vobiblog

Vobiscum. September 2005.

Le Corbusier was without doubt one of the most influential people of the 20^th century in the fields of architecture and urban planning. As a founder of the modernist movement, his work, which was not without controversy, inspired a generation of planners and architects after World War II. While his plans have fallen out of favour in recent times, the context for the development is worthy of investigation. Also worth discussion is the effect that the implementation of these plans has had. Overwhelmingly, the most important (and the most misunderstood) aspect of Le Corbusier’s work is the social order that he was trying to create.

Le Corbusier

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born on October 6, 1887 to a family of well known watch makers in the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds (Hall 2002: 219). He gained early acclaim as a painter and as an architecture critic. Jeanneret recreated himself as Le Corbusier, which roughly translated is “the crow-like oneâ€?. Le Corbusier rose to become the Parisian leader of the Modern Architecture revolution and a founding member of Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) (Fishman 2003: 24-5). He was perhaps most famed for the statement that the “house is a machine to live inâ€? and the industrial methods he promoted to create such a house (Hall 2002: 220).

Influences

Le Corbusier’s influences are wide and varied. The fact that he was born in Switzerland and didn’t move to Paris permanently until he was 31 probably had a lot to do with his obsession of order and uniformity, especially in regards to cities (Hall 2002: 219). He was impressed with Parker and Unwin’s interpretation of the Garden City and the way they were trying to create an “architectural appropriateness for cooperative civilizationâ€? (Fishman 1982: 180). Growing up, he saw how the industrial age caused the countryside to stagnate, while the cities suffered chaotic growth. Living conditions for the working class were miserable (Fishman 2003: 26). However, despite his dislike of industrial age cities, he saw some advantages of the era.

Le Corbusier was fascinated with technology. He was introduced to technological rationalism by engineer August Penret (Fishman 1982:170). Specifically, he was interested in how this new technology could be used in housing and to create utopia. New methods of production had been brought about by the businessmen and engineers. In Le Corbusier’s view, it was up to architects to make use of them (Fishman 1982: 187), yet he only acknowledged the advantages of technology where it fit his social values (Fishman 2003: 27).

Le Corbusier’s views were considered idealistic. He was not interested in extracting more profit out of land. In fact, property rights often frustrated him. However, there was little enthusiasm for his theories from socialists who believed that urban design would always reflect the inequality of capitalist society (Fishman 2003: 27). In the 1920s, Le Corbusier visited the Soviet Union where ideas similar to his were appearing. He rejected the Soviets as too authoritarian well before they rejected modernism (Hall 2002: 226), though modernism eventually returned east of the Iron Curtain with the ascendancy of Khrushchev (Kunstler 2001: 132).

Plans

Le Corbusier’s first contribution to the modern industrial civilization was the Domino house of 1914. He felt that WWI would finish shortly and a massive reconstruction effort would be required. The Domino house was mass produced and based on a standard concrete form (Fishman 1982: 178). While the Domino house imposed a uniformity that Le Corbusier felt was missing from the industrial city, the overall effect could be varied, through position and placement of the houses, by the planner (Fishman 1982: 178). Subsequent plans produced by Le Corbusier were much more ambitious.

The Contemporary City

A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants was Le Corbusier’s first complete plan for an ideal city. It was meant to be a city of the time, rather than a relic of the past and was to usher in an era of order and social collectivism. The contemporary city was designed around function, efficiency and the realm of production. To provide efficiency, the city was segregated based on class (Fishman 1982: 191).

The social elite were to live at the centre of the city. The top 400,000 – 600,000 people were housed in 24 identical 60 storey glass and steel skyscrapers. What was unique about this plan was that the skyscrapers only occupied 15% of the land on the site with the remaining 85% left open for parks and gardens (Hall 2002: 224). Le Corbusier regarded the skyscraper as a vertical street, providing density without the “soulessness� of the industrial city. The elite housing was designed to be collectively serviced. Cooking, cleaning and shopping were no longer jobs that need to be performed by the elite (Fishman 2003: 26).

In the Contemporary City, the working class did not fair as well. They were relegated to satellite cities away from the central core, living in dwellings much more modest than those of their elite counterparts. The housing was based around low rise apartments built around courtyards with 45% of the site left as open space. What was common between the working class and elite housing is that both were mass produced for mass living. Even the same furniture was to be used in every apartment (Hall 2002: 224).

