Ville Radieuse

His utopian ideal formed the basis of a number of urban plans during the 1930s and 1940s culminating in the design and construction of the first Unité d'habitation in Marseille in 1952.

In the late 1920s Le Corbusier lost confidence in big business to realise his dreams of utopia represented in the Ville Contemporaine and Plan Voisin (1925).

The design maintained the idea of high-rise housing blocks, free circulation and abundant green spaces proposed in his earlier work.

Discussions at the fourth CIAM meeting on board the SS Patris bound for Athens were incorporated into Corbusier's book, The Radiant City (published in 1933).

It comprised four main elements: an administration area by the water in two slab blocks, convex and concave apartment blocks for the middle classes up on the slopes above the city, an elevated roadway on a north-south axis above the casbah and a meandering viaduct with a road on top meandering down the coast.

In 1933 in Nemours, North Africa he proposed eighteen Unité apartment blocks orientated north-south against a backdrop of mountains.

He proposed replacing all the existing buildings with one huge Cartesian Skyscraper equipped with living and working units.

When designing the layout for Brasília, architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were influenced by the plans for the Ville Radieuse.

[7] New Urbanists such as James Howard Kunstler criticise the Ville Radieuse concept for its lack of human scale and connection to its surroundings.