The Unités d ’Habitation
Five Materializations of One Model
In his article, Roger Aujame looks optimistically at the historical moment in which the five Unités d’Habitation were built as well as at the theoretical context for that typological innovation. A double point of view is taken: that of one of Le Corbusier’s collaborators and that of the users themselves. The occupants of the unités enbody a kind of urbanism which Aujame calls «living a la Corbu».
In Le Corbusier’s opinion, the most important of his works, aside from the Chandigarh Capitol, was this project, inaugurated in 1952 in Marseilles with the first cité radieuse. It is easy to understand why the architect thought this, as it epitomized his theories about living in the machinist age which he had presented and defended repeatedly since 1922...[+]
