In the spring of 2020 I planned on visiting the Unité d’Habitation, type Berlin – also known as Corbusierhaus. It is a cheaper and slightly altered version of the ‘original’ Unité d’Habitation in Marseille; a realisation of the architect Le Corbusier’s mass housing project manifesting his notion of a utopian city. I booked the tickets from Amsterdam to Berlin, scheduled the tour for April 13th (a Monday). You know the story. I didn’t go.
Loving Le Corbusier is a sort of beginner’s guide to architecture. An easy ‘How to Manual’ which will lead you down the road of expensive fees and long queues of tourists, where everyone competes on how to love his buildings the most intensely. I don’t particularly love Le Corbusier or his mission; it is incredibly flawed, modernist, and built on a system of oppression enforced in his architecture. There is a certain wonderful irony to the Berlin version. It is a mockery of the original, to be crude. A Northern European interpretation of French brutalist architecture, to be nationalistic.
Yet, it is because of all of its flaws, its rupture to the strict rules, its divergence, that I hold it so dear (despite never having been there). This walk has stuck with me so stubbornly because I was supposed to stand in front of this building next to the person I have been in love with for the past two years. Being located in two different European capitals was not considered an issue prior to this year. I was supposed to tell her how it has been compared to an ocean liner and a bodybuilder on taut legs. About how it relates to Charles Fourier’s apolitical utopia of the Phalanstere. How the original version has large sculptures on its roof. Of Calvinism, exercise and ritualistic models that Le Corbusier structured his building around. I wanted to cite those “beautiful grids become restricting bars”.
You access the building by the S-bahn or the U-bahn. It is built on the outskirts of the city, or at least the outskirts at its conception as every large European city is expanding. I imagine that after seeing the Corbusierhaus, we would have walked to the stadium erected for the 1936 Olympian Games in Nazi era Germany. A supposed symbol of wealth and extravagance, it embodies a cruel symbolism of perseverance. The architect (and Nazi) Albert Speer had planned for it to stand for the next thousand years. Pre-empting a beautiful demise, its ruins were planned out carefully.
I have scanned the area for places to eat. Google maps tells me the menus span from Indian to Italian. I zoom in on the nearby IKEA and wonder if I could talk her into going there.
Anna Seibaek
Loving Le Corbusier is a sort of beginner’s guide to architecture. An easy ‘How to Manual’ which will lead you down the road of expensive fees and long queues of tourists, where everyone competes on how to love his buildings the most intensely. I don’t particularly love Le Corbusier or his mission; it is incredibly flawed, modernist, and built on a system of oppression enforced in his architecture. There is a certain wonderful irony to the Berlin version. It is a mockery of the original, to be crude. A Northern European interpretation of French brutalist architecture, to be nationalistic.
Yet, it is because of all of its flaws, its rupture to the strict rules, its divergence, that I hold it so dear (despite never having been there). This walk has stuck with me so stubbornly because I was supposed to stand in front of this building next to the person I have been in love with for the past two years. Being located in two different European capitals was not considered an issue prior to this year. I was supposed to tell her how it has been compared to an ocean liner and a bodybuilder on taut legs. About how it relates to Charles Fourier’s apolitical utopia of the Phalanstere. How the original version has large sculptures on its roof. Of Calvinism, exercise and ritualistic models that Le Corbusier structured his building around. I wanted to cite those “beautiful grids become restricting bars”.
You access the building by the S-bahn or the U-bahn. It is built on the outskirts of the city, or at least the outskirts at its conception as every large European city is expanding. I imagine that after seeing the Corbusierhaus, we would have walked to the stadium erected for the 1936 Olympian Games in Nazi era Germany. A supposed symbol of wealth and extravagance, it embodies a cruel symbolism of perseverance. The architect (and Nazi) Albert Speer had planned for it to stand for the next thousand years. Pre-empting a beautiful demise, its ruins were planned out carefully.
I have scanned the area for places to eat. Google maps tells me the menus span from Indian to Italian. I zoom in on the nearby IKEA and wonder if I could talk her into going there.
Anna Seibaek