Plan Obus
Le Corbusier proposed a sinuous inhabited motorway above Algiers while demolishing much of the existing city below.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- detailed preproduction
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A series of unbuilt masterplans by Le Corbusier for Algiers under French colonial rule.
The proposals combined long residential viaducts, monumental business districts and new transport infrastructure. Several versions developed the project in detail while treating the existing Casbah and colonial city as material to be reorganised from above.
Existence timeline
Le Corbusier begins an urban project around a monumental inhabited viaduct.
Transport, housing and business districts are combined into a city-scale composition.
New versions respond to official rejection without abandoning the central megastructure.
Le Corbusier again seeks an opening for a major Algiers commission.
No version receives authority to proceed to construction.
Why it ended
Colonial authorities never adopted the radical scheme and repeated revisions failed to produce a commission for construction.
Last confirmed trace
The Fondation Le Corbusier preserves plans, drawings, models and correspondence from the successive versions.
What it left behind
Plan Obus remains influential and controversial as both an extraordinary megastructure and an example of modern planning's colonial power over an inhabited city.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to detailed_preproduction under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.