Editing Le Corbusier (section)

===Ville Contemporaine, Plan Voisin and Cité Radieuse (1922–1939)===
{{See also|Unité d'habitation|Ville Radieuse}}
As the global [[Great Depression]] enveloped Europe, Le Corbusier devoted more and more time to his ideas for urban design and planned cities. He believed that his new, modern architectural forms would provide an organizational solution that would raise the quality of life for the working classes. In 1922 he had presented his model of the Ville Contemporaine, a city of three million inhabitants, at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. His plan featured tall office towers surrounded by lower residential blocks in a park setting. He reported that "analysis leads to such dimensions, to such a new scale, and to such the creation of an urban organism so different from those that exist, that it that the mind can hardly imagine it."{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=98}} The Ville Contemporaine, presenting an imaginary city in an imaginary location, did not attract the attention that Le Corbusier wanted. For his next proposal, the Plan Voisin (1925), he took a much more provocative approach; he proposed to demolish a large part of central Paris and replace it with a group of sixty-story cruciform office towers surrounded by parkland. This idea shocked most viewers, as it was certainly intended to do. The plan included a multi-level transportation hub that included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and an airport. Le Corbusier had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and created an elaborate road network. Groups of lower-rise zigzag apartment blocks, set back from the street, were interspersed among the office towers. Le Corbusier wrote: "The centre of Paris, currently threatened with death, threatened by exodus, is, in reality, a diamond mine...To abandon the centre of Paris to its fate is to desert in face of the enemy."{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=100}}

As no doubt Le Corbusier expected, no one hurried to implement the Plan Voisin, but he continued working on variations of the idea and recruiting followers. In 1929, he travelled to Brazil where he gave conferences on his architectural ideas. He returned with drawings of his vision for Rio de Janeiro; he sketched serpentine multi-story apartment buildings on pylons, like inhabited highways, winding through [[Rio de Janeiro]].

In 1931, he developed a visionary plan for another city [[Algiers]], then part of France. This plan, like his Rio Janeiro plan, called for the construction of an elevated viaduct of concrete, carrying residential units, which would run from one end of the city to the other. This plan, unlike his early Plan Voisin, was more conservative, because it did not call for the destruction of the old city of Algiers; the residential housing would be over the top of the old city. This plan, like his Paris plans, provoked discussion but never came close to realization.

In 1935, Le Corbusier made his first visit to the United States. He was asked by American journalists what he thought about New York City skyscrapers; he responded, characteristically, that he found them "much too small".<ref>Time Magazine, article on Man of the Year, 5 May 1961</ref> He wrote a book describing his experiences in the States, ''Quand Les cathédrales étaient blanches, Voyage au pays des timides'' (When Cathedrals were White; voyage to the land of the timid) whose title expressed his view of the lack of boldness in American architecture.{{Sfn|Journel|2015|page=218}}

He wrote a great deal but built very little in the late 1930s. The titles of his books expressed the combined urgency and optimism of his messages: ''Cannons? Munitions? No thank you, Lodging please!'' (1938) and ''The lyricism of modern times and urbanism'' (1939).

In 1928, the French Minister of Labour, [[Louis Loucheur]], won the passage of French law on public housing, calling for the construction of 260,000 new housing units within five years. Le Corbusier immediately began to design a new type of modular housing unit, which he called the Maison Loucheur, which would be suitable for the project. These units were {{convert|45|m2|spell=in|lk=out|abbr=off}} in size, made with metal frames, and were designed to be mass-produced and then transported to the site, where they would be inserted into frameworks of steel and stone; The government insisted on stone walls to win the support of local building contractors. The standardisation of apartment buildings was the essence of what Le Corbusier termed the ''Ville Radieuse'' or "radiant city", in a new book published in 1935. The Radiant City was similar to his earlier Contemporary City and Plan Voisin, with the difference that residences would be assigned by family size, rather than by income and social position. In his 1935 book, he developed his ideas for a new kind of city, where the principal functions; heavy industry, manufacturing, habitation and commerce, would be separated into their neighbourhoods, carefully planned and designed. However, before any units could be built, World War II intervened.