What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by renewiltord » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 11:19 PM UTC

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.

Well, I lived in a converted warehouse. Then I lived in a new-build next door. The converted warehouse had an aesthetic, but the new build? Fucking gorgeous, man. Look out over the Thames, massive panes of glass. The thing those warehouses have that you can't beat is location. They're all right on the river for obvious reasons.

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

#62

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #44

martneumann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

What you said is underappreciated in options on architecture. I'm as much of a critic of some themes as anyone, but it's fundamentally about designing within constraints.

One can dislike the result, but proposing alternatives that ignore the design constraints is disingenuous.

If countries need massive amount of housing but don't have time or money to build it... you're going to get a certain type of solution.

And it can be the best solution given those constraints and still an objectively bad solution.

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

#63

Post by kergonath » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #51

kergonath wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modernism has been around for almost 100 years already. "Le Coubousier's Toward an Architecture" is 1920–1923.

This does not really change the fact that we are applying current ideas about how a building should look like in a future we don’t know. For all we know refurbished brutalist buildings will be all the rage in 2070.