RESEARCH The Unité d'Habitation (French literally "Housing Unity" or "Housing Unit") AFTER is the name of a modernist residential housing designed by Le Corbusier with the collaboration of RESEARCH painter-architect Nadir Afonso. The concept formed the basis of several housing developments designed by him throughout Europe Existing with this name.

Social In the block's planning, the architect heavily drew Condensers on his study of the Soviet Communal housing project, the Narkomfin Building.

Unité d'Habitation RESEARCH Cité Radieuse The first and most famous of these buildings, also AFTER known as Cité Radieuse (radiant city) and, informally, as La Maison du Fada (French - RESEARCH Provençal, "The Lunatic's House"), is located in Marseille, France, built 1947-1952.

Existing The idea to build the Cité Radieuse is the result of a research program that Le Corbusier oversaw for Social almost twenty-five years. The aim was to find a Condensers new architectural response to the problem of collective housing at a time when France was experiencing a severe housing shortage.

According to Le Corbusier, the Unité d’Habitation creates a social space in which the individual and the collective are equally balanced. The central idea of the model remains simple: it’s to build on artificial grounds individual flats that are placed within the logic of a collective structure. The building itself stands on stilts. The way in which the Unité is organized and the integrated services it offers are meant to enrich social life in the building. By doing so, Le Corbusier invents a town object that transcends the ordinary functions of housing.

Main goals of the idea considering social aspect: ?an attempt at radical renewal of the traditional block structure on a spatial and functional level ?providing the perfect residence for a family, while facing the sun, the surrounding space and nature in silence and solitude. Unité d'Habitation RESEARCH Cité Radieuse Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation are its 1,600 AFTER residents, 337 lodgings (of 23 different types) and a series of equipments or services such as a RESEARCH nursery school, hotel with restaurant and bar, shops (including a laundry, bakery, butcher, pharmacy), real estate and commercial offices Existing and gymnasium, open air theater and running track. The Unité is 137 meters long, 24 meters Social wide and 56 meters high. It has 18 floors and a Condensers sun deck roof-terrace with a swimming pool and an unobstructed view of the Mediterranean.

Inside, corridors “streets” run through the centre of the long axis of every third floor of the building, with each apartment lying on two levels, and stretching from one side of the building to the other, with a balcony.

Unlike many of the inferior system-built blocks it inspired the Unité is popular with its residents and is now mainly occupied by middle-class professionals.

http://www.marseille-citeradieuse.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://karrick-studio3.blogspot.com/

Unité d'Habitation RESEARCH Le Corbusier's utopian city living design was repeated in four more buildings with AFTER this name and a very similar design. The other Unités were built in Nantes-Rezé RESEARCH 1955, Berlin-Westend 1957, Briey 1963 and Firminy 1965.

Existing The building inspired several housing complexes including the Alton West Social estate in , London, and Unités Condensers Park Hill in . These buildings in Berlin have attracted a great deal of criticism. Other, more successful, manifestations of the Unité include Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's Barbican Estate (completed 1982), Gordon Tait's Samuda Estate, (1965) and Ernõ Goldfinger's (1972), all in London.

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Alton West http://www.open2.net/modernity/ Trellick Tower http://architecture-buildingconstruction.blogspot.com/ Unité d'Habitation