First look: French designers Marie & Alexandre move in for the summer to Marseille's Cité Radieuse

After six years, the door to faithfully restored ‘Apartment 50’ at Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, has opened to the public once more with an exhibition of collectible, experimental objects by French designers Marie & Alexandre. Inspired by the creative salons of the apartment’s original owner Lilette Ripert, who lived there from 1952 to 2000, today’s owners Jean-Marc Drut and Patrick Blauwart have invited designers such as Jasper Morrison, Pierre Charpin, Alessandro Mendini and a cohort of ECAL students to interpret the living space with a contemporary scenography every two years between 2008 to 2018.

Heralding the return of the format for 2024, Marie Cornil and Alexandre Willaume’s ‘playground’ of pieces from lamps, to table and tiles explore a reinvigoration of relationships between design, craft and manufacturing, curated in collaboration with Paris-based gallerist Maxime Bouzidi of signé, who has hosted five exhibitions of the emerging designers’ works over five years. After meeting in 2018 at the 13th Design Parade in Hyères and then working together for the Bouroullec brothers, Marie & Alexandre have embarked on a mission to discover new materials and techniques across France from glassblowing to ironworking.

A series of the resulting prototypes decorate the apartment with an organic yet modular language: a textured glass table encasing circular holes is reminiscent of Prouvé’s prefabricated panels, and the iron frames of a chair, lounge chair and table were developed during a residency at the Lycée Jean Monnet in Moulins this year. A series of local Salerne red clay tiles, carved with a colourful language of simple patterns, were manufactured at the Alain Vagh tile factory in Draguignan. They are a nod to the apartment’s inlaid concrete balconies with furniture designed by Charlotte Perriand. Elsewhere, lamps constructed of glass reflectors on cylindrical ceramic bases were cast and pressed at the Verrerie de Biot.

The pair thrive in a perpetual state of discovery at ‘beginner level’ – embracing mistakes and imperfections, and remaining physically and emotionally connected to the tools, machines and practitioners with whom they work. Alexandre admits that, like the irregular edges of each form, this style of working isn’t always smooth; it’s about building trust, negotiating time and energy, and often working weekends when machines are available outside of commercial product cycles – an interesting reflection on the relationship between humanism and industrial prefabrication in the 21st century, at a landmark building that addressed those same topics in the last century.

For gallerist Bouzidi, Marie and Alexandre represent an emerging generation of designers who approach the industries of craft and manufacturing with humility, eschewing ego for inclusivity and giving credit where it is due – all resulting in a ‘material energy’ that reflects the embedded emotional relationships and stories. As the sun sets at the Cité Radieuse, the light bounces through the primary colours of a modular glass unit created in collaboration with Glas Italia, and Marie and Alexandre, Drut and Bouzidi welcome collaborators and visitors into Apartment 50, continuing the legacy of conversation between design, craft and production.

signé & Jean-Marc Drut present Marie & Alexandre at La Cité Radieuse, Apartement 50. July 15th to August 15th, 2024. The exhibition will then travel to Paris, where it will be adapted for the gallery and presented at the launch of Paris Design Week from September 5th to October 21st, 2024.