Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille contains 337 apartments.
Known locally as La Cité Radieuse, the building was commissioned by France’s Ministry of Reconstruction after the Second World War. It was designed between 1945 and 1952 to address the post-war housing shortage while testing a new model of collective living. The building’s apartments accommodate different household sizes and use 23 layouts.
Many units are duplexes, arranged around internal “streets” rather than conventional corridors. Le Corbusier imagined the structure as a vertical city: residents could live, shop and socialize within one large building. Its facilities included commercial spaces, communal amenities, a nursery school and a roof terrace.
The number 337 refers to apartments, not the building’s approximate population. Sources may give different figures for residents because occupancy changes over time; the building has been described as housing roughly 900 to 1,600 people. The Marseille Unité is also often cited as a foundational work of Brutalism, although “Unité d’Habitation” is a building type used for several Le Corbusier projects.