-cities’, he was, however, inspired by the ‘essential
joys’ that Howard promoted through sunlight, open space and greenery. Le
Corbusier’s solution that used these ideas of integrated housing with parks and
gardens avoided problems of isolation in the horizontal sprawl of the ‘garden
cities’ by introducing the vertical ‘garden city’. See Besset, Maurice, Qui était
Le Corbusier?, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, Geneva, Switzerland, 1968, p.
152; and Benton, Tim, Urbanism, Chapter 4 of exhibition catalogue, Le
Corbusier Architect of the Century, Arts Council of Great Britain, London,
1987, pp. 200-201.
7 Le Corbusier was born in Switzerland, in the small town of La Chaux-de-
Fonds in the Swiss Jura. Although he traveled and worked briefly in Vienna,
Paris and Berlin during his years of study, he did not in fact settle in Paris
until 1917, at the age of thirty. (Jenger, Jean, Le Corbusier: L’Architecture
pour Emouvior, Gallimard, Evreux, 1993, p. 33)
8 L’Esprit Nouveau (meaning ‘The New Mind’) was a review founded by Le
Corbusier himself, along with the painter Amédée Ozenfant and poet Paul
Dermée. Twenty-eight issues of the review were published between 1920 and
1925. (Jenger, Jean, Le Corbusier: L’Architecture pour Emouvior, Gallimard,
Evreux, 1993, p. 41)
9 Boesiger, W. + Stonorov, O., Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Œuvre
Complète 1910 – 1929, Volume 1 of l’Œuvre Complète, (text by Le
Corbusier), Girsberger, Zurich, 2nd Ed., 1974, pp. 34-39.
10 The twenty-two storey Tacoma building in Chicago by Holabird and Roche
had been built in 1887-88 following the development of the steel framed