The main building types of this new version of Le Corbusier's ideal city are skyscrapers and apartment buildings, as in the Ville Contemporaine. These collective habitations with roof terraces are very similar to the Swiss Pavilion. The city is highly centralized and densely populated, yet most of its surface is given over to zones of leisure, like parks and playing-fields. Le Corbusier created broad roads to facilitate rapid passage of traffic to and from the countryside and from place to place within the city.
Pedestrians are able to circulate on separate levels.
In 1935 Corbusier made his first trip to the United States. The Museum of Modern Art was arranging for an exhibition of his work, and invited him to come to New York for a series of lectures in connexion with that show. At long last he was in the land of Machine Art and in the land of the Ville Radieuse - the twin subjects that had fascinated him for years. Yet Corbusier was not entirely dazzled by New York, Chicago, or Detroit. With his usual perceptiveness, Corbu pointed out that a skyscraper without a city plan was sheer nonsense.