【Notes】

Housing slab, raised off ground on sculpted legs.

t’s little wonder that Le Corbusier’s nine-storey edifice was nicknamed La Maison
du Fada or ‘house of the crazy’ in Provencal patois. Post-war overcrowding in east
Marseille called for desperate measures and Le Corbusier’s grand scheme, known as
the Unité d’Habitation, was to push thousands of local residents skyward in
self-contained units. The master plan also included the ‘Le Corbusier’ hotel
on the third floor.

Temporary residents are still welcome to make the 30-minute taxi ride from
Marseille airport to bed down in a true vision of the future. The 300-apartment
block retains heaps of original features, such as the Charlotte Perrian fitted
kitchens and huge comma-shaped lamps. Many of the hotel rooms are a little on
the small and spartan side but are as well kept as the rest of the building,
allowing you that brief taste of urban utopia.

The multi-coloured fa?ade is so painted to hide some dodgy concrete,
but Corbusier did have the foresight to surround the Unité with green
open spaces and trees, and the rooftop garden offers corking views of
the Med. Thanks to another natty piece of urban planning, the hotel is
only four Metro stops away from the centre of town.

Architecture enthusiasts (and there are a hell of a lot of them staying
at Le Corbusier) can soak up Marseille’s redeveloped vieux port area
before heading off on the airport shuttle bus from St Charles station.
Finally, ten points if you spot a polo-necked designer in Le Corbusier’s
bar: these trendy types are allegedly snapping up apartments here in droves.

【Commentary】

Le Corbusier’s most influential late work was his first significant postwar
structure—the Unitè d’Habitation in Marseilles of 1947-52. The giant,
twelve-story apartment block for 1.600 people is the late modern counterpart
of the mass housing schemes of the 1920s, similarly built to alleviate a
severe postwar housing shortage. Although the program of the building is
elaborate, structurally it is simple: a rectilinear ferroconcrete grid,
into which are slotted precast individual apartment units, like ‘bottles
into a wine rack’ as the architect put it. Through ingenious planning,
twenty-three different apartment configurations were provided to
acccommodate single persons and families as large as ten, nearly
all with double-height living rooms and the deep balconies that form
the major external feature.

—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman.
Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p541.

>>> http://www.hotellecorbusier.com/

=====
Le Corbusier-Villa Savoye
=====
Architect:Le Corbusier
Location:Poissy, France
Date:1928 to 1929
Building Type:House
Construction System:concrete and plastered unit masonry
Style:Modern

【Notes】

An early and classic exemplar of the “International Style”, which hovers above a grass plane
on thin concrete pilotti, with strip windows, and a flat roof with a deck area, ramp, and a
few contained touches of curvaceous walls.

【Commentary】

“Unlike the confined urban locations of most of Le Corbusier’s earlier houses, the
openness of the Poissy site permitted a freestanding building and the full realization
of his five-point program. Essentially the house comprises two contrasting, sharply
defined,yet interpenetrating external aspects. The dominant element is the square
single-storied box,a pure, sleek, geometric envelope lifted buoyantly above slender
pilotis, its taut skin slit for narrow ribbon windows that run unbroken from corner
to corner (but not over them, thus preserving the integrity of the sides of the square).”

Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture:
from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p530.

The Five Points of a New Architecture

1.The Pilotis
2.The roof gardens
3.“Free” plan
4.The horizontal window
5.The free facade

“The Five Points of a New Architecture” were formulated by Le Corbusier(1887-1965) in 1927,
in order to give a theoretical basis for the fundamental principles of the Modern Movement.
The Villa Savoye is the perfect illustration of this theory.

Address：

Villa Savoye
82 rue de Villiers
78300 Poissy
01 39 65 01 06 – vox
01 39 65 19 33 – fax
villa-savoye@monuments-france.fr
www.monum.fr

=====
paris
=====

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,
then wherever you go for the rest of your life,
it stays with you,
for Paris is a moveable feast.

－－Hemingway, 1950

如果你夠幸運時
年輕在巴黎待過
那麼巴黎將永遠跟著你
因為巴黎是一席流動的饗宴

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there,
not even poverty, nor sudden money,
nor the moonlight,
nor right and wrong, nor
the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

－－”A Moveable Feast”

然而，巴黎是一座古老的城市，
而我們卻還年輕。
這裡沒有一件事是簡單的，
甚至連我們的貧困、
突來的一筆錢、
月光、
或正確或錯誤，
還有躺在你身邊，
在月光下熟睡的人的呼吸聲，
都沒那麼簡單。

－－《流動的饗宴》p.083