Monday 20 February 2012

Unité d'Habitation Marseille


Wow! A year off blogging. Oh well... I’ve been busy, I swear. Working on my first graphic novel which will be published this year! So hopefully now will have more time to upload stuff that is long overdue.
Let’s start with something I did last week! This illustration is part of a series of 6 postcards I submitted to Bauhaus: Art as Life, a competition at the Barbican. This one is inspired by the Unité d’Habitation Marseille by Le Corbusier. It is not really a Bauhaus architect, but his work pushes forward the Bauhaus principles of Modernist architecture and links it to Brutalism.
Christened as ‘Cité Radieuse’ this one is the first of a series of residential housing developments that he designed to ‘improve the living conditions for the residents of crowded cities’. This one in Marseille is a more realistic outcome to the urban megalomania of the ‘Ville Contemproraine’ planned for Central Paris. It comprises 337 apartments arranged over 12 stories and it is informally referred as ‘La Maison du Fada’. The madhouse.
Le Corbusier didn’t know that this ‘unité’ likes eating cars!

See the original building here.

No comments:

Post a Comment