The book provides graphic information and previously unpublished analyses of the typical cell of one of Le Corbusier's most important buildings:

the Unité d'habitation in Marseille. A graphic reconstruction detailing spatial, technical, and aesthetic aspects (including the color scheme) is provided for two units: the typical east-west apartment and the south-facing apartment of Lilette Ripert, the first director of the nursery school and a “messenger” of Le Corbusier's work. Four articles constitute a kind of " critical apparatus" accompanying these drawings: they deal with the place of the building in Le Corbusier's work, the individual/collective relationship in this concrete community utopia, the way in which the cell summarizes Le Corbusier's social thinking and plastic research, the restoration of the apartment classified as a Lilette Ripert's apartment, which is listed as a historic monument, and Le Corbusier's relationship with the latter.