Editing Le Corbusier (section)

===Moscow projects (1928–1934)===
{{Main|Le Corbusier in the USSR}}
[[File:Centrosoyuz Moscow - Ak Sakharova view.jpg|thumb|Building of the [[Tsentrosoyuz]], headquarters of Soviet trade unions, Moscow (1928–34)]]

Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect [[Konstantin Melnikov]] during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the [[Tsentrosoyuz]], the headquarters of Soviet trade unions.

In 1932, he was invited to take part in an international competition for the new [[Palace of the Soviets]] in Moscow, which was to be built on the site of the [[Cathedral of Christ the Saviour]], demolished on Stalin's orders. Le Corbusier contributed a highly original plan, a low-level complex of circular and rectangular buildings and a rainbow-like arch from which the roof of the main meeting hall was suspended. To Le Corbusier's distress, his plan was rejected by Stalin in favour of a plan for a massive neoclassical tower, the highest in Europe, crowned with a statue of Vladimir Lenin. The Palace was never built; construction was stopped by World War II, a swimming pool took its place, and after the collapse of the USSR the cathedral was rebuilt on its original site.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=128}}