Unite dHabitation

Marseilles, France
It has been accurately claimed that Le Corbusiers most influential late work was his Unite dHabitation in Marseilles. The eighteen-story apartment building, universally admired by architects but unloved by the people who live in it, is the first realization it was followed by three others elsewhere in France and one in Berlin, Germany of the famous Swiss architects theories of urban design formulated twenty years earlier. It also expressed the socialist housing ideals of CIAM (in English, International Congresses of Modern Architecture), developed after 1928, and spawned imitations throughout the world. It was, although perhaps for the wrong reasons, an important architectural event. Between the early 1920s and the end of World War II, Le Corbusiers most significant work albeit theoretical was in urban planning. In published plans like La Ville Contemporaine for a population of 3 million (1922), the Plan Voisin de Paris (1925) that proposed replacing the historic city with eighteen superskyscrapers, and a spate of classless