Appartement 50, Marseille/France

Purchased and restored as a monument by the two enthusiasts Jean-Marc Drut and Patrick Blauwart, Appartement 50 has been regularly functioning as a platform for seminal design exhibitions since 2008. Students on the Product Design MA course at the university ECAL in Lausanne applied themselves with assiduity and enthusiasm to the challenge of developing various objects for the famous Appartement 50 at Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille. Among the twenty objects of the twelve students that featured in the exhibition, the ATLAS rug by Julie Bernard is outstandingly significant. This is due partly to its size – the rug measures 160 x 240 cm, taking up almost a quarter of the room’s surface area – and on the other hand to its considered approach to color, based on a combination of light grey, dark grey, beige, red and blue. These have not been combined into an abstract pattern, but surprisingly result in a graphically minimized section of the Marseille town plan.