Context

Weber has employed archival and library research and wider explorations into the history of Briey in this study. Joseph Abram and Guy Vattier’s book Le Corbusier à Briey: Histoire Mouvementée d’une Unité d’Habitation (2006), co-written with the former mayor, is currently the only published book specifically addressing the political turmoil surrounding the near demolition of the Unité.

The Unité principle came to represent a new housing typology in which the singular architectural form is enriched with the services and facilities expected of a modern city. This formed a slow development of thought, the theoretical basis of which dated back to Le Corbusier’s aspirational plans for the Cité-jardin vertical (vertical garden city), which was indirectly influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Letchworth Garden City and his book Garden Cities of To-morrow: Urban Planning (1902). For Le Corbusier, the figureground relationship of the garden city would be further polarised into a continuous landscape, a ‘garden ground’, lightly touched by high-density urbanised forms, or housed cities, elevated on pilotis.

The high-density Ville Contemporaine – an unrealised city for three million inhabitants –designed by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret in 1922, was a key step in the formalisation of this agenda. Soviet communal housing projects were of particular interest, specifically the Narkomfin Building in Moscow designed in 1932 by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis. Of the Unités, the original Marseilles project, completed in 1952, is lauded as a successful housing prototype. Its diverse internal programme includes shops, educational facilities, a public hotel and a restaurant. In keeping with the concept of a ‘stacked urbanism’, these services were organised around interim floors designated as internal ‘streets’. Apartments with stateof-the-art interiors are arranged around these streets, including stairs designed by Jean Prouvé. The apartments feature fitted wardrobes, sliding partitions to connect or divide spaces, and bespoke ironmongery. All of these elements were integrated into the building and were not intended for removal.

Of interest was Philippe Boudon’s 1979 post-occupation study, Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited. For this study, Boudon engaged with the residents of Quartiers Modernes Frugès (QMF) – a workers’ accommodation complex in Pessac consisting of 50 modernist houses, designed by Le Corbusier almost 40 years prior to Briey – and considered what it means to adapt signature modern architecture. Lived-In Architecture touches on many of this study’s initial questions. The residents in Pessac have made a variety of modifications over time, from closing-up open spaces on the ground floor to transforming terraces into habitable spaces (18). Le Corbusier commented on these developments: ‘You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong’ (Boudon 1969). This reiterates and raises questions regarding Le Corbusier’s attitude towards the inhabitant while he was designing the Unité, given the similarities in their socialist agendas and specific target demographic. Boudon’s study was reassessed in Ada Louise Huxtable’s 1986 essay Architecture, Anyone?, which questions previous critiques of the project’s success as potential misinterpretation – Boudon himself states that an aim is objective in his reflection of the project – and thereby presents an alternative and more favourable viewpoint on resident’s adaptations and the resilience of Le Corbusier’s intent. Boudon’s study was later discussed in Fred Scott’s On Altering Architecture (2007).

17

17 Original site plan for Briey, 1956. The Unité was planned as part of a wider development, featuring shops, a cinema and housing. Most of these plans remain unrealised, however, leaving the Unité in an isolated position.

18

A contemporary project that echoes many of the parameters of Briey is Jean Nouvel’s Nemausus 1 HLM housing project in Nimes, built in 1987 (19). Nouvel fought with the developer to be more generous with the volume of the individual apartments, eventually making them 30% bigger as a trade-off for delivering a 30% cheaper building. The tenants were obliged to sign an agreement preventing them from decorating, thus retaining the space and structure as Nouvel intended, including bare concrete walls, exposed services and fake builder’s markings. Over time, however, they started to personalise their spaces, decorating walls, carpeting floors, using curtains to screen off private areas and cornices to blur the line between wall and ceiling.

Weber also looked at similar photographic studies in his research. For MvRDV’s WoZoCo housing complex project, the new-build interiors were photographed before and shortly after occupation. The architects Lacaton & Vassal, meanwhile, have conducted photographic studies of their refurbished apartments not long after project completion. Weber’s study departs from both of these examples by reflecting on several decades of transformation.

18 Comparative images of the houses at Pessac before (top) and after (bottom) occupation. 19 (overleaf) Richard Copans and Stan Neumann, Nemausus 1—A housing project of the 80s, 1995. A selection of stills show various post-occupancy modifications.

19