The clockmaker

How Le Corbusier's visit to Greece inspired L'Unité d'Habitation in Marseille

This is a work-in-progress from a longer work about the origins of modern architecture. As a result, I’ve put it behind the paywall as the final (and belated) entry in my Marseille travel miniseries. Le Corbusier’s visit to Mount Athos in Greece inspired his design for the L’Unité d’Habitation, the large-scale modern housing that became the model for housing projects across the world, but usually replicated in inferior quality and terms.

L’Unité d’Habitation, as seen in 2016. (© Harrison Blackman, 2016)

One afternoon in 1911, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret sat aimlessly aboard a Constantinople-based steamer bound for Piraeus, Greece. In his boredom, Jeanneret climbed the ropes of the ship and looked out onto the sea. As evening approached, the ship’s chef brought up dishes of fried octopus from Mycenae. At night, Jeanneret slept on the deck, under the stars, wrapped within the folds of a Romanian rug he had purchased at a monastery in Mount Athos. “What sweeter litany can there be than that of the bow waves slapping against a hull vibrating with the ship’s engines,” Jeanneret wrote in his journal, expressing more interest in the ship than the Aegean. The comment was fitting, considering the direction his life would take. Still, he was haunted “by a dream, a yearning, a madness.”

A few days before, at the port of Thessaloniki, 800 bulls were loaded onboard and shoved into stockades. As Jeanneret described in his diary:

The joints of the crane grated; the powerful hook dropped rapidly down to their heads. Quick, a running noose around the horns, brief command, the hook is taken up again carrying away that enormous mass of meat hung by its horns… the bull arrived at the end of the hold and fell on its back, rolling its bewildered eyes. It hardly had time to recover when, seized by the ring in its muzzle, it was firmly fastened.

Jeanneret recorded these events dispassionately. He was unconcerned for the plight of the bulls. In later years, he would adopt an attitude in favor of machines, of control. He would design houses as machines for living. Maybe his “machines” were not so cruel as the method by which the bulls were treated, but his concept had a similar result in mind.

A tall, bony man, Jeanneret was an unlikely candidate to become the first modern celebrity architect. The 24-year-old Swiss was the son of a clockmaker, though the old man was not expert in the inner workings of clocks. Rather, the elder Jeanneret decorated their surfaces. It was a profession which had more in common with Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s destiny than he probably would have liked to admit.