ABSTRACT
In most surveys of modern architecture, housing projects after the Second
World War are described largely as the outcome of sociological, ideological and
functionalist criteria. The study of their theoretical implications as architectural
projections of a new social and subjective order for the postwar welfare state
is only now beginning. I examine these implications through two famous case
studies, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (Marseille, 1947-52 and subsequent
iterations), and Alison and Peter Smithson’s unbuilt Golden Lane (London, 1952).
