Lecture - "Moving Landscapes: Promenade"
A comparison of Le Corbusier’s plans for Algiers and Paris.
 |
| Plan Obus for Algiers |
 |
| Plan Voisin for Paris |
At first sight we wonder how two
very different city plans could come from the same architect? Despite the stark differences in form – one is
curvilinear while the other is strictly geometric – the plans share the same
architectural concepts and the cities were searching for the answer to the same
question: how to deal with the development of slums that have led to
an urban housing crisis. Le Corbusier
believed that modern forms of architecture and new construction technology and
materials like steel, glass and concrete, would elevate the quality of life for
tenants of lower incomes. He offered newer programmatic solution that did not allow
for community social interaction and celebrated the development of the
automobile with a transportation hub at the center. Both projects were designed on the premise
that the historic city would be destroyed to make way for his new utopian and
fanciful ideals. Unfortunately, Le Corbusier’s ego trumped these projects as his
designs were meant to make money for the cities; very little was designed with
the occupants in mind.
"From right to left, from east to west, you see the
'great East-West throughway of Paris' which embodies the future of Paris and
offers the City Council the chance to launch a gigantic financial enterprise, a
'money-making' enterprise = a source of wealth. Since 1922 (for the past 42 years) I have
continued to work, in general and in detail, on the problem of Paris.
Everything has been made public. The City Council has never contacted me. It
calls me 'Barbarian'!" - Le Corbusier
In 1922 Le Corbusier developed a scheme for 3 million
residents titled Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City). At the center was a group of 60-storey skyscrapers
built of steel and curtain wall glass – a new material at the time. He envisioned a transportation hub at the
center and thought airplanes could be flown between buildings. Pedestrian paths were completely separated from
roadways and the car was a celebrated part of the scheme.
Three years later Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin for
Paris consisted of twenty 60-storey skyscrapers that covered the city center,
similar to those he proposed for his “Contemporary City" scheme. His plan was stark and it segregated tenants
based on income. He did not gain the
support of French industrialists as he had hope, although the project was
originally sponsored by an automobile manufacturer.
Le Corbusier spent the next several years reformulating
his ideas about the urban landscape. In
1935 he published Radiant City, which
organized tenants based on family size rather than social class. However, he still took no care of the past in
order to build what he thought was a better future. It was over this ten year period that he
designed Plan Obus for Algeirs. The plan was composed of a business center at
the docks while the residents were housed in a curved, 15 km, fourteen story
apartment block with a highway on top that stretched around the bay. His plan would have housed a staggering 108,000
people.
Although Le Corbusier was distinctly out of touch with
the needs of society surrounding him, we can still applaud him for his ideals
of architecture as a motivator to social change. His visions of a city were prophetic in that
we see many of these high rise elements in today’s cityscape and there is certainly
a strong sector of our industry that believes architecture is a vehicle for
social change.
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment