Le Corbusier’s monumental Cité Radieuse complex in Marseille, long the home of artists and writers, now plays host to a design project that has seen contemporary designers decorate and furnish apartment 50 to their own specifications. Its current incumbent is German designer Konstantin Grcic, who has filled it with his own signature, industrial-influenced furniture, and prints taken from the pages of a punk fanzine. Masterminded by Jean-Marc Drut, the project began five years ago. “I first proposed it to

Jasper Morrison, because the work he was doing at the time had such a clear relationship with Le Corbusier’s,” says Drut. After a year, the project is passed on to another notable designer: Morrison put forth the Bouroullec Brothers, who in turn proposed it to Grcic. Each approached the apartment on their own terms. “Grcic said the Bouroullec Brothers’ design fitted so seamlessly and peacefully into the space that he had no option but to stage a brutal intervention, and the punk aesthetic matches the Brutalist architecture of Le Corbusier,” says Drut. “Design is a vocabulary. Objects are like an alphabet and designers are trying to tell us something with their creations. We are learning a new language every time.”