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It was called "Unité d'Habitation," but this massive apartment block overlooking the lavender-strewn hills of Provence and the glinting Mediterranean does not prompt a unity of opinion, even sixty years after it first opened — least of all amongst its own inhabitants.

Upon the 1952 opening of this rough-textured concrete high rise slab — home to 1,600 residents — the never-shy Marseillaises dubbed it "La Maison du Fada" —Provençal dialect for "Crazy House," or even better, "Cuckoo Coop."

There were reasons for these sentiments, as Unité d'Habitation was bigger than any other single apartment block in France. In a tour-de-force of architectural ingenuity, Le Corbusier designed no less than 24 different unit types, accommodating everyone from single seniors to families with 8 children in a demonstration project that was duplicated in five other European cities, including Firminy to the north and Berlin.

Moreover, Unité had a then-unprecedented building section, with corridors and elevator stops on only every third floor, because its L-shaped 2-storey units wrap either side of these corridors, allowing nearly all suites to have windows on both sides, guaranteeing through-ventilation, a highly desirable feature, given the Mediterranean heat. More than these, it was the bold range of paint hues slapped onto the rough concrete around each apartment's balcony, and the bafflingly sculptural roof garden that nonplussed the first residents.

It was not only the largely poor residents of this social housing complex who were mystified. Some rankled at the artistic flourishes of Unité d'Habitation's palette of textures and colours, and even more so, at the range of cylinder, box, spiral and free-form organic shapes set in concrete up on the roof garden. Many of Le Corbusier's fellow architects concluded, when the Unité proposal was first published in 1947, that one of the core inventors of Modern architecture had lost it — his principles, his design sense, maybe even his mind.

Reading architectural magazines from the era, many peers thought the aging genius they venerated as "Corbu" had gone a bit cuckoo himself. Not altogether affectionately, the largely Anglo-Saxon architectural movement called "Brutalism" was inspired by Unité, the church at Ronchamps, the monastery called La Tourette, getting its name from Le Corbusier's beloved rough-textured concrete — in French "béton brut."

Certainly, the formal name the architect gave to the Marseilles project —"La Ville Radieuse" — is a direct nod to his 1920s polemical proposals for a radically up-scaled urbanism (those infamous X-shaped high rise towers that would replace Paris' medieval heart), notions for housing the homeless and under-housed from the previous World War.

Le Corbusier's "Five Points" — a set of design principles that include gardens on roofs, columns called "pilotis" that raised buildings up off the ground, and so on —were by then being taught in nearly every architecture school in the world. Unité d'Habitation contains a version of all of these design rules, but there was something more than rationalism, modernism, functionalism, call it what you will; there was something more here.

Touring Unité d'Habitation for the first time since my enraptured first visit as an architecture student thirty years ago, the building unexpectedly got me thinking about Brazil. Maybe it was the sun and sea, or the sashay of African women along hectic streets, or maybe the sweet code of pleasure amongst poverty that persists in both places.

In any regard, seeing Unité again convinced me that the late works of Le Corbusier were inspired by his two Brazilian visits ten and twenty years before the launch of his radically altered post-WWII take on architecture. Students often teach their teachers, and it now seems plain to me that the older architect borrowed ideas from the young Brazilian designers who gathered around him then — especially Oscar Niemeyer, the last of the living modern masters, who is even today working in Rio de Janeiro at age 100.

The Brazilian architects were inspired by landscape, and their designs bring it into their architectural forms — the undulations of forested coastal mountains, the infinite extension of the dry interior plains and lush Amazon basin. Before meeting the Brazilians, there was little of any of this in Le Corbusier's work. After his two South American trips, there was little else. More than this, the Brazilians were the world's first modern architects to re-introduce the previously-shunned notions of ornament and bright colours for buildings. They were also the first to reject the modernist box, their palette of shapes including the organic, and forms — they widely proclaim this —inspired directly by the female body.

Without doubt, Unité d'Habitation is the single most influential housing design of the 20th century, recognized in the UNESCO plaque mounted near the entrance. For evidence of its impact, one need only look out from Unité's roof deck — with its made landscape of concrete forms — to see a range of imitative housing towers all around the urban landscape of Marseilles, stretching over the horizon and beyond. Many of these other projects demonstrate mastery of Le Corbusier's ideas: the ground-clearing pilotis in some; the slab-form in others; the rough-textured concrete yet more; sculptural entrance canopies and roof gardens throughout.

But none of the other Marseilles housing slabs brings things together as here, not even the other projects dubbed Unité d'Habitation erected elsewhere by the same architect. Sixty years on, this in-your-face building remains unique.

When I was a student, Le Corbusier was blamed for all the sins of modern architecture — its arrogance, its inhuman scale, its bleak machine aesthetic. Now it is time — carefully sharing credit with the Brazilians — that we also give him thanks for some of its most profound moments.