On Making "Unité d'Habitation"
I did not set out to draw a building. I set out to draw an idea of how strangers could live together without disappearing into each other.
Le Corbusier believed that concrete could hold philosophy that a structural grid, repeated eighteen times over, could become a form of care. Each loggia in the Unité is identical in dimension and utterly singular in color. Red beside blue beside yellow beside green: not decoration, but a declaration that sameness and individuality are not opposites. The Modulor was his attempt to measure the human body against the universe, and then to let that measurement become a home. I find something almost devotional in that, architecture as an act of faith in the ordinary person's right to light, proportion, and dignity.
What moved me most, drawing this piece, was the building's relationship to the ground. It rests on pilotis, refusing to touch the earth directly, as if to say: the city belongs to everyone, so let it pass freely beneath the home of the few. That gesture lifting the private into the air so the public can remain whole below felt like a metaphor I wanted to hold onto as an artist. My own work often tries to do something similar: to elevate an intimate, individual vision without severing it from the shared world it rises out of.
In building this work, I wasn't reconstructing Marseille. I was reconstructing an argument that mass housing need not mean mass anonymity, that a grid can still sing, that a thousand lives stacked in concrete can remain, each one, a color of its own.