A vertical village, Le Corbusier's Marseilles landmark was supposed to change the way we live, writes John Fleming
An Asian man smiles in a yellow lift as it ascends to the roof garden. He wears a T-shirt, shorts, running shoes. As the doors part on the 18th floor, he jogs out for his daily exercise. The sun streams down on this high-rise cement plain as he completes lap after lap of this brutalist utopia. All around: the Marseilles mountains and the Marseilles sea. Way up above the tree tops, hear the wind roar. Almost 60m below, at the base of the building, there's a crawling black dog that looks like a bear. The boulevard Michelet artery spurts out away from the city towards Cassis. On this baking roof, you feel privileged: it's lofty, elemental, and literally ship-shape. The chimney is a jutting funnel. There is a cement rock pool, a green-tiled paddle pond.
The jogger sweats and makes circuits, each lap approximately 360 paces. That's one for each degree of the circular pan of my stealthy video recording. As I study the footage afterwards, the dominant sound is of water jiggling in the jogger's bottle: it is the sea caught in a vessel, its waves trapped by plastic.
BORN 120 YEARS ago last month, Le Corbusier completed his flagship Unité d'Habitation building in France's southern capital in 1952. The upshot of many of his early architectural theories and practices, its raw, reinforced concrete exterior and strangely functionalist interior come across as an outmoded vision of the future, a prescient structure once ahead of its time but now dated - like the Atomium in Brussels, it is the stuff of sci-fi B-movies. The Unité was designed to house 1,600 residents in its 337 apartments with 23 variations. Some 137m long, 56m high and 24m across, it is a structure that exudes a sense of purpose as a clear prescription for how people should behave communally.
At the same time, it is history as a brilliant farce, an amazing but incorrect version of the shape of things to come. The Swiss architect's idea was to build a vertical village, a large-scale self-sufficient residence from which there would be little need to leave. As he put it, the building was a machine for living in.
Propelled by ideas as to how people should live together spatially, Le Corbusier planned buildings as antidotes to social revolution. They were visionary attempts to create housing according to industrial thinking - both in terms of their materials and mass production.
Since blamed for the alienating tower blocks that house the disadvantaged in cities all over the world, he has been scapegoated by town planners who were bad copyists. Governments globally abused his designs to house city dwellers, twisting the ideals with their insufficient budgets and lack of empathy. Dublin's Ballymun tower blocks were a good example of how to get it all wrong.
Le Corbusier saw design as intelligence made visible and he directed that design to address the problems of Europe's slums and the shortage of housing, particularly after the second World War. Society was a built environment and could be helped by effective design: social unrest could be kept at bay by eliminating crowded, squalid living conditions. A modernist, he rejected the past: his dictum was that a year zero was needed and that cities needed to start afresh. His proposal in 1925 to raze the structures and narrow streets of Paris's right bank Marais area and impose 18 massive 60-floor towers in their place illustrates both his policy and aesthetic of breaking from the past. Think of our own recent reluctance to revamp an unloved O'Connell Street on the grounds that it was simply part of what we were, and it is clear how far ahead he was in rejecting buildings as custodians of their own causes. However, the very purity of his modernist thinking was often to prove a pragmatic failure. His "radiant cities" with vertical work, home and leisure zones could also be seen as corals for automatons, their lives controlled by the dominant "machines" in which they lived. Le Corbusier devised an intriguing social formula, but he left out at least one magic ingredient: the neighbourhood.
It is generally accepted that his thinking was misguided. Heavy-handed copyists threw up high-rise housing that ripped out all social fabric. The Ballymun towers stood as bleak isolates, outcasts even from each other: they were social housing that denied their dwellers all of the kindness of Corbusier's interior design, that deprived them of basic necessities such as shops. Carved asunder by roads, they poked up gloomily into the sky. And they are rightfully beingtorn down in ironic rhyme with Le Corbusier's year-zero principle.
Now 55 years old, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles has survived as a success. Professionals compete to live and work within it; children and their minders play in a park at its foot. Inside the brutal concrete is a world of ergonomics: the space is enlightened, the security man friendly. The nine shiny lacquered levels of duplexes are not called floors but rues: among the residents and architecture pilgrims, I checked in to a room on the troisième. This level houses a small supermarket, a baker, a wine shop, a butcher, a restaurant and a hotel whose keyrings are metal icons of Le Corbusier's "modulor man".
UNFINISHED CEMENT WALLS frame doors that seem more wooden than any door you've ever seen. Painted white on the quatrieme rue, they house the offices of architects and lawyers. Back on the third, the apartment entrances are in primary shades - it's like the colour test-card distilled. Red. Yellow. Blue. Green.
Each door has an unpainted wooden handle: in the midst of all the modernism, these are primitive twigs or broken witch brooms that make the interior mythic and lend it a sense of folklore.
Each level has a stunning rectangular corridor. The reflective floor surfaces lend the illusion of heat haze to people some 30 or 40m away. They appear to be walking on water, maybe mercury - it's a liquid engineering miracle as your eyes play tricks in the low light. As windows are reserved mainly for the dwellings, the interior is a dark, starkly beautiful surprise nestling inside this grey leviathan that looms at an odd angle to the heavily trafficked road nearby. As I take the lift down to the world outside, a woman smiles. "This is a rather special place all right," she says, a resident becoming for a moment one of the building's exhibits.
Hours later I return. Night has fallen. Morning weighs with the need to get up and terminate this trip. A prostitute scrambles out from a perimeter hedgerow to negotiate unsuccessfully with the driver of a slowing matt-white Mercedes who chooses to motor on. Entering Le Corbusier's flagship, I notice scrape marks on a door and decide to read them as signs of forced entry.
Back up on the roof, there is only starlight. The experience is spiritual: this is the loneliness of satellites, the insight of alienation. As I scuttle around on the roof of the Unité d'Habitation for 40 minutes, I feel isolated but redeemed, like a credible unit of an insect colony.