ead of its time the concept of green parks and gardens at the foot of a cluster of skyscrapers.The ideas for city planning set forth at the Salon d'Automne, an annual semi-official exhibition, were taken up again and developed in 1925 at the Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris, in a pavilion that was to be a "manifesto of the esprit nouveau." In this little duplex-flat, the interior walls violently coloured under the influence of the painter Fernand Lger, Le Corbusier exhibited his first collection of industrially produced furniture.During these years, in fact, Le Corbusier's social ideals were realized on two occasions. One of these was in 1925-26 when, thanks to the financial support of an industrialist, he built at Pessac, near Bordeaux, a workers' city of 40 houses in the style of the Citrohan House; the scorn for local tradition and the unconventional use of colour provoked hostility on the part of municipal authorities, who refused to provide a public water supply. Pessac was thus deprived of inhabitants for six years, and Le Corbusier did not forget this affront. In 1927 the architect participated in the international exposition of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of various groups concerned with producing functional objects of high aesthetic value. For this exposition Le Corbusier constructed two houses in the experimental residential quarter of Weissenhof at Stuttgart.Although Le Corbusier was from the beginning most interested in building for large numbers of people, during the prewar period he built primarily for privileged individuals who commissioned individual houses. They were functional in design and ascetic in appearance, incorporating rigorous geometric forms and bare facades. The first was for Ozenfant in 1922, followed by, among others: the house of the Swiss collector Raoul La Roche (1923), which later became the quarters of the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris (1968); the villa (1927) of Michael Stein, a b...
