Ceausescu (the Genius Architect of the Carpathians) "did" (ordered others to) just that, in Romania - especially in Bucharest - during his regime of [terror and] "reconstruction".
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
#32What's radical about putting up a bunch of prisons? We did that.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#333-D Model of Plan Voisin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4
And the Pruitt-Igoe segment from Koyaanisqatsi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE
Just bad ideas.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not build more Baths next to the old one instead?
I don’t know about building codes in Britain, but in almost all of the US it would be illegal to build a carbon copy of the beloved older cities we have, because huge roads, parking lots, and setbacks are all mandatory.
And of course, these short-sighted car-centric ideas are all part of the problem.
In North America there are planners and activists trying to change this[1] & world-wide, planners can achieve walkable, people-centric urban planning [2].
[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?
The problem is too many people. The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats? Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?... Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.
The question is rather, what (possibly horrible, dystopian) methods will we use to prevent a demographic crisis as fertility rates are plummeting most places in the world, as most projections now suggest population decline will start within a century.
Turns out the method that have worked the best against "those who insist on breeding like rats" is to treat them humanely, reduce childhood mortality, increase education and provide a more stable economic environment - do that and fertility rates plummet - with or without additional pressure like China's infamous one-child policy.
As it stands, China is set to face decline within a decade or two despite having dropped their previous draconian measures to reduce fertility rates - their fertility rates are now slowly increasing, but they're still far below replacement. India is set to see decline ~3-4 decades later - they're now about at replacement, with fertility still dropping, but there's a lag of a few of decades from the decrease in fertility to population decline. Sub-saharan Africa will likely be last, but even those countries are seeing declining birth rates (e.g. even Niger, which has one of, if not the, highest fertility rates in the world is at around 6.6 births per woman now, but the rate peaked at 7.9 in 1983 and has been declining consistently since, currently at a rate of about 1.3% a year; UN projections suggest they'll reach ~4 by 2050, and around ~2.3, slightly above replacement, around year 2100)
As a result, expect countries to start competing for immigrants, and to start increasingly desperate attempts to get people to have more children. E.g. China has gone from it's one-child policy to allowing three [1] in an attempt to stem the coming decline, with only little effect so far, and you can expect China will see additional policy changes to try to drive the fertility rates back up.
[1] https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/06/07/chinas-declining-po...
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.
The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.
Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?
The problem is too many people. The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats? Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?... Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.
Education of girls and young women. That's it. That's the biggest ROI.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#38It should probably be pointed out that Paris has a history of "knocking it all down" to make space for the New. Haussman did that. Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, one of the most iconic sacral buildings of the world (?) sits on the rubble of its Christian predecessors (as well as an ancient pagan temple, oh well, zeitgeist). The difference was that Le Corbusier's stuff is, as most of this thread attests, ghastly, mayb…
I think the cutoff is the invention of photography. The only way painters could remain relevant is by doing something original rather than beautiful. Then the other arts followed. Modern classical music is impossible to listen to most ears. And architects followed too, more interested in creating an original shape of glass or concrete rather than building anything beautiful and pleasing. There is hardly any piece of modern architecture that will resist the test of time (and the materials used won’t anyway).
For a long list of examples, I defer to the twitter account architects against humanity.
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#39The 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…
Well, thing is, despite he utter ugliness of his designs in mass, one of his high-rises, a tad smaller, could be a nice piece of architecture. One, not a whole city of those...
Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925
#40As 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…
They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.