L'école maternelle de l'unité, built in 1968, by Le Corbusier is a kindergarten and elementary school located on the top two floors of a 19-story housing block planned as a utopian community in the working-class town of Firminy, near Lyon. The classrooms are organized along a long hallway, all oriented in one direction. The walls of the hallway, opposite the classrooms, are pierced with multi-colored windows scaled for children's height, a touch that adds a great deal of color and play of light to the interiors. Classrooms feature specific activity zones, delineated by the built-in furniture, including reading circles. Throughout, the architecture, fixtures, and all furnishings are scaled for the young students. The interiors are extremely well-suited for interactive, activity-based learning that fosters community.
Designer and Architect, Marcel Breuer (1902 - 1981) can be regarded as one of the most influential and important designers of the 20th century. As a young student at the Bauhaus Weimar, Breuer, who was Hungarian by birth, caught the eye with various furniture designs inspired by the Dutch De Stijl group. In 1925, at the tender age of only 23, he “invented” tubular steel furniture, a revolutionary development, to be considered his core contribution to the history of design. Breuer’s tubular steel designs, such as the famous Wassily armchair, the Bauhaus stool, or his various cantilever chairs are representative for the design of an entire epoch, and thus comparable only with Wagenfeld’s legendary table luminaire. In the shape of millions of copies they have long since taken a firm place among the great classics of Modernism. Yet it was not only tubular steel furniture that helped Breuer make an international splash. He was likewise a design history trail-blazer with his alu...


