After Corbu » le corbusier

I’m a famous architect, bitches.

Quixote — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:40:18 +0000

Critiquing Skyscrapers

Quixote — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:00:45 +0000

I make fun of skyscrapers a lot, so I thought I should back up my scorn with some substantive arguments. Here they are:

Their is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and landowners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open space near them, and they damage the light and air and view.

This comes from, Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language, which has been very influential on planning and architecture. These arguments form the basis for Alexander’s Four-Story Limit “pattern,” or design rule. When I say “argument,” I know I’m just quoting the claims, with narry a warrant in sight, but most are fairly intuitive, and the book does reference quite a few studies and evidence — read it!

The one extremely counter-intuitive claim, that skyscrapers do not help create open space, I will expand upon, as this is often the primary reason given for tall buildings. In fact, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City plans, genesis of much of our tall building obsession, envisioned a city consisting almost entirely of skyscrapers juxtaposed with open land. A completely binary built environment, with the Natural and the Artificial perfectly represented.

Corbu’s plans make a lot of sense when your scale is one building. At that level, an architect has to choose how much of the site should be occupied by the building footprint, and as they go higher to meet the client’s space needs, they can leave more of the site open.

At the city scale, this is not how urban development occurs. Planners, upon lining up a new skyscraper for their downtown, do not convert adjacent zones into parks. In fact, since skyscrapers represent the homes or businesses of huge concentrations of customers, there is huge pressure to turn as much nearby open space into more shops and offices to serve said skyscraper.

In theory, tall buildings are a concentrated supply of some good (housing, offices, or in downtown Los Angeles, jails), and thus reduce demand for the good elsewhere. This reduced demand translated into less political resistance to planners appropriating land for open space…or something. This seems like it would be difficult to show and how economic conditions translate into the political environment seems like it draws on a branch of economics that’s even more pseudo-science than usual…but then again, I abandoned my economics studies.

In any case, in the modern planning environment, where one ~~egomaniac~~ individual doesn’t exercise control over density trade-offs, municipalities decide how much park land they are willing to purchase and maintain based on their budget, then allot it (ideally) based on where their people live. They don’t check the city’s density level first.

Skyscrapers do not create open space. Whether they create conditions that one day might, if we’re lucky, allow for their to possibly be more open space, maybe…well I don’t know about that. But this all seems like another example of Le Corbusier straying beyond his natural scale and creating problems.

Plan Voisin

Quixote — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:10:04 +0000

And here’s the picture of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris that I was just talking about:

Also,the Affordable Housing Institute (from whence this picture comes) has a nice (if old) blog post on Reinventing Public Housing.

Le Corbusier

Quixote — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:58:19 +0000

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.

Chasing After Corbu

Quixote — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:16:33 +0000

…so as to be better positioned to throw heavy cooking implements at him.

I know I’m ruining the ending (and at the very beginning no less), but the basic conceit of this blog is that Le Corbusier is a stand-in for industrialization and centralized control as much as the more brutal side of modernist architecture. He famously described the Unite d’Habitation, pictured above, as “a machine for living in,” which is more creepy than evil as a stand-alone statement — sure, housing is a consumer product just like vacuum cleaners, got it — but sets off all sorts of alarm bells when you realize you’re staring at the genesis of 50 years of human anguish in the form of dreadful housing projects. But it’s not Corbu’s fault — I mean, who could have predicted that Borg-ish housing was a bad idea?