The building where an entire city lives: from Le Corbusier to the Begich Towers case

In Whittier, a small town in southern Alaska nestled amongst the inlets of Prince William Sound and surrounded by glaciers, live 272 residents, at least 200 of whom inhabit in the same building, the Begich Towers Condominium.

The 14-storey complex stands out not really for its aesthetic qualities as for a certain military austerity: it was built between 1954 and 1957 as the Hodge Building, headquarters of the US Army Corps of Engineers. As early as 1943, Whittier had been chosen for its strategic location as a suitable site for a military port, and the Hodge Building provided 150 flats for military families, as well as a school inside it. When the 1964 earthquake and tsunami devastated the port, the Begich Towers remained largely undamaged, and from that moment it was decided to convert it into a civilian building, taking the concept of a self-sufficient building to the extreme: 196 residential units, a hospital, a hotel, a supermarket, a small church, a playground with an indoor swimming pool, a post office, a police station, and a launderette.

In a promotional video highlighting the benefits and comforts of community life at Begich Towers, residents generally feel reassured by the prospect of not having to leave the building for weeks on end; at least, the case of Whittier can be seen as a practical example of community organisation, particularly in relation to the harsh climatic conditions.

With a provocative association, one is simultaneously reminded of the cynicism of James G. Ballard in his 1975 novel High-Rise: at the centre of the tale, a block of flats like a sort of golden cage, inhabited ‘by a new social type, cool and unemotional, impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere’, disturbingly ‘free to behave in any way’ and to ‘explore the darkest corners they could find’.

What form have city-buildings actually taken? And above all, how did they come to take that form?

Architecturally, the question of the building-city has well-established origins, especially to the rationalist experiments of which the first ambassador can only be considered Le Corbusier. 
As early as 1922 with his project for a Ville contemporaine for three million inhabitants, Le Corbusier started from the urban macro scale to formulate a new housing utopia for the 20th century, based on the idea of the Immeuble-villa, the communal and potentially self-sufficient building. It will finally take full form with the Unité d'habitation in Marseille: in the super-block with Brutalist plasticity, 300 apartments of different sizes and all kinds of services are condensed, from laundry to hotel to school facilities, and woe betide the magnificence of the roof-terrace equipped with a gymnasium, swimming pool, solarium, children's play area and outdoor theater.

Le Corbusier’s ostentatious and universally replicable formula must necessarily be contrasted with the lesson of Alison and Peter Smithson, and their determination to transform the rationalist Master’s utopia into a social commitment: as early as the competition entry for the Golden Lane complex (1951–52), the building is conceived as social infrastructure, where Le Corbusier’s ‘rue intérieure’ loses its purely functional essence to become a space for social interaction, in the ‘streets-in-the-air’ that connect the various levels of the complex. But when the Smithsons attempt to apply this principle to a built project, the Robin Hood Gardens in London (1966–70, demolished in 2025), the outcome reveals the flaws of the realised utopia: an attempt of forced social integration driven by the high housing density proposed by the Smithsons (around 700 residents spread across 214 flats), whose expectations are inevitably disappointed; at Robin Hood Gardens, the only space for socialising to be embraced was the garden and the artificial hillock between the two residential blocks.

It is clear from these few archetypal examples that the concept of the city-building can only ground the very terms of its existence on a principle of contradiction: utopia, the source of architectural visions that are at times extreme, has often proved throughout history to be incompatible with the social, economic and political realities of urban contexts; yet it is precisely on this basis that architects and urban planners continue to foster the debate around this category of buildings.

In 1967, on the occasion of the Montreal Expo, Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie created the Habitat '67 project on the banks of the Saint Laurent River. Initially intended as a true urban segment, the cluster of precast concrete volumes houses 158 apartments evoking a (seemingly) spontaneous settlement, close to the imagery of the Mediterranean village that Safdie knows well from his origins. Again, amenities-including transportation-parking lots, stores, schools, and office space that make the complex self-sufficient, while a system of pedestrian streets leading to playgrounds and green spaces is provided at each level, vaguely recalling the Smithsons' streets-in-the-air.

From a futuristic Brutalist experiment, somehow in dialogue with the techno-compositional research of the Japanese Metabolists, and even earlier with the designs of Yona Friedman’s Ville spatiale, Habitat ’67 quickly transforms into a luxury residence, and it is no surprise that Safdie himself conceived, in a much more recent era, examples of urban buildings and infrastructure such as the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore (2009), or Raffles City in Chongqing (2019)—instant icons, no less—where the sole driving force seems to be hyper-capitalism, and where architecture bends its image to a soulless reiteration of its own forms (groups of towers linked by suspension bridges, where living becomes a luxury resort experience and where you can easily switch between a spot of gambling at the casino and a dip in the 57th-floor swimming pool, some 200 metres above the ground).

In the wake of the bridge city, Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing (2003-09), on the other hand, reintroduces a concept closer to living, the "porosity" already explored in MIT's Simmons Hall (Cambridge, 1999-2002), applied to a new model of urban space understood as an open city within a city. In the 8 towers, the now customary restaurants, hotels, kindergartens, and cinemas accompany the residences on the lower floors; between the 12th and 18th floors, however, a swimming pool, fitness room, cafeteria, gallery, auditorium, mini lounge, and a variety of other entertainment venues find space in those very skybridges that hold the complex together. This does not prevent that once again, behind the Cartesian grid of facades lurks the specter of the cluster-enclave, rather than a place that should "constantly generate relationships."

If we try to look back again, in Barcelona, we find Ricardo Bofill with his version of social utopia, the Walden 7. According to his Taller de Arquitectura, the name evokes Henry David Thoreau, who spent about two years of his life-between 1845 and '47-in a cabin built on the shores of Walden Lake, in Concord, Massachusetts, seeking an intimate relationship with nature and finding himself in a society where he did not feel represented.

Rather, Walden 7 appears as an impregnable fortress. In an article published in Architectural Digest in 1988, Vincent Scully calls it "a wildly expressionist apartment building, part Gaudi, part Archigram," and while finding reconciliation with the natural world is not exactly the first thought that comes to mind at the sight of the building,  the use of brick, the ceramics, and the repetition of architectural motifs, themes, and components underscore the attempt to recover the Catalan modernist architectural tradition, combined with the desire to experiment with a new urban housing model, still based on public interaction and the diversified offer of services, conveyed within a single building.

The examples may be more or less vituous, more or less subservient to the logic of capital, but one indisputable fact remains: the utopia of the city-building cannot escape constant confrontation with the customs and pragmatics of everyday life, even the most ordinary, lest it risk drifting into Ballard’s dystopia. And this discourse, which is enriched every year by new projects, shows no sign of coming to an end.

Opening image: Le Corbusier, Unité d'habitation, Marseille, France. Photo Denis Esakov from Flickr