Completed in 1952, Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation in Marseille has been blamed for launching a thousand brutalist concrete apartment blocks around the world. In Britain alone, they include the Roehampton Estate in west London, Park Hill in Sheffield and, most notoriously of all, Sir Basil Spence's Hutchesontown flats in the Gorbals, Glasgow, which were built in 1965 and demolished less than 20 years later. Yet the one crucial thing the British copycats can do nothing to reproduce is the bright sunshine and clear skies of Marseille on France's Mediterranean coast. That, together with the local pale limestone aggregate, produces a creamy-white concrete that glows in the sunshine like travertine marble. It bears no resemblance to the smoke-grey, porridge-like material produced in Britain that soaks up all this island's rain and urban pollution like a thirsty sponge.
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