After Corbu

Today I’m feeling a little guilty* about the fact that I named this blog after Le Corbusier and have yet to write about him (this smidgen in my very first post hardly counts). I’ve been trying to compose an epic that actually ties together modern architecture and radical politics, which is my (heretofore not manifested) blog motif, but no dice. Maybe one day I’ll b able to write that. For now, I will chip away at the topic in digestible, blog-sized chunks. Today, my hack-job on Corbu (not really):

What frustrates me about the man’s work is that the individual instances of his architecture are often great. But he repeatably attempts to move beyond his natural scale and mold whole cities. These latter efforts are disasters.

The first such effort was the 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris. From Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow (pg 222):

“Its 18 uniform 700-foot-high towers would have entailed the demolition of most of historic Paris north of the Seine save for a few monuments, some of which would be moved; the Place Vendome, which he liked as symbol of order, would be kept. He was apparently quite unable to understand why the plan aroused such an outcry in the city council, where he was called a barbarian.”

You do have to hand it to him. It takes serious chutzpah to suggest Paris should be leveled.

Then Hall quotes Corbusier himself:

“Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its center.”

This was the first time this kind of redevelopment to accommodate the car was suggested (and it would later happen in a great number of cities). Ignored is the deleterious effect this would have on the environment and the lived experience of the city.

Worse, the design explicitly assigned space to people based on their perceived social importance. More Hall:

“At the center were the skyscrapers of Plan Voisin which, Corbusier emphasized, were intended as offices for the elite cadres: industrialists, scientists, and artists (including, presumably, architects and planners);”

The lesser professions are on the periphery, ordered hierarchically. Each class has specific housing types intended for it, of decreasing size and quality as you become less important. Of course, these are the exact orderings that happen in cities normally, so it’s not like Le Corbusier is trashing our egalitarian society. However, it’s abhorrent to use state planning to reinforce social castes and divisions. In fact, that’s the opposite of what they teach you to do in planning school.

That said, it happens all the time. Corbu was inspiration to a lot of people.

*This is largely because an actual, honest-to-god architecture blog linked to me today, and thus I feel the need to up my built environment street cred. Lists of phallic buildings wasn’t going to cut it.