Dystopian times in utopian buildings — how Covid tested Modernist ideals
Will it be the model of the houses of tomorrow?” asked the Marseille newspaper La Provence in 1948, during the build of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, the influential Modernist concrete block that would be completed four years later with 337 apartments, in 23 different layouts, for 1,800 residents.
Gisèle Moreau moved into a second-floor split-level apartment with her parents in 1953, when she was 10. She would think of her school friends in detached homes with private gardens, and feel pity. At home in Le Corbusier’s project she had a whole world, a gang of neighbouring peers, allies in the indignities and milestones of childhood.
Sometimes, Moreau would sunbathe on the roof — a large communal space with a small pool — where, in August 1965, under cloudless blue, listening to a friend’s transistor radio, she learnt that Le Corbusier had died. Not long after, the dream of Modernism — of utopian villages in the sky, of machines for living, of the human condition being healed by new approaches to design — would end too. Now, most consider it a moment in time, a flawed hope that placed too much emphasis on industry.
Moreau, now in her seventies and a retired teacher, lives in the flat she grew up in. I visited her this summer and we drank lemonade and marvelled at her well-proportioned kitchen, originally designed by Charlotte Perriand.
When she was a girl, Moreau tells me, her mother rarely went outside the building. She would take her two youngest sons to the nursery at the top of the block, do the daily shop on the third floor, see friends. “You could find everything here,” Moreau says. “You really didn’t need to leave.” Even the building’s roof offered the chance to be outdoors without requiring that residents exit.
During the Covid lockdowns Moreau thought of her mother’s routine as she went through the same motions, up and down the same staircases. She still had that sympathy from girlhood, for those spending the pandemic in detached houses; too roomy, too solitary. Here, the architecture suited the conditions of a life contained.
After our meeting, when I left the block, the outside world felt cluttered, the lines unconsidered. Where was the symmetry, the rules?
Like many, I spent lockdown thinking about space, home, change. I stalked the property search website Rightmove. I rearranged furniture. I read articles about the effect of interiors on mental wellbeing, of cities on physical health.
I found myself fixating on my childhood and the strange, quasi-utopia where I spent weekends: Milton Keynes, a “new town”, dropped on to fields 50 miles north of London by the UK government in 1967. The goals were not far from Le Corbusier’s; a place for communities to flourish, for businesses to grow.
As a teenager I hung out in the belly of this vision, a shopping complex with slippery travertine floors and surprisingly magnificent plants. I browsed Kookai schoolbags I couldn’t afford. I bought my first make-up. I enjoyed the veneer of freedom. I would travel home through the grid of roundabouts and watch people existing together in apparent harmony.
In lockdown, I reflected on the ideals of it all. It felt naive. To dream of utopia, as the planners had, did not feel possible in the midst of a pandemic, especially given the likely follow-up was the chaos of climate change. How could one hope?
Before arriving in Marseille, I emailed an acquaintance who lives in the Unité to ask about the irony of spending dystopian times in a “utopian” setting. He replied that the pandemic had “proved the building’s utopian credentials”. He felt safe and happy there: “I wonder if those pillars were also built as a hedge against rising sea levels,” he wrote.
“The first lockdown was really putting the building to a test,” says another resident, Maxime Forest. He and his partner Laura Serra moved into the Unité d’Habitation three years ago, but have worked there since 2016, running their gallery, Kolektiv 318, on the third floor. Serra tells me that sometimes she feels that she is living in a philosophical project, an agenda, rather than a building.
“Our work is so much about Modernist aesthetics. But, at some point, we realised we were not living the true thing,” Forest says. He adds that he has reservations about Le Corbusier; the “male chauvinism”, the “pettiness”, the refusal to credit others. But he loves his home.
Serra recalls that during lockdown, a neighbour found love with a fellow resident she’d never met before; so many were using communal spaces such as the roof regularly for the first time.
It wasn’t all ideal, though — any architectural utopia relies on collaboration and consideration. At one point in lockdown, thumping music began leaking into Serra and Forest’s flat. And the design of the building meant it wasn’t easy to trace the source: each floor of the building is double height, with the duplex apartments slotting under and over each other. The front door next to yours does not necessarily lead to the rooms next door; so a noisy neighbour could be any number of people.
Eventually, exasperated, the couple sourced the plans for the building, and only then found the culprit.
Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation was an inspiration for London’s Barbican, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. Started in 1965 and comprising various buildings, it is now home to 4,000 residents. David McKendrick has lived there since 2006, most recently in Willoughby House. McKendrick, an art director, is attracted to the clean lines of Modernist architecture; the way the spaces make sense.
Yet recently, his young niece asked, “Uncle David, why do you live in an office?” Growing up in a semi-detached house, she struggled to understand the flat’s compact scale, the bustle outside, the concept of communal gardens.
McKendrick sometimes worries about a sense of “entitlement” among residents, a snobbery about keeping others out of their concrete oasis. He recalls disparaging comments about runners from outside using the walkways. At one point during lockdown, police were called when there were supposedly too many people in the gardens. A familiar sight was “a sea of Deliveroo drivers”, he says, their eyes wide with confusion as they wandered between blocks looking for the right entrance, signage or even a friendly face to help.
