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What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

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Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#41

Post by nkoren »

lqet wrote: post #18

Le Corbusier is a mystery to me. I would very much like to understand the intellectual bending of his esthetic instincts that lead him going from this [0, 1, 2] to this [3, 4, 5] and his ideas of "machines for living" [6]. With good intentions, he invented the modern ghetto. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg [2] https:/…

I can't find any online searchable text of his great polemic, "Towards a New Architecture" -- but basically if you read that it's pretty clear: he hated people. Individual humans are fine and should have their needs efficiently catered to, but humans, en masse, are a repugnant horror that need to be cleaned up.

From memory, he described the cafes and bars of Paris as "fungus which consumes the pavement". He wanted to raze Paris to the ground in order to sort that out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin). There was one line in particular -- I wish I could find the exact text, but it went something like this: "the modern phonograph or victrola can perfectly reproduce the sounds of the orchestra, so there is no more need for the modern man to expose himself to the germs of the audience of the virtuoso of the soloist."

(I threw that book across the room SO many times during architecture school.)

In short: at one scale Corbusier may have had a fine sense of aesthetics and a generally keen mind, but at social scales he was a sociopathic germophobe who absolutely abhorred the complexity of organic living systems.

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#42

Post by rospaya »

lqet wrote: post #18

Le Corbusier is a mystery to me. I would very much like to understand the intellectual bending of his esthetic instincts that lead him going from this [0, 1, 2] to this [3, 4, 5] and his ideas of "machines for living" [6]. With good intentions, he invented the modern ghetto. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg [2] https:/…

It's borderline ignorant to call Unite buildings ghettos, especially if you're judging them only by looks. I've been in several of them in the article and loved it, in some places they're coveted places to live - if they've been maintained and supported with surrounding infrastructure.

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#43

Post by nerdponx »

Spooky23 wrote: post #37
nerdponx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair about anonymity, and fair about his talent. But I can't forgive him for what he did to the Rockaways, as much as I can't forgive whoever designed the Inner Loop highway in Rochester. The fact that I know one's name and not the other doesn't change my dislike of what they did.

Agreed. If you haven’t, it sounds like this is a topic you’re into and i would recommend that you read “The Power Broker”. It’s a summer read (as in June-September), but is a uniquely awesome book.

It's next up after the Hamilton biography :)

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#44

Post by kergonath »

martneumann wrote: post #26
lqet wrote: post #18

Le Corbusier is a mystery to me. I would very much like to understand the intellectual bending of his esthetic instincts that lead him going from this [0, 1, 2] to this [3, 4, 5] and his ideas of "machines for living" [6]. With good intentions, he invented the modern ghetto. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg [2] https:/…

The first few are single family villas, the last four are multi family housing complexes. For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward. That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transpor…

> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.

To be fair, there were pressing issues with large slums all across Europe at that time, and they needed to build lots of homes very quickly. I am not sure there were many alternative to blocks of flats back in the day. The problem is also not really high densities, because it also means that there is a local market for shops, restaurants, etc, which can make the neighbourhoods very walkable and nice. Most large projects had plans for things like cinemas, swimming pools, gyms, shops, and stuff. Often these were not built and instead there were these rows after rows of blocks of concrete.

Transport is a real problem, because these places became less and less attractive as they aged and became more and more isolated.

But smaller population densities would not have helped one bit with that. It would just have encouraged urban sprawl which is even worse in terms of public transport and walkability.

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#46

Post by kergonath »

dmitriid wrote: post #33

As I saw someone say, "In all its years modernism has failed to produce beautiful cities". Tourists still flock to old parts of towns and 19th-century factories are refurbished into elite apartments.

The 19th-century warehouses that are so trendy these days were abominations back in the day. I think it’s very difficult to predict with any king of accuracy what people will like 100 years from now.

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#47

Post by johnyzee »

martneumann wrote: post #26
lqet wrote: post #18

Le Corbusier is a mystery to me. I would very much like to understand the intellectual bending of his esthetic instincts that lead him going from this [0, 1, 2] to this [3, 4, 5] and his ideas of "machines for living" [6]. With good intentions, he invented the modern ghetto. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg [2] https:/…

The first few are single family villas, the last four are multi family housing complexes. For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward. That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transpor…

> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.

I saw a documentary about one of these projects. It was contemporary footage with interviews of regular people, asking what they thought about them. A woman gave an answer which I felt was very profound: "Who wants to live where you can't see your kids when they're playing outside?"

It just seems so jarringly obvious, how disconnected it is to sit up in a tower block, coming from someone who is probably used to be able to open the front door and be outside. Also it struck me how these areas are always associated in my mind with delinquency (having grown up around them). Perhaps it's just because the parents can't see their kids, duh.

Re: What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh

#49

Post by lbriner »

I immediately find myself asking whether the mistake is to allow one person to govern so much of a design of something so large and multi-purpose as a city.

Many places where people complain of a failed designed city are complaining about its uniformity, whereas most places that people rate highly will have an enormous range of styles, sizes, ages and even geometry.

It seems like a more useful design would need to be organic. You could have an open competition for people to simulate how a real town would have grown over time taking into account what happened in that part of the world (famines, wars etc.) to end up with something that could look much more varied and interesting but which could be built to modern standards of efficiency and also can design things like roads and services more sustainably, instead of creating something that cannot be maintained for reasonable money (digging up roads all the time, tarmac etc.)

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