Corbusian space and urban corpus: the Unité d’habitation in Marseille and the Bastide town of Monpazier

Abstract

Le Corbusier’s multi-layered understanding of corporeality evolved through successive appropriations and dismissals of contrasting theories, experiences, and paradigms. In his unpublished manuscript La Construction des villes (1910), he enthusiastically endorsed Camillo Sitte’s conception of space as an emanation of the human body, predicated solely on its physiological effect; and he dismissed urban structures that are legible in plan but not sensorially comprehensible as irrelevant. However, in Urbanisme (1925) he polemically inverted his earlier position, deriding Sitte’s physiology and exhorting the virtues of rational planning and pure geometry dissociated from the human body. Intriguingly, Le Corbusier’s reference to the Bastide town of Monpazier (1284) in Urbanisme and the photographs that he archived suggest the third reading of corporalité, with a nuance and ambiguity that transcends either of his earlier polemical positions. The medieval founders of Monpazier conceived of the city as a substitute for the political body of their king. Monpazier is experienced both as a singular, cohesive urban corpus and as an agglomeration of separate houses. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947–1952) extends this genealogy of twofold readings. While the Unité confronts its visitors as a standing, singular corpus of a vertical city, its façade exposes a diagrammatic representation of its urban assemblage of maisonettes.