Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
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Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#2As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. Just look at Birmingham, England - they knocked down beautiful buildings to put up brutalist eyesores to then knock down brutalist eyesores and replace them with a different type of modern architecture that will look awful in 20 years.
There's a reason that people want to live in Bath.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#3The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so you get all their space in between that’s hostile to you hanging out there, barren plazas which don’t function as a park and are strictly segregated from any meaningful street retail…
It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#4As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. Just look at Birmingham, England - they knocked down beautiful buildings to put up brutalist eyesores to then knock down brutalist eyesores and replace them with a different type of modern architecture that will look awful in 20 years. There's a reason that peo…
High modernists are like the somewhat narcissistic recluse programmer who thinks everything is crap. They shut themselves in and rewrite everything in their own superior paradigm without bothering to look at any real world use case or ask anyone anything. Then they're surprised that nobody uses what they built.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#5Even the Nazis weren’t this ambitious once they took Paris. Yikes.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#6I love how even the statue facepalm at the end...
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#7The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so…
Yes. There's a colossal failure of modernist architecture to think about the "user experience". People don't like being mechanized.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#8The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so…
Agreed, but as a counterpoint, read this story on a very interesting housing project in Montreal (1967).
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#9I think of the 20th Century as being the century of quacks. Guys like Corbusier and Freud proposing radical new ideas based on no data, zero research, basically pulled out of their assholes. And then somehow these ideas become widely accepted and implemented. There was a lot of damage done then that we are still dealing with the consequences of.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#10The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so…
This. And the funny thing is Le Corbusier and other modernists intended to design for humans:
- They add large parks between the buildings
- You get the huge highrises and long boulevards because of separation of function, because they want to put the living quarters far away from the smelly factories
- They use a lot of concrete and prefab components to keep everything affordable
- They design community areas into the buildings
and so on. But it fails spectacularly. The resulting cities are completely inhumane. There is no space for natural development, for "lucky accidents", no mixed zoning, no entertainment and shopping close by to living quarters, the kind of stuff people now want from an urban lifestyle. And you can't really walk anywhere.
One thing I really hate in these kind of cities is that you can't just go anywhere straight, you are 'channeled around'. Whether you are on foot or in a car, you have to shut off your brain and follow the signs. You can't follow your 'desire path', and even if you would, you will walk for a long time through 'non-places' where there is nothing.
I was trying to walk a couple of blocks in one of these cities in the hot summer, and it was brutal (there are places like this in the US, France, China, ...). Nothing is human scale, and that is why it feels dehumanizing.