Vita activa: From Home to Factory. Two Round-trip Commutes in Le Corbusier and SANAA

This article examines how Le Corbusier and SANAA structure the three fundamental human activities identified by Hannah Arendt in her conception of vita activa — labor, work, and action — as expressions of the three dimensions of human existence: life, worldliness, and plurality. To ground this connection, the article traces two round-trip commutes that link life in collective housing and work in a factory. In the aftermath of World War II, Le Corbusier designed nearly simultaneously a hosiery factory in Saint-Dié and the emblematic Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Seven decades later, amid a fresh wave of social upheaval — the global economic crisis of the early 21st century — SANAA designed, also almost simultaneously, a furniture factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and a residential condominium on Avenue Maréchal Fayolle, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. In these paired projects, both architects envision the daily commutes of men and women transitioning between domestic and industrial spheres. The architectures — both domestic and industrial—embody the potential for a renewed world for these “half-dwellers, half-workers,” who actively scour their commutes and their architectures for the possibility of a new existence. While Le Corbusier’s hosiery factory, with its concrete structure, serves the domestic sphere of a modern man whose destiny transcends the limits of a single lifetime, SANAA’s architecture, with its delicate metallic curtain, symbolizes a new domestic and industrial life of a destiny that matches that of their lives. While the modern man embraced a vita activa integrating labor, work, and action within as a being-in-private, the contemporary man celebrates this vita activa as a continuous being-in-public.