Unité d'Habitation

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Unité d'habitation in Berlin

The Unité d'Habitation ( French for residential unit ), also known colloquially as a living machine , is a modern type of residential building developed by the architect Le Corbusier .

Le Corbusier's idea

Le Corbusier presented the core of the idea as early as 1925 in Paris , with the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau . Le Corbusier saw his building design as the ideal solution for mass repetition in many places. He wanted to achieve a high level of profitability through standardized series production . This efficiency and widespread use should enable a broad mass of people to enjoy increased living comfort. The Unités d'Habitation are the forerunners of the prefabricated buildings . Le Corbusier endeavored to meet human requirements and integrated various facilities for daily needs. In doing so, he stacked housing and other functions of the conventional city. This corresponded to Le Corbusier's model of the “vertical city”.

history

The Unités d'Habitation were realized between 1947 and 1965 in four French locations as well as in Berlin. The projects were intended to alleviate the housing shortage after the Second World War .

Unité d'Habitation in Marseille

Sectional drawing of the interlocking apartments

The first Unité d'Habitation was built in Marseille from 1947 (address: 280, Boulevard Michelet, F-13008 Marseille). This building, the Cité radieuse opened on October 14, 1952 , is 138 meters long, 25 meters wide and 56 meters high. The reinforced concrete skeleton structure has 18 floors, with an open floor with supports that support the building instead of the ground floor. The stairs can also be found here. The 337 apartments are designed as two-storey maisonettes : one storey occupies the entire floor width, the other almost half of it, with a connection to the access corridor. This was only necessary on every third floor. The row buildings are each laid out relatively precisely in a north-south direction in order to allow adequate sun exposure on both sides.

Various shops, a small hotel and a laundry are located on the seventh and eighth floors. A kindergarten, an open-air theater and a sports hall were located on the accessible roof landscape.

The shops, the café in the hotel and the roof terrace are freely accessible; you just enter yourself in a visitor's book with the porter. The roof terrace offers a view over Marseille, the sea and the surrounding mountains. The condition of the residential unit is very old.

All dimensions of the Unité d'Habitation of Marseille were determined according to the Modulor system of measurement developed by Le Corbusier , which is based on the golden ratio and takes into account natural measurement relationships that occur in humans.

Realized residential units

The following five Unités d'Habitation were realized:

  • 1947–1952 Cité Radieuse in Marseille (length 137 m, width 24 m, height 56 ​​m), → location
  • 1950–1955 Cité Radieuse de Rezé near Nantes (length 108 m, width 19 m, height 52 m), → Lage
  • 1956–1958 Corbusierhaus in Berlin (length 157 m, width 23 m, height 53 m), → location
  • 1959–1961 Unité d'habitation de Briey in Briey (length 110 m, width 19 m, height 56 ​​m), → location
  • 1965–1967 Unité d'habitation de Firminy-Vert in Firminy (length 130 m, width 21 m, height 50 m), → location

Candidate as a World Heritage Site

In January 2008, did France 14 buildings and facilities of Le Corbusier in the tentative list of UNESCO register, including the Unité d'habitation in Marseille. Such a procedure is a prerequisite for applying for recognition as a World Heritage Site at a later date . In this case, however, this happened at the same time: under the leadership of France and with the participation of the Fondation Le Corbusier , these fourteen and initially nine works by Le Corbusier from six other countries were named "The urbanistic and architectural work of Le Corbusier" ( French Œuvre urbaine et architecturale de Le Corbusier ) nominated for inclusion as a World Heritage Site. Despite having been revised and reduced to 19 objects in the meantime, this candidacy did not find a majority of the World Heritage Committee at its annual meeting in June 2011. A new revision was submitted in 2015 and decided on July 17, 2016 at a meeting in Istanbul . 17 objects from seven different countries have been included in the world heritage status.

museum

In the Musée des Monuments français in Paris there is a full-size , two-story replica of an apartment in the Cité Radieuse in Marseille.

literature

  • Christina Haberlik: 50 classics. 20th century architecture . Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 2001. ISBN 3-8067-2514-4
  • Le Corbusier's residential unit "Typ Berlin" - facsimile of the original edition from 1958 with an updated appendix, WEG Corbusier-Haus, Förderverein Corbusierhaus Berlin e. V. (Ed.), JOVIS Verlag Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86859-005-0
  • "Typ Berlin" - The Corbusierhaus in Charlottenburg , photographs by Bärbel Högner , Hans E. Roth (ed.), JOVIS Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-86859-004-3
  • Katrin Eberhard: Machines at home. The mechanization of living in the modern age . gta Verlag, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-85676-276-6
  • Laura Stillers: Between space and function. The proportionalities of the Unité d'Habitation by Le Corbusier . In: INSITU. Zeitschrift für Architekturgeschichte 6 (1/2014), pp. 117–132.

Web links

Commons : Unité d'Habitation  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inauguration de la Cité radieuse de Le Corbusier, October 14, 1952
  2. ^ L'œuvre architecturale et urbaine de Le Corbusier . Entry in the tentative list of UNESCO on their website, accessed on April 10, 2014 (French)
  3. ↑ UNESCO dossier Le Corbusier signed in Paris . Press release of the Swiss Federal Office for Culture, January 30, 2008, accessed on April 7, 2014
  4. ↑ Joseph Hanimann: All or not at all. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 29, 2011, accessed on April 7, 2014
  5. ↑ Le Corbusier houses in Stuttgart are world cultural heritage. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 17, 2016, accessed on August 11, 2016
  6. ^ The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement. Entry of the collection comprising 17 buildings in the World Heritage List (as of August 12, 2016)