Tsentrosoyuz building

In the 1920s the Tsentrosoyuz, the USSR's Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, held a competition open to every architect. In May 1928 Nikolai Popov, head of the organisation's Paris office, wrote to Le Corbusier asking him to compete. The brief wanted a main entrance treated "in a monumental spirit" on Miasnitzkaya Street, among Moscow's busiest shopping streets, and load-bearing walls and floors in reinforced concrete, while leaving each entrant free to choose the character and material of the facades. The building had to take 2,500 staff in 1929 and provide shared catering, meeting and performance halls, a library and a physical-culture club.

The scheme by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret was recommended to the Tsentrosoyuz management, but it was only confirmed after other architects launched a petition. The partners produced three versions; in 1929 the complete set of working drawings reached Moscow and construction got under way. Neither man was on site: the Russian architect Nikolai Kollii supervised the works, and Charlotte Perriand travelled to Moscow to report back to Le Corbusier, alerting him to a difficulty in keeping to the colour scheme drawn up in Paris. Materials ran short under the five-year plan and slowed the building down. The offices opened in 1934 and the club was completed in 1935.

It is the largest building Le Corbusier put up before the Unité d'habitation in Marseille. The Russian state has protected it since 2008. In the 1960s it was restored in keeping with the original design. A reconstruction in 2012 changed it: the ramps and circulation spaces got back their original volume, but heavy aluminium frames were fitted to the club hall and the glazed parts of the facades, and some pilotis were filled in or turned into fluted columns.

The building is made up of three parallelepipeds on pilotis framing the club. Having watched how pedestrians moved through Moscow, Le Corbusier concluded that "architecture is circulation", and so laid out over six floors an "architectural promenade" of ramps of varying sweep and curvature, which links the Tsentrosoyuz to the Villa Savoye, a project of the same years.

Opaque facades clad in red tuff alternate with facades opened by ribbon windows and large expanses of glass. Le Corbusier wanted a system of "exact breathing" with "neutralising walls", an early form of air conditioning; the Russians rejected it because they lacked the means to build it. He therefore used a red tuff from the Caucasus as infill, which allows exchanges between indoor and outdoor temperatures. Only later, at the Salvation Army's Cité de refuge, would he apply "exact breathing" in sealed buildings for the first time.

It is now an administrative building, used by Russia's state statistics services.

The building can be seen from outside. Since 2015 a statue of Le Corbusier, seated and studying a plan for an "ideal city", has stood at its foot.