Unité d'habitation in Firminy-Vert, Modern residential building in Firminy, France
The Unité d'Habitation in Firminy-Vert is a concrete residential building 130 metres long, 21 metres wide and 51 metres high, with 17 levels and 414 duplex apartments. Seven interior streets serve the flats, which range from T2 to T6 and have windows on both sides. It stands on the Massaridier hill and is the largest of the five unités built worldwide.
Construction started in 1965 with Le Corbusier overseeing the work, but after his death that same year, architect André Wogenscky completed the building in 1967. It became a final expression of Le Corbusier's ideas about living in cities.
The building's name comes from Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation model, and residents still call it simply "l'Unité". A local radio station, Radio Ondaine, broadcasts from inside the block, and a post box serves the 414 duplex flats. The rooftop nursery school, closed in 1999, now houses part of the Erasmus Mundus MaCLands master's course of the University of Saint-Étienne.
The building rests on thick concrete pillars that create a generous space underneath, used as a parking area where visitors can walk through. This arrangement lets you see the structure and construction details up close as you move below the building.
The rooftop swimming pool was left without tiles, one of the compromises forced by a budget four times smaller than that of the Cité radieuse in Marseille. The building is the largest of the five Unités d'habitation worldwide, with 414 duplex apartments and a total floor area of 27,859 m².
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