World heritage status is being sought for the architect's entire oeuvre, writes RUADHÁN MAC CORMAICin Firminy
MORE THAN half a century after Le Corbusier sketched his modernist vision of a model town on the bare landscape of what was to become Firminy-Vert, the utopian spirit behind the plan is still hard to miss.
The panorama is more cluttered these days; there are new roads, new houses, and certainly more people than there were in the 1950s.
But in other respects the Franco-Swiss architect’s vision is intact. From the window of the beautiful, light-filled school that occupies the top floor of his bare concrete housing block, you watch children playing on the wide open green spaces directly below. In the near-distance is the slope-roofed Maison de la Culture, an inviting public meeting place, and next to it the municipal stadium with room for 4,000 spectators. Most distinctive of all is the Church of Saint-Pierre, which opened its doors to the public just five years ago — 40 years after the master’s death in 1965.
The past few days have been tense for the authorities in Firminy-Vert. Along with five other countries, France has applied to Unesco, the UN’s culture and education agency, for world heritage site classification to be conferred on Firminy and 18 other Corbusier sites around the world. If the two-year campaign is successful — Unesco’s decision is due today — it would be the first such designation for a 20th century architect’s work.
The most celebrated of Firminy’s buildings, with its square base topped by a truncated cone, is the Church of Saint-Pierre. It looks a little like a nuclear cooling tower, or perhaps a coal bucket — a reference to Firminy’s past as a grim, industrial working town. That impression of the place, which is situated in a valley of the Loire west of Saint Étienne, began to change in 1953, when an ambitious new mayor named Eugène Claudius-Petit was elected. He had met Le Corbusier on a trip to the United States in 1946 and later, as France’s minister of reconstruction, had endorsed the architect’s ideas on urban planning.
On becoming mayor of Firminy, Claudius-Petit set in train a major renewal project, recruiting a team of planners to create a “vertical garden city” on an open site outside the town. It became known as Firminy-Vert, in contrast to the Firminy “noir” of the 19th-century mining era. The architect died before most of his buildings were completed, but soon his model was winning praise as one of Europe’s most successful exercises in postwar planning.
Joël Le Scornet, an official at the local city hall, says Le Corbusier was one of the last representatives in a “utopian cycle” whose idea was “to create things that allowed for the fulfilment of human beings’ every need. Everything here, whether it’s housing or the cultural centre or the stadium or the church, are, for the people living here, exactly those things before anything else,” Le Scornet says. “Above all they’re sites of everyday living.”
The social experiment at Firminy did not prove entirely successful. The closure of factories in the industrial heartlands of Saint Étienne meant the population did not grow as fast as anticipated. The school is now a site for guided tours rather than learning. Only one of Le Corbusier’s towers was built, and it was soon surrounded by less elegant high-rises. As in many French suburbs, crime and poverty are serious problems.
And yet Firminy has managed to retain the feel of a laid-back village. “The atmosphere is good around here,” says David Philippon, who moved into the “Corbu” tower with his wife and two children in 2008. “Even if you don’t know people, it’s the sort of place where you would say hello on your way in. The older people say it was more like that before, but people are still surprised by it.”
Le Corbusier's ideas — living spaces adapted to human needs, the emphasis on fraternity and community in architecture, the idea of public spaces open to everyone — always had a special resonance in this region, Le Scornet remarks. It was here that French mutual insurance was born, and where the idealism of les trente glorieuses(the period of huge economic growth from 1945 to 1975) was most keenly felt. "This utopia, the idea of fraternity, is very much connected to the history of the region, and to the miners. It's our past, but it's also our future."
