Happy Hive

Marseille, a city of small buildings (the largest is nine stories) had never seen anything just like it. Neither had any other town. Under construction last week was a glassy 17-story apartment house, perched lightly on stilts, to stand in the middle of an eight-acre park (traffic will move freely underneath it). To get this modernity built, France's Ministry of Reconstruction had set aside $3 million and lifted all rationing on concrete and steel.

Seldom before had Swiss-born Architect Le Corbusier had such cooperation: his plans had usually been considered so radical and so costly that few were ever translated into buildings. The French Government was smoothing the way for Le Corbusier because it believed that other French architects could use the building as a model. For Le Corbusier it was "the first step towards the radiant city of tomorrow."

The building will house 1,500 tenants (330 families) in spacious duplexes, all prefabricated and slipped into place like drawers into an empty desk. The outer walls will be mostly glass, and finlike shades will protect them from the Mediterranean sun, a stunt Le Corbusier had tried in Rio de Janeiro. "Just as the human eye can stand the sun because it has eyelashes," says Le Corbusier, "rationally oriented sunbreaks will admit only those rays that bring pleasant warmth and cheer in every season."

17th Floor for Growing. On the roof, tenants will be able to run races around a 120-meter track, swim in a pool, lounge in a solarium. Children can do most of their growing up on the 17th floor: romp in a nursery, play games in a playground, train in a gymnasium, or go to classes in a schoolroom. On the seventh floor, parents can shop, eat at the restaurant or drugstore, visit the barber or clinic. "Relieved of the two great burdens of heavy housework and the care of children," Le Corbusier explains, "the family will live a happy existence. There will be no quarrels between neighbors and no divorces in my house."

A onetime watch-engraver's apprentice, wry, wiry Le Corbusier (born Charles Edouard Jeanneret) had designed his first house by the time he was 18. When no one would listen to his new theories ("Men are so stupid, I'm glad I'm going to die"), he shocked them into attentiveness. "Should we burn down the Louvre?" he once asked Paris. He told New Yorkers that their skyscrapers were too small. Rome's architecture, he said, is "the damnation of the half educated."

Vertical City. Last week, peering excitedly through thick, black-rimmed glasses at the models for his new building, he was still blasting away at everybody who didn't see things his way. "Garden cities are just a waste of space. Rows of houses, each one cutting off the view from the next, and always too far away from where people work. Skyscrapers are veritable prisons. They suffocate their inmates, deprive them of sun and air. A vertical city of glass and steel, open to the sun, is the ideal. Some people think I want human beings to live like bees. But how do they know whether bees are not-happier than men?"

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