I love seeing these little Invaders all over Marseille. They are everywhere — and usually in a place where you’d be looking even if it wasn’t there (see above). I just learned that there’s also a game you can play with them called Flash Invaders. The way it works is that you earn points every time you come across one and snap a photo. I haven’t been playing. But even without that, they are a lot of fun to discover. I see them as 100% public art and I wish we had something similar in Toronto.

I have written about Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille many times before on the blog. It is one of the most influential multi-unit buildings of the 20th century. For better and for worse, it inspired a generation of architects. But up until this afternoon, I had yet to actually see it in person. Now that I have, here are 3 takeaways.

The corridors throughout the building were thought of as “streets” in a vertical village. Because of this, each street had a mailbox and each front door came equipped with an elaborate delivery system. The large curvy thing pictured above was for general deliveries (mostly food I’m guessing). And the smaller door below was for ice block deliveries (i.e. refrigeration). In both cases, these doors could be accessed from inside the kitchen.

The two “streets” in the middle of the building were dedicated to commercial uses. And by being in the middle of the building, they were equidistant from residents living either above or below. I was told that when the building first opened in the 1950s, these streets were actually quite successful — filled with everything from bakeries to grocery stores. So you can imagine people running deliveries up and down to the other streets. But that quickly fell off as the retailing landscape developed in Marseille and in France. Today, this portion of the building houses mostly offices, art galleries, and specialty boutiques. Though there remains a widely-used 21-room hotel (pictured above).

To fully appreciate what the Cité Radieuse meant for housing in France, you kind of have to imagine what the rest of its stock was like at that time. The introduction of duplex and dual aspect units with modern kitchens and bathrooms and with views of the sea, represented meaningful progress at the time. But it is interesting to see how much ceiling heights have changed over the years. They’re really low here — well under 8 feet. And that is probably its greatest Achilles’ heel today.

If ever you happen to find yourself in Marseille, I would encourage a visit to the Cité Radieuse. Many of the things we do today started in this building. And there are some other ideas here that might also be worth bringing back.

I usually always have a laser distance meter in my bag. I use it when I’m on construction sites and I need to confirm important dimensions. But they can also be useful when you’re traveling and you want to appear as nerdy as humanly possible to the locals.

This is a typical older street in Le Panier area of Marseille, which is the oldest part of the city in probably the oldest city in France. Greek settlers colonized this area around 600, and at that time it was called Massalia.

There is one major street in Le Panier — la rue de la République — which will make you feel like you’re in Paris. It was pierced through in the late 19th century, around the same time that Paris was doing its large-scale urban renewal things.

But there remains lots of examples of what you see here: streets that are 12 to 13 feet wide from building face to building face. This is wider than your typical Toronto condo living room, but not by much.

There are, I guess, sidewalks on these streets. But most of them tend to be taken over by potted plants and other urban accessories. Everyone who uses these streets really just has to figure out how to share them.

It would be illegal to build this close and compact in most modern cities. Part of this is, of course, because modernity used to view this kind of urban form as being unhealthy and generally undesirable. Humans needed light, air, and space.

This is true. But we also like intimate urban spaces that put people first.