Unite d'Habitation, Marseille

The Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, France, is a modernist housing block designed by the architect Le Corbusier, with the painter-architect Nadir Afonso among his collaborators, built between 1947 and 1952. The building holds 337 apartments across 23 different layouts on 12 stories, all raised off the ground on massive concrete pilotis, and its wide internal corridors, running along every third floor to serve the apartments on the floors above and below, are known as streets in the sky. Built in bare, unfinished reinforced concrete, known in French as beton brut, largely because of postwar steel and material shortages, the building became a founding example of the architectural style later named Brutalism after that material choice. Its rooftop is treated as a communal terrace, fitted with sculptural ventilation stacks, a running track and a shallow paddling pool, and the Marseille building served as the model for several later Unite d'Habitation blocks Le Corbusier built elsewhere in Europe; UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 2016.