Misreading Modernism

Last week (14/8-15/8/07) I traveled to Marseilles for the express purpose of visiting Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. Completed in 1952 after a protracted process of construction in the years directly following world war II, the building is one of the architect’s most instantly recognisable works. It is also perhaps one of his most misrepresented, at least in terms of current design culture. The building engages an overt formalism that has in many ways come to define popular conceptions of high-modernist aesthetics. Indeed, many of the shapes and forms present in the structure, particularly on the roof area, can be seen to echo through much ‘kitsch’ industrial design of the 1950s to 70s. It is, as theorist/artist Mark Lewis recently observed of modernist buildings, “almost already an image in both complicated and simple ways.” However, to engage with the building (and indeed the architect’s oeuvre) in purely aesthetic terms, as much contemporary design culture seems to do, is to create such a simple image. It is to ignore ideas that that are absolutely integral to the building’s creation. For Le Corbusier the building was to be the first in a community of structures that were to present a new ideal for living. An ideal, that in the architect’s words, sought to to balance “individual freedom and collective organisation”. The voice of history calls: form is never just form. So what of the building today? It is a slightly run-down, fully functioning apartment block in a unremarkable part of town that also caters for a modest flow of architourists. If it is not the most luxurious hotel in the world it sure can’t be beat as place to contemplate the complexities that accompany its image.