Corbu was to suffer a further, disappointment in 1952, when the UNESCO headquarters in Paris was placed in the hands of Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer of the U.S., Bernard Zehrfuss of France, and Pier Luigi Nervi of Italy. Despite all this, Corbu was in fact entering the richest phase of his career. Plans that had been locked in his mind for years began tumbling out like coins from a treasure chest. Now came the Marseille apartment block of raw concrete (béton brut), on which the marks of the form boards were left visible. The Society for the Preservation of the Beauties of France denounced It; a large hardware firm refused to sell it locks or hinges, for fear of tarnishing the firm's name. But the experts knew better. "Any architect who does not find this building beautiful," said Gropius, "had better lay down his pencil."
Worthy of Homer. It was 200 ft. long and 18 stories high--a huge filing cabinet in which 337 apartments could be placed like drawers. Part of the way up was an "internal street" of shops, and on the roof was a garden made up, not of plants and trees, but of sculptured shapes surrounded by a parapet that shut out all but the sky and the mountaintops. Corbu called the building a "Radiant City," its garden "a landscape worthy of Homer."
It had its faults. The corridors were bare and forbidding, and the apartments rather wild in scale. A room might be only 12 ft. wide but soar 16 ft. high. Nevertheless, major housing projects all over the world, including Corbu's own at Nantes-Rezé and in Berlin, have borrowed from Marseille.
Square Spiral. In the Indian cotton center of Ahmedabad he built two graceful villas, an office building for the Millowners Association, and finally the "endless museum" he had thought of 30 years before. Its plan, which was to be repeated in Tokyo, was a sort of square spiral or maze that could be expanded at will. Today he is still working on his biggest commission of all: Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab. The Indian government hired Corbu for 4,000 rupees ($840) a month to build a whole new city to replace the old Lahore, which had been turned over to Pakistan.
