commissioned to build, in Marseille, a residential complex that embodied his vision of a social environment.The Marseille project (unit d'habitation) is a vertical community of 18 floors. The 1,800 inhabitants are housed in 23 types of duplex (i.e., split-level) apartments. Common services include two "streets" inside the building, with shops, a school, a hotel, and, on the roof, a nursery, a kindergarten, a gymnasium, and an open-air theatre. The apartments are conceived as individual "villas" stacked in the concrete frame like bottles in a rack. It was completed in 1952, and two more unts were built at other locations in France, at Nantes and Briey, as well as others in West Berlin.Two religious buildings in France were commissioned as a result of the influence of the Dominican father Reverend Couturier, creator of the review L'Art Sacr. The more lyrical of the two, the chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1950-55), sacrifices Le Corbusier's famous principles of apparent functionalism; the wall has been built to a double thickness for visual effect and the roof, which appears to be suspended, actually rests on a forest of supports. More brutal and austere is the convent of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette at Eveux-sur-Arbresle, near Lyon. The square building imposes a fortress of concrete in a natural setting. In the three-tiered facade of glass at la Tourette, Le Corbusier first employed panes of glass set at "musical" intervals to obtain a lyrical effect. Le Corbusier's reputation in France was established with two large expositions of his work in Paris in 1953 and in 1962. Only from 1950 on did Le Corbusier become active on a large scale outside of France. In 1951 the government of the Punjab named him architectural advisor for the construction of its new capital, Chandigarh. For the first time in his life, Le Corbusier was able to apply his principles of city planning on a metropolitan scale. Totally without reference to local tradi...
