Corbusier in Provence (20th Century)
The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, also known as the Cité Radieuse, designed by the architect Corbusier in 1946-1952, became one of the most influential buildings of the 20th century. Built of unfinished concrete (steel was not available because of the war), it had nineteen stories with 330 apartments of twenty different designs, along with shops, a restaurant, a hotel, clinic, sports facilities, a roof terrace, an outdoor auditorium and a kindergarten. It was meant to be "a machine for living," with everything needed under a single roof. Corbusier built five versions of the Unite d'Habitation, and it inspired similar buildings in other parts of France, Germany and in Britain, and became a model for new apartment buildings and public housing projects in the 1950s. It was praised and much criticized as the first example of brutalist architecture.
Other buildings by Corbusier in Provence:
- Cabananon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1952. Corbusier stayed several times in the Villa E 1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Marin, and was commissioned in 1952 by Thomas Rebutato, the owner of a local restaurant, to build a beachside cabin, or Cabanon. It was limited to 16 square meters, was made of wooden logs and plywood, and was to be furnished with only a couch, a table, and a sink. It was part of Corbusier's effort to standarize every genre of architecture. Later he added a tiny office next to the cabin.
Read more about this topic: Architecture Of Provence
Famous quotes containing the word corbusier:
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)