Plan Voisin

Without doubt, Le Corbusier’s most controversial plan was the Plan Voisin of 1925 (See illustration 1). The plan consisted of 18 uniform skyscrapers to be built in Paris, north of the Seine. To accomplish the plan, mass demolition of the historic area was required. Le Corbusier viewed the plan as the logical continuation of the work of Baron Hausmann, that would bring Paris into the age of the skyscraper and the automobile (Fishman 1982: 210). However, his plan was largely met with criticism and outrage. (Hall 2002: 222)

Le Corbusier claimed that the Plan Voisin would be hugely profitable. This was despite the massive cost of land resumptions. Even though most of the ground was to be covered by parks and gardens, there was to be five times as much office space as in the old business district. He attempted to form a private consortium of bankers and social elite to buy up the land needed and construct the 18 skyscrapers. While Le Corbusier’s other plans gained a level of respect over the years, the Plan Voisin remained undesirable (Fishman 1982: 207-212).

While Le Corbusier’s other plans gained a level of respect over the years, the Plan Voisin remained undesirable. This plan was attacked because of its inhuman scale, vast empty spaces and its elimination of close knit old streets with their rich and varied public life. Le Corbusier was also never able to prove the plan economically viable. (Fishman 1982: 207)

The Radiant City

Le Corbusier began to become dissolutioned with the bourgeois elite and capitalism. This was for two reasons. Firstly, he experienced much frustration at property rights and that landlords’ greed was preventing the city from operating efficiently (Fishman 1982: 217-218). Secondly, the 1929 stock market crash was proof to Le Corbusier that capitalism was too chaotic to create the order needed in the machine age. He felt that the existing power structures had failed the modern era (Fishman 1982: 220). Others argue this dissolutionment arose because the bourgeois were no longer able to support his work (Hall 2002: 225). Regardless, the enthusiasm for capitalism and the separation of classes found in the Contemporary City was lost in his latest plan.

The Radiant City varies to the Contemporary City in that the residential district does not mirror the realm of production like the contemporary city. At the centre of the plan was high rise apartment blocks, Les Unité, catering for 2700 residents each. Unlike in the contemporary city, all classes lived together in the same area. Apartment size was to be based on need rather than wealth. Le Corbusier wanted to get rid of the space wasting dwellings that the elite used as status symbols (Fishman 2003: 55).

Les Unité was designed to have shared facilities so that all residents could have a level of amenity that would not otherwise be possible. Workshops for producing handicraft and common meeting rooms were provided for those activities that were no longer appropriate in the industrialised workplace. Cafés, restaurants, shops, gymnasiums, tennis courts and swimming pools were an integral part of each tower. As with the Contemporary City, the tower itself was designed to only take up 15% of the land (Fishman 2003: 55).

The Radiant City was more of a social than a planning or architectural revolution. In the radiant city, both men and women work. Cooking, cleaning and child raising are roles that are collectively provided by society. The main focus of Les Unité is not so much the individual apartments but the collectively provided services which are designed to be a reward for eight hours of productive work in a factory or office (Fishman 2003, p. 56). An important fact, often omitted when discussing Le Corbusier’s work, is that he was very clear to note that Les Unité was only of use after society itself and been revolutionised. He therefore never concerned himself with with muggings in the park or vandalism of communal buildings as crime didn’t exist in the Radiant City (Fishman 1982: 232).

European reconstruction

Modern architecture and urban theory played a large role in post World War II reconstruction in Europe. Berlin faired much worse than other cities with between one-third and half the city destroyed. In 1957, a residential district near the centre of West Berlin, the Hansa Quarter, that had been raised by the war was rebuilt along modernist lines. The development here differed from Le Corbusier’s plans in that different architects were used to design different buildings, leading to variation in building styles (Ladd 2005). The following year, Le Corbusier set his sights on a larger project.

According to Le Corbusier, the war presented a unique opportunity for reform. Much of the opposition to his Plan Voisin was that vast tracts of land needed to be cleared before the plan could be implemented. Post-war Berlin, with its vast destruction, presented the clean slate he had been looking for. Le Corbusier created his Hauptstadt Berlin plan along the lines his Plan Voisin for a design competition for a reunified Berlin (Kunstler 2001: 131-132). Le Corbusier did not win the competition and, in any case, the plan did not go ahead due to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. By this time, the Soviets were producing their own brand of modernism in East Berlin. However, unlike that of the West, the Soviet buildings completely lacked any form of ornament (Ladd 2005).

Britain embraced modernism for other reasons in addition to reconstruction. In 1955, the British launched a major slum clearance program. This, combined with a far greater than expected population growth, led the government to promote large, high-rise apartment complexes. By the mid 1960s, 20% of the public housing stock were units in five story or taller blocks, from virtually none before the war. High rise public housing projects in Britain have been plagued with crime and other social problems. These problems are partly related to class of the occupant as not all Modernist projects have suffered from social problems (Hall 2002: 241).

