Le Corbusier
World War II and Reconstruction; Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1939–1952)

During the War and the German occupation of France, Le Corbusier did his best to promote his architectural projects. He moved to Vichy for a time, where the collaborationist government of Marshal Philippe Petain was located, offering his services for architectural projects, including his plan for the reconstruction of Algiers, but they were rejected. He continued writing, completing Sur les Quatres routes (On the Four Routes) in 1941. After 1942 Le Corbusier left Vichy for Paris. He became for a time a technical adviser at Alexis Carrel 's eugenics foundation but resigned on 20 April 1944. In 1943 he founded a new association of modern architects and builders, the Ascoral, the Assembly of Constructors for a renewal of architecture, but there were no projects to build.

When the war ended Le Corbusier was nearly sixty years old and he had not had a single project realized for ten years. He tried, without success, to obtain commissions for several of the first large reconstruction projects, but his proposals for the reconstruction of the town of Saint-Dié and for La Rochelle were rejected. Still, he persisted and finally found a willing partner in Raoul Dautry, the new Minister of Reconstruction and Town Planning. Dautry agreed to fund one of his projects, a " Unité habitation de grandeur conforme ", or housing units of standard size, with the first one to be built in Marseille, which had been heavily damaged during the war.

This was his first public commission and was a breakthrough for Le Corbusier. He gave the building the name of his pre-war theoretical project, the Cité Radieuse, and followed the principles that he had studied before the war, proposing a giant reinforced-concrete framework into which modular apartments would fit like bottles into a bottle rack. Like the Villa Savoye, the structure was poised on concrete pylons though, because of the shortage of steel to reinforce the concrete, the pylons were more massive than usual. The building contained 337 duplex apartment modules to house a total of 1,600 people. Each module was three storeys high and contained two apartments, combined so each had two levels (see diagram above). The modules ran from one side of the building to the other and each apartment had a small terrace at each end. They were ingeniously fitted together like pieces of a Chinese puzzle, with a corridor slotted through the space between the two apartments in each module. Residents had a choice of twenty-three different configurations for the units. Le Corbusier designed furniture, carpets and lamps to go with the building, all purely functional; the only decoration was a choice of interior colours. The only mildly decorative features of the building were the ventilator shafts on the roof, which Le Corbusier made to look like the smokestacks of an ocean liner, a functional form that he admired.

The building was designed not just to be a residence but to offer all the services needed for living. On every third floor, between the modules, there was a wide corridor, like an interior street, which ran the length of the building. This served as a sort of commercial street, with shops, eating places, a nursery school and recreational facilities. A running track and small stage for theatre performances were located on the roof. The building itself was surrounded by trees and a small park.

Le Corbusier wrote later that the Unité d'Habitation concept was inspired by the visit he had made to the Florence Charterhouse at Galluzzo in Italy, in 1907 and 1910 during his early travels. He wanted to recreate, he wrote, an ideal place "for meditation and contemplation". He also learned from the monastery, he wrote, that "standardization led to perfection", and that "all of his life a man labours under this impulse: to make the home the temple of the family".

The Unité d'Habitation marked a turning point in the career of Le Corbusier; in 1952, he was made a Commander of the Légion d'Honneur in a ceremony held on the roof of his new building. He had progressed from being an outsider and critic of the architectural establishment to its centre, as the most prominent French architect.
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