Y ou might have thought the first building to have the word ‘brutalist’ attached to it would have been a modest affair. A town house or a small villa, perhaps, built out of the way as a quiet experiment that would lead to bigger things. Instead, the first bit of overt brutalism was 12 storeys high, contained 337 apartments, a hotel, shops, a restaurant, a medical clinic, laundry, kindergarten and a gym – with a running track on the roof. This was Le Corbusier’s housing unit, or Unité d’Habitation. It was not so much a block of flats as a whole vertical city.

For Le Corbusier (the pseudonym of Swiss-born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), the Unité’s brutality was the least of its attributes. He’d designed the structure around an idealized human form that he called the Modulor. The resulting semi-abstract figure might also have been his idea of the perfect resident: silent, decorative and, most importantly, created by him. The block itself was an experiment in living as a revolt against sprawling suburbanization. It was to operate as a machine, providing everything the inhabitants needed. These ideals went back to the 1920s, when Le Corbusier first became obsessed with a vision: cities constructed entirely of towers in parkland. This he explored in his 1925 Plan Voisin, imagining the demolition of a large area of Paris and its replacement with 60-storey towers surrounded by low-rise flats and green. The Unité d’Habitation, built 20 years later, showed he had lost none of his desire to shock.

Le Corbusier had adopted his pseudonym at the age of 33, when he became a journalist. His first major book, Towards an Architecture, was published in 1923 and was wide-ranging and confrontational. He gave readers a choice – architecture or revolution? – and contributed one of the most enduring tenets in modern architecture, the functionalist’s creed – a house is a machine for living in. As one might have expected, the book included construction plans, such as his ‘Dom-Ino’ frame – a two-storey house stripped back to show just the two floors, flat roof and supporting pillars between, somewhat resembling a coffee table. He was showing the potential of reinforced concrete, the free plan and free elevations it enabled in contrast to the heavy masonry and structure of traditional building techniques. With his prototype mass production house, ‘Citrohan’ he took lessons from the manufacture of cars and the design of aeroplanes and ocean liners. And he didn’t stick to individual buildings – there were town planning ideas as well. The ‘Ville Contemporaine’ was based on earlier work by French architect Tony Garnier, where giant tower blocks sat at regular intervals in parks, gardens and playgrounds, away from a high-speed road network. Then there was a town raised up on pillars, where cars circulated on the ‘service’ level below and people roamed an artificial landscape on the first floor.

Unité D’Habitation, Marseille, France. Architect: Le Corbusier.

Towards an Architecture wasn’t merely a book about design, it was a compelling series of statements linking ancient to modern, science to art and building to city. ‘A man of today reading this book may have the impression of something akin to a nightmare’ teased his translator, the English architect Frederick Etchells, like Alfred Hitchcock gleefully introducing a macabre story in his TV series. Etchells’ introduction was instructive on how Le Corbusier’s work was likely to be received in Britain: ‘I have no doubt that some of the French work illustrated in these pages will appear unpleasing to many of us,’ he remarks, emphasizing the gulf between Continental modernism and the conservative British architecture establishment of the day. The remark was prophetic when it came to Le Corbusier’s later adoption of brutalism.

The ‘brut’ in ‘brutalism’ did not come from Le Corbusier, but rather from the material that he was using to construct his enormous housing unit: raw concrete, or béton brut. This sense of ‘raw’-ness is lost in English, and instead a violent, thuggish, disturbing undertone predominates, with ‘brutal’ in mind – buildings that brutalize the inhabitants. Rather than being clad in a more ‘respectable’ material such as stone, Le Corbusier’s Unité revelled in the imperfections of its uncovered raw concrete. It made for a confrontational statement in Marseilles, where it was constructed between 1947 and 1952. The concrete was left to set in wooden moulds or ‘shutters’, and it was these roughly constructed boxes that helped to create the counterintuitively primitive finish of this resolutely modern structure. It was yet another example of the collision of ancient and modern in Le Corbusier’s work: an immaculate grid created from the most impure and organic of materials.

Upon completion, the Unité became an instant hit with architects, who made pilgrimages to Marseilles from all over the world. The locals, meanwhile, were rather less impressed and called it La Maison du Fada – the madhouse. Regardless, it was the sheer audacity of Le Corbusier’s vision that inspired his peers, and the boldness of his use of raw concrete fired their imaginations. Since the mid-19th century, architects had viewed it as the perfect plastic material, one that could be moulded into any shape. But architects had been nervous of using it extensively in domestic buildings. Now this new generation saw that it did not even need to be prettified for domestic use. Instead, concrete’s rough stony texture was appealing in itself. The idea of being able to put up a massive structure without a steel frame was also attractive to cost-conscious architects, who were looking for practical solutions they could take home and introduce to austerity-pinched local authorities or private practice.

It is curious that it was the concrete from which the Unité is made, rather than its other innovations, that it would become best known for. While Le Corbusier’s Modulor system was imitated by other architects, such as Ernő Goldfinger in his two famous London towers, Trellick and Balfron, it was largely dispensed with by others. The idea that one building could house so many different functions is common today, but is usually achieved with rather less panache or coherence. And despite a glut of smart gadgets, we are still some way from houses that provide for the inhabitant’s every need.

Le Corbusier intended to see other iterations of his Unité built, and his desire was satisfied by a further series of commissions: in Nantes-Rezé (1955), Berlin (1957), Briery (1963) and Firminy (1965). The five Unités continue to inspire architects and residents today, their colourful balcony façades and rough concrete ‘bottle rack’ structure are an enduring symbol of modernity that helps place all future brutalism into historical context. Le Corbusier continued to push the primitive aspect of his muse, but it was this gloriously awkward behemoth that would come most to fascinate the architects who followed.