At points, things tipped into Ballardian territory, McKendrick says. Browse Barbican Talk — an online residents’ forum that is publicly viewable — and the cracks are evident. For every resident offering a good price on spare Vitsoe shelves, there is another complaining about others using “the soles of their shoes to press lift buttons”, a “rotten egg smell” drifting through vents or a “not very neighbourly noise”.
During lockdown, some Barbican dwellers left town for country piles, using the time to do building work on their empty flats; facelifts for post-pandemic bolt-holes. This irked those who remained.
“Imagine someone drilling with all this concrete, right as everyone else
has started working from home,” says McKendrick. One weekday, a neighbour messaged the Willoughby House WhatsApp group; he had an important Zoom call, could people hold off on the drilling? He messaged again: the call was starting. “He was getting more and more desperate,” says McKendrick. The deafening sound continued. The group alert pinged once more: “Bunch of pricks.”
Fellow Barbican resident and curator Eva Wilson has lived in Bunyan Court with her partner and children since 2017. In lockdown, she often pondered the “problematic” aspects of living in a gated community. “Utopia is based on exclusion,” she tells me over coffee in the Barbican’s restaurant.
Despite its density, the Barbican doesn’t encourage breaking out of conventional family bubbles, she says. She has been dreaming of somewhere with a more fluid sense of coexistence, where cooking, resources and childcare are shared; perhaps somewhere rural.
“Barbican’s experimental, but it’s conservative in its model of society. You don’t share communal spaces, not really. Everyone has their own place. And there is a lot of caretaking involved,” she says, referring to the car park attendants, cleaners and doormen who keep the estate going. “There is a different logic that applies to us, and to the people that work here.” Many of these workers fell ill with Covid.
The pandemic led Wilson to confront the idea that the Barbican seemed to be built with lockdown-like circumstances “as an ideal state of mind”. A hub of people staying safe while others toil: “the containment, the orderliness, self-sufficiency,” she says, “obviously it’s not self-sufficiency but it pretends to be.”
If other estates do not have the pleasant feel of the Barbican, it can be because they lack the same resources, or the same relatively wealthy resident profile. Andres Llopis, a father of three who lives in Ricardo Bofill’s Walden 7 in Barcelona — built in 1975 and named after the psychologist BF Skinner’s utopia-themed novel Walden Two — says that despite the hype around the building’s look and intentions, the reality of living there is like any other apartment block. Many residents don’t talk, he says, and any sense of unity has been diminished by social-distancing rules. Loneliness is “the main problem”, says Llopis.
In 2014, the artist Fritz Haeg sold his Modernist-style home in Joshua Tree, California, and bought Salmon Creek Farm, a 33-acre plot surrounded by forest in Albion, 150 miles north of San Francisco. The site had been a commune in the 1970s, founded by youths tired of mainstream consumer culture.
When the pandemic hit, it was a beautiful spring and Haeg worked outside, building an open-air kitchen and a dance floor. “I barely left the land. I grew my own food,” he says.
Haeg’s work has long addressed different ways of living. His “Edible Estates” project, which received a Tate commission in 2007, turned domestic lawns into edible landscapes, with the aim of making food production more visible and joyful.
When lecturing, he sometimes discusses the hubris of Modernism. “The problem is the assumption of starting over,” he says. “That you would take millennia’s worth of knowledge and throw it out the window and say we don’t need that, we can start from scratch, thinking that technology, industry, will save us.”
Recently, Haeg has been thrilled by a rush of people interested in being part of Salmon Creek. He thinks that for many, the pandemic has forced, if not a drive towards utopia, a drive towards inquiry; “a critical questioning of the systems that you’re in”.
A space that sits somewhere between Le Corbusier’s Modernism and Haeg’s retreat is Walters Way and Segal Close in south London. Conceived by architect Walter Segal in the late 1970s, the project involved 20 Lewisham residents being selected to build their own home, on plots provided by the council, under the guidance of Segal. He developed a timber-based construction system that was manageable for those with enough tenacity and a few helping hands.
One chosen resident was Dave Dayes, a yoga teacher, who still lives in the house. Of lockdown, he says, “I was in my own little utopia,” referring to his house as a magical “Himalayan cave”.
The house has seen Dayes through a lot: children, career changes, the illness and death of his wife. It has acted as a crèche, a hospital and a studio, as well as a home. “The house showed its ability to change,” he says, adding that he adapted the layout regularly. In his view, Walters Way works because it offered people confidence, autonomy and dignity.
“Walter used to say, ‘We can’t wait for the big boys to do it for us, we have to get people to do it for themselves. The first cut will be wonky, but you do it a number of times and it becomes straight.’”
Dayes has come to see utopia as being less about space itself, and more about the exchanges around or within it. Early on in lockdown, after the murder of George Floyd, Dayes, who is black, decided to help organise an online “yogathon” to raise money for the Stephen Lawrence Trust. Some 350 yogis took part.
“That felt like a utopian bubble,” he says. “All those people together.” It was as Segal suggested; individuals standing up for themselves, while working together. Bodies moving in rhythm, momentarily united.
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