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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

#71

Post by zukzuk »

pembrook wrote: post #48
rich_sasha wrote: post #25

It 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…

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics: "We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the g…

The parts of Paris that were most affected by Haussmann's renovation are arguably still kind of awful.

The Champs-Élysées for example is a horrible place to actually spend time in, and is currently undergoing major redevelopment to make it a bit more livable.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#72

Post by agumonkey »

pembrook wrote: post #48
rich_sasha wrote: post #25

It 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…

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics: "We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the g…

Not far from the outcry around when the eiffel tower was erected.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#73

Post by bobthechef »

pembrook wrote: post #48
rich_sasha wrote: post #25

It 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…

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics: "We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the g…

I reject the notion that aesthetics is arbitrary. It is not. I also reject the mystification and the dismissive progressive fallacy that the only reason anyone might oppose change is because they're crusty old reactionary humbugs (of course, if aesthetics is arbitrary, "progress" has no meaning). Le Corbusier's Paris is objectively hideous. It is objectively a nightmare. It would objectively be immoral to inflict something like that on Parisians. It would objectively harm the common good. A nihilistic misanthrope consumed with hatred for humanity, and himself, could do no better. For this reason, I detest language like "clinging to an aesthetic past". It is a hollow comment that begins from faulty assumptions about aesthetics.

Of course, we often make aesthetic judgements in a relative fashion. People visiting Paris today might say Paris is beautiful, but what they mean is more beautiful than some other point of reference. Spend enough time in a beautiful city and your standards will shift such that you will be disappointed by aesthetically inferior cities you had previously thought were beautiful when you revisit them. This is good. Let our tastes become more refined so that we may make the world a more beautiful place. Let us resist mediocrity and ugliness.

So perhaps those critics of Haussmanian Paris were making such a comparison. I certainly don't think Paris is the most beautiful city, but if you had grown up in a Corbusian nightmare or some aesthetically lesser locale, then it would certainly be an upgrade and perceived as such. Still, Haussmanian Paris is at least built according to classical principles and that is the most important factor.

Of course, I am not opposed to development in the realm of art and architecture and so on, but modernist travesties like the ones pictured are not an authentic development, but a barbaric revolt against the past rooted in hubris, madness, or some other defect.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#74

Post by shoo »

bregma wrote: post #40
richliss wrote: post #2

As 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.

give the people who will live and work in the space ability to locally control the design, as espoused by Christopher Alexander.

that means getting the end users out in the field and teaching them how to build or customise the system to meet their needs using simpler and cheaper traditional materials. maybe perl, javascript, wordpress. maybe excel. maybe bash & cron. smother those high modernist RSI-inducing SaaS user interfaces with a layer of malleable user-written robotic process automation.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#75

Post by Bayart »

pembrook wrote: post #48
rich_sasha wrote: post #25

It 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…

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics: "We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the g…

> Fast forward 100+ years and suddenly that quote sounds hilariously wrong.

Only if you don't care about history and conservancy. Every medievalist is still frothing at the mouth, for good reasons.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#76

Post by shoo »

a-dub wrote: post #51
api wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"dude. i know that's not what it's supposed to do, but actually it's better. it's a feature, not a bug. no, no. it's not shitty, and no i'm not refactoring it and neither are you. it works better and they'll never be able to fire us. it's like jane jacobs and shit. leave it alone. the bits are happy."

this module is a thriving, multi-use community of interacting concerns and responsibilities. yes, it would be more legible to central administrators like us if we evicted all the requirements and implementation details, paved it over, then redeveloped it into a high modernist Corbusian hexagonal microservices architecture. but truly, who would want to live or work inside such a bleak module structure, where instead of simply nipping downstairs to share surplus resources with unrelated business logic in the parent stack frame, you would have to traverse through endless tiers of serialization, transit, deserialization & be subjected to endless authoritarian checkpoints for authorisation by central authorities?

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#77

Post by contingencies »

The artist makes a good point but it's rather unfairly at the expense of Corbusier who to be fair was capable of real art. Fond memories of Paris myself - including La Défense - but shocked how similar the right-side vision is to the current feeling of living en Chine.

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#78

Post by rvieira »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #3

The 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…

It seems he would really enjoy working in the 21st century.

Designing striking CGI buildings for movies without the "downside" of humans actually having to live there :)

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#79

Post by Bud »

captainmuon wrote: post #10
fennecfoxen wrote: post #3

The 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 t…

Le Corbusier just didn't have this figured out. But Christopher Alexander did. See "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building".

Re: Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

#80

Post by dtagames »

bobthechef wrote: post #73
pembrook wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics: "We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the g…

I reject the notion that aesthetics is arbitrary. It is not. I also reject the mystification and the dismissive progressive fallacy that the only reason anyone might oppose change is because they're crusty old reactionary humbugs (of course, if aesthetics is arbitrary, "progress" has no meaning). Le Corbusier's Paris is objectively hideous. It is objectively a nightmare. It would objectively be immoral to inflict som…

Bravo!
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