L'école maternelle de l'unité, built in 1968, by Le Corbusier is a kindergarten and elementary school located on the top two floors of a 19-story housing block planned as a utopian community in the working-class town of Firminy, near Lyon. The classrooms are organized along a long hallway, all oriented in one direction. The walls of the hallway, opposite the classrooms, are pierced with multi-colored windows scaled for children's height, a touch that adds a great deal of color and play of light to the interiors. Classrooms feature specific activity zones, delineated by the built-in furniture, including reading circles. Throughout, the architecture, fixtures, and all furnishings are scaled for the young students. The interiors are extremely well-suited for interactive, activity-based learning that fosters community.
Aldo Rossi (born 1931), one of the most influential architects during the period 1972-1988, has accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in three distinct areas: theory, drawing, and architecture. In 1966 Aldo Rossi published the book The Architecture of the City, which subsequently was translated into several languages and enjoyed enormous international success. Spurning the then fashionable debates on style, Aldo Rossi instead criticized the lack of understanding of the city in current architectural practice. Aldo Rossi argued that a city must be studied and valued as something constructed over time; of particular interest are urban artifacts that with-stand the passage of time. Despite the modern movement polemics against monuments, for example. Aldo Rossi held that the city remembers its past and uses that memory through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city. ...


