Marseille, France

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, we decided to stimulate our architecture senses and take a trip to Marseille in the south of France. A visit to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation was to be a highlight of the trip.

Except we didn’t plan it particularly well. At the time we went, my wife was pregnant with our first child and suffering pretty badly with morning sickness. During the course of our trip we barely ventured more than 1km from our AirBnB and for the most part, we stayed in bed. At the time Nicki Minaj’s ‘Starships’ song was newly released and was on almost constant repeat on one of the half dozen or so tv channels we had. This was hardly the culture we were looking for.

On the last day of our trip we planned a visit to the Unité and went to hop on a bus. But to further emphasis our bad planning, it was May 1st, Labour Day in France. Everything was closed and there was no public transport, or taxis. We had managed to take an architectural trip to Marseille and not see the Unité.

Some of what we did see, including Zaha Hadid’s CMA CGM Tower (we could see it from our apartment), is in the images below.