In 1949, the photographer Lucien Hervé took photographs of Unite dHabitation, an innovative apartment building in Marseille, France. He sent them to the building's architect, Le Corbusier, who immediately realised that after forty years of searching he had finally found a photographer with an architect's soul. Their seminal collaboration is extensively documented in this album of 1200 cardboard sheets of Herve's carefully edited, sequenced and labelled contact prints, housed at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Originating as a vehicle for dissemination of the architect's work and as a commercial venture for the photographer, these contact sheets now form an extraordinary archive of modernist architecture and photography in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1949, the photographer Lucien Hervé took photographs of Unite dHabitation, an innovative apartment building in Marseille, France. He sent them to the building's architect, Le Corbusier, who immediately realised that after forty years of searching he had finally found a photographer with an architect's soul. Their seminal collaboration is extensively documented in this album of 1200 cardboard sheets of Herve's carefully edited, sequenced and labelled contact prints, housed at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Originating as a vehicle for dissemination of the architect's work and as a commercial venture for the photographer, these contact sheets now form an extraordinary archive of modernist architecture and photography in the mid-twentieth century.