Le Corbusier’s first Les Unité in Marseilles is different to the imitations. Partly because it is occupied by middle class residents, but also because they are proud to live in one of France’s greatest architectural monuments. It is nothing like the poorly serviced public housing featured in Britain. The rich always faired better living at high densities than the poor because they could afford the services such as maintenance staff and doormen which make high rise apartments more liveable (Hall 2002: 247). Children were also not well accommodated in these high density developments. According to Jacobs (1961), the fact that these developments were based in parks rather than regular streets, led children to commit anti-social behaviour because their parents did not have their watchful eyes on them.

Brasilia: a new social order

The only new city constructed in the Corbusian image, other than Chandigarh, was Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. While Brasilia was not planned by Le Corbusier, it was based on the principals of CIAM which was the most influential forum for the promotion of modern architecture (Holston 1989: 31). Both A Contemporary City and The Radiant City, Le Corbusier’s most complete works, were the prototypes for ideal cities in CIAM’s Athens Charter, their most definitive publication on city building (Holston, 1989, p32).

A number of comparisons can be drawn between the work of Le Corbusier and Brasilia. Both feature: dwelling units of uniform height, scale and appearance divided into residential superblocks; gardens and other collective facilities; freeways crossing the city on both axis; administration, business and financial towers built around the centre of the freeway crossings; and the recreation zone surrounding the city (Holston, 1989, p32).

Brasilia was intended to transform society. It was thought that the city plan could create a social order in its image (Holston, 1989, p4). However, Brasilia failed to create a classless society. Servants in the residential high rises faired worse than they would have in traditional workers quarters. Due to the layout of the city, the classes were segregated to a much greater extent than in old cities (Hall 2002 p233-4). Brasilia also has a very limited street life. Casual interaction between citizens does not occur because the pedestrian has been replaced with the private car (Holston, 1989 p 103- 119).

Criticism

Much of the criticism surrounding Le Corbusier’s is the lack of appropriateness. Chandigarh in India was the only new modernist city that Le Corbusier worked on. While he was not the head planner, he completely took charge of the project. The resulted was a class segregated city and an urban form with no regard for the Indian climate or culture (Hall 2002: 227). Others claim that the only reason people moved into modernist developments is because they were forced out of their existing neighbourhoods. This was due to landlords not maintaining the traditional properties while governments and banks only provided finance for either the suburban expansion or mega-projects like the 15,300 apartment Co-op city in Bronx, New York (Gratz 1989: 94).

One of the most spectacular failures of the modernist movement was the Pruitt-Igoe project in St Louis which was constructed in the late 1950s. The site of the project consisted of 22 identical 11 story apartment blocks. While the project was designed to be a mixed class environment, it was generally occupied only by single parent families and those dependant on social security. Residents never felt attached to the common facilities in these development as they were detached from their apartments. With no one else to maintain the facilities, decay set in (Newman 1996: 10). In 1972, just 13 years after its completion, the project was demolished due to the state of disrepair, high vacancy rates and many social problems (Hall 2002, p 256).

Central to much of Le Corbusier’s, and that of his contemporaries work, is the removal of streets and their replacements with parks and freeways. Le Corbusier detested the streets of the old city (Kunstler 2001). However, city life begins and ends on the street. Many large modernist urban renewal projects have completely ignored the role of the street and their role in maintaining community (Gratz 1989: 293-5). Much of Jacobs (1961) work was dedicated to the importance of city streets. Mumford (1961: 519) went further claiming Le Corbusier wasn’t even building a city:

What Le Corbusier put forward as an improvement, the so-called Vertical Garden City, is in fact only a vertical suburb, whose very alternation of isolated high-rise buildings with uncultivated open areas makes the word city meretricious.

Since the 1960s, there has been growing discontent with modernist cities. Some have dubbed the whole postwar reconstruction effort the “second deconstruction� of the city because many of the large scale projects required the raising of buildings and neighbourhoods that had survived the war. In recent times, much effort has been expended on correcting the perceived wrongs of the modernist era. (Ladd 2005).

Conclusion

It is clear that Le Corbusier has had an enormous impact on cities around the world. While he wasn’t directly responsible for the construction of many projects, his modernist contemporaries were. Modernist projects based on sections of his plans have been replicated over and over again, all around the world. While these projects may have been unneeded in North America, there is no doubt that they were part of the solution to the housing shortage after WWII in Europe. Much of the criticism of his work stems from the social problems surrounding the modernist projects he influenced. However, Le Corbusier was obviously planning on a form of social revolution before utopia could be found in his plans.

Bibliography

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