The roof
Sculptural stacks, a running track and a horizon of hills.
vincent desjardins — CC BY 2.0 · Matthias Süßen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Carl Ha — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Peter Christian Riemann — CC BY-SA 4.0
Partly. The **interior street and the roof** are usually open to visitors during the day without a ticket, and that is enough to understand the building and see the best of it. The **apartments are lived in** and can only be entered on a guided tour booked in advance through the Marseille tourist office, which includes a show flat furnished in period pieces. Behave as a guest: don't photograph inside the residential corridors and keep your voice down — this is people's home, not an exhibition.
If architecture interests you, then yes without hesitation — this is one of the most important buildings in the history of modern architecture and nothing in Marseille resembles it. If you are on a short visit taking in only three or four sights, perhaps not: it sits about five kilometres south of the centre, and the round trip plus the visit eats half a day. You can combine it with Parc Borély and Château Borély, relatively nearby in the south, to make the journey pay.
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An enormous concrete slab lifted on thick pillars in southern Marseille: this is the **Unité d'Habitation**, the most famous apartment building of the twentieth century, designed by **Le Corbusier** and completed in 1952 to house people displaced by the war. Its idea was that housing is not stacked boxes but a **vertical village**: 337 apartments in an interlocking plan that gives many of them two storeys and windows on both sides, with an interior street of shops, a café and a small hotel — still operating — running through the middle of the building. The material is raw poured concrete carrying the imprint of its timber shuttering: *béton brut*, the phrase that later gave Brutalism its name. The roof is what stops visitors: an open deck with ventilation stacks shaped like sculpture, a running track, a children's pool, and the hills of Marseille on the horizon. A contemporary art centre now programmes exhibitions up there. UNESCO inscribed the building on the **World Heritage List in 2016**, within a nomination gathering Le Corbusier's work across seven countries. Note that it is **a genuine residential building**, not a museum: people live here now, which is why visiting is limited to the public parts.
Sculptural stacks, a running track and a horizon of hills.
Shops, a café and a small hotel inside the building.
Raw concrete with timber imprints — the root of Brutalism.
280 Boulevard Michelet, 13008 Marseille