ColourFeel recently curated a cultural deep-dive into France’s Mediterranean capital, Marseille.

The audience was the global communications team for a prominent fashion brand, who (like everyone lately) has found themselves running on fumes while trying to move adeptly with the fast-changing times.

Going in, I was inspired by architect Le Corbusier’s idea of “machines for living in” - a post-war architectural paradigm shift that questioned the very essence of life. At a time when we are being told that technology is on the precipice of another major time-jump, I geared every moment and encounter towards bigger questions such as: Are we still in the driver’s seat of our own destiny? Or, as many modern-day alarmists are asking: Are we back to being driven by forces beyond our control?

From our home base in Le Corbusier’s Cite Radieuse housing complex (which contains a time-capsule-coded hotel), the entire three-day experience unfolded as an immersive lesson on how to set boundaries as a direct response to so much virtual encroachment on every minute. With its fighting spirit of solidarity and resistance to over-working (readers take note: most of Marseille’s good restaurants roll down their shutters and take a break on weekends), our chosen city provided an instructive and admirable backdrop.

Marseille was also a three-day instruction on giving time to time, of learning how to protect our basic human needs, while also allowing space for joy, inspiration, and much-needed integration.

As always, I involved an inspiring local cast, from prolific artists and entrepreneurs to retailers and restauranteurs, all of whom brought the bigger story to life, sharing their elusive code on how to fuse life’s serious and structured side with the requirement for creative freedom.

Below, subscribers to The ColourFeel Dispatch can dip into the entire trip’s itinerary with a guide that contains three core sections: Fuel (food and drink), Places (culture & nature), and Faces (inspiring artists, entrepreneurs, and retailers).

As Le Corbusier himself once said, “space and light and order; those are the things that [people] need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.”

Rather than a clearcut equation, finding balance will always be more of a colourful quest. An open question that seeks to sate the soul over and over, from within and without.

This guide through Marseille is designed to illuminate that journey just a little further.

Enjoy.

Bienvenue à Marseille.

Welcome to this radiant city. An ancient Mediterranean port, Marseille is no stranger to the tides of change and friction. No wonder it has learned to so staunchly defend its way of life, to give time to time, to relish in the power of saying NON!

Many decades ago, two visionaries, the architect Le Corbusier and painter-architect Nadir Alonso, also shipped into town with a radical idea to re-imagine urban life. Built atop the detritus of a long period of industrialisation, war and devastating destruction, their proposal for more colourful, compact, vertical neighbourhoods offered a bold re-calibration of the work-life balance. Riffing on Le Corbusier’s ‘machines for living in’ concept, the residential complex Cité Radieuse brought some urgently modern questions to the fore. What is the machine? And, if we find ourselves living inside of it, does this machine exist to give us food and nourishment, or are we simply fuel for its grander plan?

Today, as we stand at yet another intersection of voracious virtual expansion, the assertive, sovereign spirit of the Marseillais provides the perfect spark to re-think our own futures. To define and defend our boundaries, to reinforce our own spirit of resilience.

This Guide unlocks Marseille with:

1 x Inspiring hotel to stay

6 x Eateries to fuel your own machine

6 x Places to enjoy culture & nature

6 x Faces of the city’s current creative curve

1 x Wellness spot (…it’s a Hammam)

**GUIDE CONTINUES BELOW**