The photographic representation of the Marseilles apartment block is indicative of these postwar changes. A key component of the urban vision put forth in Le Corbusier’s 1935 La Ville radieuse, the Unité d’Habitation, was the fruit of thirty years of speculation regarding collective living. It was offered as solution to the worldwide housing shortage that had been brought on by the destruction of the war and the postwar population boom. Like much of Le Corbusier’s earlier work, it was proposed as a ‘standard type’ and was intended to be reproduced throughout the world. It would be one of Le Corbusier’s most important and necessary buildings, and undoubtedly he understood it as such from its inception.