STORP WEBER ARCHITECTS
A REGISTER OF USER ADAPTATIONS
Introduction
Over the years, social and economic decline have led to periods of abandonment and partially squatted re-occupation for Briey. It has been overlooked as an architecturalartistic work as many of its fitted interior furnishings have been stripped out, sold or consumed as firewood. Due to its social housing status, last-minute cost cuts and political manoeuvres, the variety of internal programmes envisioned by Le Corbusier were never actualised, which resulted in a remote residential building with few support services. In addition to this, there was a decline in the local economy due to the closure of iron ore mines in the region not long after construction. This created financial difficulties for the project and its community, and by 1982 the Unité was mostly abandoned. Since then, parts of the building have been renovated as affordable housing and it has also been partially listed as a heritage site to save it from demolition; in 1993, the façade, roof, gantry, hall, Première Rue and apartments 101, 116, 128, 131–4 were registered as historical monuments. The façade and roof of the former boiler room and its portico are inscribed with ‘Heritage of the XXth century’. Today, it is largely occupied by a diverse community with varying attitudes towards its status as an original ‘Le Corbusier’.
This study is an attempt to engage with the story and transformation of the Unité d’Habitation, Briey-en-Forêt, a historically overlooked yet symbolically important project by Le Corbusier; a Swiss-French architect and key proponent of architectural modernism. Completed in 1961, Briey was one of five Le Corbusier multi-storey housing projects alongside: · Marseilles (completed 1952) · Nantes-Rezé (completed 1955) · Berlin (completed 1957) · Firminy-Vert (completed 1965) The ideal Unité format was inspired by the compact self-sustaining idea of the cruise ship and was designed in accordance with Le Corbusier’s views on the ‘house’, described in Vers une Architecture as ‘a machine for living in’ (Le Corbusier 1927). Within this collection of essays, Le Corbusier describes how modern dwellings, and to an extent the city, should operate. Based on a largely selfcontained mixed programme, the Unité aimed to incorporate many of the diverse services one might associate with a functioning town, including nurseries, shops, restaurants, community spaces, hotels and laundrettes. Briey was designed with 339 duplex apartments over 17 floors and six internal ‘streets’ (8). It was the only one of the Unités classified under the Habitation à loyer modéré (HLM) rent-controlled housing scheme. The building was not, however, realised to the same standards of construction or mixed programmes of occupation as its siblings, with André Wogenscky – a long-standing collaborator of Le Corbusier’s – commenting that it ‘was not good, neither geographically nor economically, or sociologically’ (Abram and Vattier 2006).
9 Original drawing by Le Corbusier of the roof, 1960. The proposed design features a nursery and a running track. These did not come to fruition, however, and the roof remains unused to this day.
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