Apartment Block

The Modern Age apartment block is industrialism applied to human habitation — a reinforced-concrete frame rising six to fourteen stories, housing hundreds of families in a footprint that once held a dozen row houses. Soviet workers' palaces, Weimar-era Wohnhöfe in Vienna and Frankfurt, and American New Deal housing projects all embodied the belief that density, light, and sanitation could be engineered simultaneously into mass dwellings. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille took the concept to its extreme: a self-contained vertical village with school, shops, and gymnasium under one roof. The apartment block solved the arithmetic of housing millions of factory workers, soldiers' families, and wartime refugees at minimal land cost. In the game it provides the largest population bonus of any residential building, enabling the enormous armies and workforces of the late game — without it, your industrial and military production has no one to run it.