I'm not exactly sure what a "pre-fall" menswear collection is all about. But Louis Vuitton recently honored the late and great fashion designer Virgil Abloh by photographing one of them in and around Le Corbusier's Firminy-Vert complex about an hour outside of Lyon, France.

Abloh was apparently a huge fan of the work of architect Le Corbusier. And he tried to apply the same kind of utilitarian approach to fashion as Le Corbusier had done to cities, buildings, and housing.

The Firminy-Vert complex is a series of buildings, one of which is the last of his "Housing Unit" designs (1965). Le Corbusier designed and built a number of these, with the most well known one being in the south of France in Marseille (1952).

They were a utopian model for high-density housing, with "streets" instead of corridors and with schools and other social functions being housed high up and inside the building. They were intended to act as a kind of vertical city.

To the untrained eye, they might resemble the kind of public housing that today goes unloved in many cities throughout the world. But for whatever reason, these particular renditions have largely stood the test of time.

Maybe it's because of their importance to the development of modernist architecture, or maybe it's because most of them (if not all of them) are now UNESCO World Heritages sites.

My take is that it shows you that architecture and built form alone can't solve every problem. The same building in different places and different contexts, can and will perform very differently. In this particular case, in Firminy-Vert, the complex seems to be doing rather well. The perfect backdrop for a luxury pre-fall fashion collection.

Last summer I went to see Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montréal. Unfortunately, you can really on experience the architecture from the street. The entire complex is clearly marked as private and you can tell they have to work very diligently to keep the throngs of architecture nerds at bay. I almost called up an agent to see if I could see one of the listed apartments, but decided not to waste anybody’s time.

Thankfully, James Brittain has a photography exhibition going on in London right now called Revisited: Habitat 67. The aim of the exhibition is to expose the hidden side of the famous housing complex, which I find fascinating, particularly because I wasn’t able to see anything hidden last summer. You can check out a bunch of his photos over at The Spaces.

There are many dimensions to Habitat 67. But one aspect that stands out is this idea of conferring the benefits of low-rise single-family housing – things like large outdoor spaces and access to light – onto higher density urban housing. It is something that architects today still explore and something that we consider in basically all of our development projects. Habitat 67 considered this over 50 years ago.