I grew up surrounded by modernist architecture. My city, Marseille, had been partially destroyed during WWII. The Nazis had gotten rid of several blocks of the old town. Its winding streets looked probably too Mediterranean to them, and its labyrinthine basements catered to the Resistance and the black market. Then, in the war’s last months, American bombs had repeatedly missed their targets, wiping out whole neighborhoods. After 1945, Swiss-born, Parisian architect Le Corbusier participated in the reconstruction of the city. There he built the first one of his unités d’habitation (housing units), the so-called Cité Radieuse. Perched above a dense forest of stilts, crowned with mushroom-shaped ventilation stacks and the reversed hull of a gym, it sat above the coastal plain like a stranded sea animal. Or so I thought, peering at it from the window of my childhood room.

After his ideas had inspired several public housing projects in the US, Le Corbusier was now finally building his very own tower in the park. My fellow townspeople soon nicknamed it la maison du fada (the house of the madman), and mad it was in several ways. Made of 350 apartments, this vertical neighborhood provided basic services to its residents, making most outings superfluous. There was a gym, a running track, a kindergarten, a school, a restaurant, a hotel, a social club, and a shopping mall. The building’s terraced roof was as manicured as the Versailles Park, and its precast concrete looked as grand as the finest Italian marble. Ribbon windows and brise-soleils lightened its bulk, and double-decker apartments traversed the structure, offering air and light to their tenants. Local builders soon followed Le Corbusier’s example, and rebuilt the city in a functionalist manner that made Paris look crumpled and greasy.

I left the city. I lived in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Riyadh, Cairo, Princeton, Boston, and New York. In most places I could track the influence of Le Corbusier. Riyadh’s Television Tower, Cairo’s Nile Hilton, Cambridge’s Peabody Terrace and New York’s Washington Square Village all reminded me of la maison du fada. Pilotis, ribbon windows, precast concrete, and extravagant smokestacks meant home. While moving into a new house, ancient Romans would carry with them their lares and penates. I didn’t need to burden myself with idols; the very landscape of modern cities was my own guardian deity.

When I arrived in Abu Dhabi, the ghost of Le Corbusier became more insistent. Like Marseille, the city was surrounded by water, it pressed its flat rooftops high against a spotless sky, and its streets were alive with migrants and informal activities. There was more to the urban landscape. Unlike any of the cities I’d lived in (Riyadh excepted), Abu Dhabi had been planned according to Le Corbusier’s modernist ideals. Everywhere else, mere buildings recalled home; here the city itself was reminiscent of my fetish architect. No wonder some of my colleagues complained about wide roads and long superblocks. We were not treading an ordinary city: we were crawling inside the very mind of the fada.

Like Marseille after WWII, the city was rebuilt in the 1960s and 1970s. After he came to power in 1966, Sheikh Zayed called in modernist urban planners and architects. Under the influence of Japanese planner Katsuhiko Takahashi and Egyptian architect Abdelrahman Makhlouf, the city became a little Brasília of sorts. With its oversized avenues and its large superblocks, the master plan embodied the official desire to erase the past and build a modern federal capital. Architects soon flocked from the Middle East, Europe, and North America. The Architects Collaborative (Cultural Foundation, 1977), Rifat Chaderji (National Theater, 1977), Henri Colboc (Zayed Sport City, 1979), Bulgar Consult (Bus Terminal, 1989; Abu Dhabi Municipality, 1990), and Abad al-Radi (Old Fish Market, 1992), among others, gave the city its main public monuments.

Like in Marseille, local builders followed suit in the 1970s and 1980s, and devised a homegrown version of the international style. Brise-soleils, overhangs, elaborate balconies, concrete latticework, vaults and arches sketched out a regional modernism. The city now counts several reinterpretations of the tower in the park, from the Garden Tower to the ADNOC Residential Buildings (Constantine Kapsambelis, 1977), where seafront lyricism rules supreme. When I first arrived in Abu Dhabi, I couldn’t take my eyes off its buildings. It took me several weeks to understand the roots of my own fascination. As a result of two decades of interventions, modernism had become Abu Dhabi’s architectural vernacular.

In January 2014, students in my Modern Abu Dhabi Architecture class documented thirty-one of the city’s modernist buildings. In three weeks, they wrote and produced The Abu Dhabi Guide: Modern Architecture 1950s-1990s, which will soon be published by FIND. Some visited the National Center for Documentation and Research, where they explored the history of Abu Dhabi’s housing policies. Others met with master planner and architect Abdelrahman Makhlouf, and interviewed him about his projects: the first Central Market (demolished in 2005), the Courthouse (built in 1977), and the People’s Housing Units (sha‘biyyat). All explored and photographed buildings, interviewed building managers, doormen, and residents, and talked to the city’s architecture aficionados.

The Abu Dhabi Guide is a collective tribute to the city’s landscape and history. By exploring landmarks that were built between the late 1950s and the early 1990s, it sheds light on the continuity between the beginnings of the city and its current global projects. Above all, it is an invitation to leave the relative comfort of the air conditioning, and to start walking.