Le Corbusier in France: On the trail of a controversial concrete king

Mottled white high- rises sprout from muddy brown mountainsides like smashed-in teeth. The mistral tries to knock me off balance as I take photographs of Marseille's seething skyline. The first time I saw Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation – flouting its primary-coloured balconies as if it were a 3D Mondrian painting – was through a greasy coach window in 1994 on a school exchange trip to France. It took me 20 more summers, finally, to get up here on the roof. In one ear I can still hear Madame Hamilton warning us about the many ways that British children can get into sticky situations in France's louche second city.

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