Five Unité d’Habitation buildings were built based on Le Corbusier’s designs. The best-known is the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, completed in 1952 and commissioned as postwar housing for roughly 1,600 residents.
The other four were built at Nantes-Rezé, Briey, Berlin, and Firminy. Together, these projects adapted Le Corbusier’s idea of a self-contained “vertical garden city,” with apartments, shared corridors, shops, communal facilities, and roof-level amenities concentrated within one large structure.
A common mix-up is counting only the four buildings usually listed as the principal Unités d’Habitation, excluding Firminy’s later Maison de la Culture or confusing related projects with the residential buildings themselves. The canonical count of completed Unité d’Habitation buildings designed by Le Corbusier is five.