INFRATECTURE. The Ville Radieuse Legacy.

[2L2] THE VILLE RADIEUSE LEGACY.

Le Corbusier, Contemporary City Project

Le Corbusier would find it ironic, if not horrifying, that the piecemeal, organic, and uncontrolled processes of urban development which he so loathed have been carrying out many of his design principles–and emulating his architectural imagery–for the past several decades. Our contemporary city closely resembles his, with glass office towers and high-rise housing blocks set amid grass fields with curvilinear paths, but without the order and urban focus that he desired. Le Corbusier established a precedent for the war against the dark, overcrowded, and unsanitary fabric of the pre-industrial city, which he believed could be swept clean by the heavy hand of the ‘elite’ master planner, who would instead provide new offices and residences with light, air, and greenery for an enlightened society. According to Robert Fishman, Le Corbusier simply "did not believe in piecemeal planning," and felt that "the planner needed open spaces in which he was free to create his own urban order. He must be master of the whole environment. ‘Nothing can be undertaken properly without a view of the whole.’ ...Only then could a collective order–beautiful and efficient, ‘worthy of the age’–emerge."⁶⁸

We are now all too familiar with the critique of his Plan Voisin and Ville Radieuse, which bear responsibility for countless urban disasters executed in their spirit. Jane Jacobs’ bitter rejection of Le Corbusier’s "urban surgery" still resonates within the design profession: "His neatly arranged skyscrapers in the park," she argues, "are a terrible oversimplification of urban order. Their rigid separation of functions makes a true diversity impossible; their inhuman scale and vast empty spaces kill off the close-knit vitality of an attractive city."⁶⁹ To Le Corbusier’s defense, he is taking blame for many failed works executed by far less skillful architects, with far less ability to understand ‘the whole’. Ultimately, however, his plans for the city of tomorrow are merely diagrams carrying a radical message, which have proven disastrous in the wrong hands. Jacobs’ response to the projects inspired by Le Corbusier’s vision is an inversion of his original polemic: "the high-rise housing projects and business districts are the dying ‘unsanitary islands’ of the modern city, and the dense, complex districts that Le Corbusier wanted to level are the true sources of urban health."⁷⁰

Why, then, are we still carrying out his schemes today? Perhaps he had strong intuitions about the form that the future city would comfortably assume. After all, he was pursuing the next zeitgeist, and embracing the technological and social change that would inform it. Ironically, we are still captivated by the ambitions and forms which characterize his schemes, which are naturally of his time–not ours. The world has seen considerable change since the 1920’s, and is influenced by an entirely new set of technological phenomena and sociopolitical conditions. Thus, it would seem logical that we try to make sense of our time, and to project new schemes (with hopefully fewer harmful effects) accordingly.

⁶⁸Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias in the 20th Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1977) p. 206

⁶⁹Ibid., p. 269

⁷⁰Ibid., p. 269

Images: 1. Le Corbusier, Contemporary City Project

A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell.