In which city is the seminal Brutalist building Unité d’Habitation located? The best-known Unité d’Habitation is in Marseille, France.
Designed by Le Corbusier with collaborators including Shadrach Woods and George Candilis, the Marseille building was constructed between 1947 and 1952. It is also known as La Cité Radieuse, or “The Radiant City,” and became one of the most influential residential buildings of the twentieth century.
The project was conceived as a “vertical village.” Its apartments are arranged in a large concrete structure raised on pilotis, with internal streets, shops, a hotel, a restaurant and communal facilities. The building contains hundreds of apartments in multiple layouts, combining private homes with shared amenities.
Its rough-cast concrete is central to the building’s historical importance and helped inspire the Brutalist movement. The design was not simply an aesthetic exercise: postwar housing shortages, limited materials and Le Corbusier’s ideas about collective urban living all shaped the project.
There are several other Unité d’Habitation buildings, including examples in Nantes-Rezé, Berlin, Briey and Firminy. The Marseille building is the first and most famous, so “Marseille” is the canonical answer rather than Paris or Berlin.