6 ms·

Grand Plans: Le Corbusier in the USSR

42 points by lermontov 11y ago

rtpg 11y ago
Man I'm really glad he didn't get his way for Paris There seems to be a similar sort of thinking between grand designs in urban planning and waterfall style development (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough). A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!). And the results seem just as mediocre Its kind of funny, despite having a lot of the same zoning vocabulary as this grand plan, playig Sim City for an hour will make you realise how foolish giant zoning areas are. And it's all because of the simple fact that people need to live close to various parts of the city. +1 for first principles. A city is a bunch of people first, a zoning map second( or ideally, almost dead last)
- rzzzt 11y ago
  > (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough) I think it's the other way round: software development borrowed ideas, process and vocabulary heavily from "rubber meets the road" engineering and architecture at its beginnings, just to have something to work with. :)
- draven 11y ago
  "A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!)." I'm not familiar with architecture nor city planning, but did these guys ever stop and look at how city centers work (in Europe at least.) Living spaces, parks and commerce places are all mixed, an arrangement that's the result organic growth and restructuration over time, converging towards a (at least local) optimum for people living there.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Many did, and many clearly thought it was too chaotic for their tastes and/or didn't actually stop to think where all the people were coming from or going to. It also gets easier to understand the temptation when you look at the kind of stamps other planners have been able to put on cities. Central Park? Arch de Triomphe with it's radiating avenues? The successful examples puts you in the history books. And even the not-quite-so-successful examples can look amazing and still be fantastic landmarks (e.g. la Défense, with the position of La Grande Arche as one end of the "historical axis" ending at the Louvre). It's not that surprising that a lot of city planners gets seduced by broad strokes and grand structures when the "prize" is to have your work quite literally stand out even on maps.
  - dreamfactory2 11y ago
    It's very formalized in Barcelona's Eixample - the streets are on a square grid and each block is mix-zoned in order that each is a mini community e.g. you probably have a cafe and restaurant on your block, don't need to go far for a laundry etc
  - _delirium 11y ago
    Part of their motivation was scale: how do you house 10x as many people? Or 50x? As countries were rapidly urbanizing, it looked clear that the traditional European city center design couldn't handle the population influx, leading to a proliferation of ramshackle slums, lengthy commutes from the suburbs, etc. The modernist housing-block was one proposed solution, to provide housing at large scale while still letting light in, having high standards of cleanliness, etc. What actually happened in most places was the long-commute option, though. A European city center like Stockholm looks nice and quaint as a historical piece, but as a livable city it doesn't work very well, because it doesn't have sufficient living space for most of Stockholm's population. Instead, most Stockholmers live in modernist housing blocks out in the suburbs, and commute in. So you still have the modernist housing blocks, they're just placed in a more out of the way location. Is that better or worse? Better for the scenic Stockholm city center, but probably worse for livability.
    - gozo 11y ago
      Uhm. I'm not sure that is entirely correct. The city proper of Stockholm is very dense, often comparable to Paris. While not as uniformly dense there is higher building often six to eight floors, compared to the usual five in Paris [0, 1]. The modernist housing blocks in Stockholm were to some degree supposed to be self-supported in what was called an ABC-area. ABC (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum) is an acronym in Swedish for work, housing and service (or center). That's why they are as disconnected from the city as they are. The problem with Stockholm is that the city stops very abruptly once you go outside the main islands. You essentially have suburbs just a couple of kilometers from the city center. While Paris just goes on and on. This becomes quite clear if you look west on a satellite maps of Stockholm [2] or compare panoramas [3, 4]. [0] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e53279637d3640c58edd542d50d99e89&extent=17.545,59.1193,18.5592,59.4706 http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e532796... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/@59.3275603,17.9835409,9633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x465f9e1e43cac981:0x79938dc7521d624b!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/... [3] http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG [4] http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg
- ianbicking 11y ago
  In these plans it feels like the highest priority is to make the design comprehensible for the planners. An expression of incredible laziness. And still such a common planning behaviour. On a smaller scale you might look at one skyscraper and consider the raw quantity of human activity contained within, all utterly erased by the architecture so that every floor and window looks the same - what a loss! On the level of roads and navigation we can start to consider ignoring comprehensibility entirely. With navigation systems and even more with automated vehicles we can traverse a city without understanding it. Who needs the strict hierarchy of transportation from the Radiant City? Or even the hierarchies we have now. Transportation is the beginning, but commerce will follow - will we need the hierarchy of warehouses, big box stores, local shops, categories of retail...? New Urbanism principles may survive, but only as an aesthetic, urban planning as decoration. The organic city structures we'll see (organic because what use has nature ever had for comprehensibility?) could go more than one way. Like an algae bloom of suburbia, structure without character or meaning. Maybe suburbia is already an expression of this trend. But if we don't fetishize old patterns like New Urbanism, and we don't create spiritually beige non-patterns like suburbia, what other structures do we have to meaningfully organize our cities? I'm somewhat at a loss. But then no one is asking me anyway ;)
- api 11y ago
  La Corbusier is still alive in parts of Southern California, resulting in places where it feels like you have to get on the highway for 20 minutes to go to the toilet. This kind of design philosophy results in places that look good from a distance and tick off all the desirability checkboxes but are not actually good places to live. The comparison with waterfall development is apt: vision first, reality second, users last.
blowski 11y ago
I find it interesting how people love tearing everything down and starting again from scratch, whether it's developers doing a complete rewrite, a new government scrapping the previous government's entire plans, or an architect suggesting to demolish an entire city to be replaced with their own design. I'm just as guilty as anybody else, so it's not a judgement. It just seems to be something innate in many successful people.
zorked 11y ago
Brasilia, the capital of Brazil (mentioned in the article) was built by disciples of Le Corbusier. It is a horrible place, a totalitarian technocracy modeled as a city, a place that forgot that humans exist. But it is also a very interesting failed experiment.
- toolslive 11y ago
  Le Corbusier and followers are responsible for quite some ghettos in France and Belgium, and still he's seen as a hero by many architects. As a consequence, instead of starting over, money is being poured into preservation and restoration of these monstrosities . An example from Leuven: http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-project http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-project or Antwerp: http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63 http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63 you can find many more
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    It might be that his constructions resulted in ghettos but it's not his exclusivity (or that the fault lies exclusively due to his way of building stuff) Yeah, some should be conserved (maybe for historical purposes) but sometimes it would be better to start over
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    These aren't even monstruosities. Compared to actual social-architectural catastrophies they're cute. There's a few stuff that went very very bad in this era of urban growth, and Le Corbusier was only part of it. If you look at his first big 'bar' in Marseille, cite radieuse, it was an acceptable concept, spacious hallways, carefully designed flats, with good lighting, good thermal thinking. Then you have national projects that took the idea of 1000s of people in a small land surface and removed all the actual individual value and beauty. It was all cramped and low-cost. Industrialization of social structures, that went sour pretty fast. Even though, based on the ads of the day, they truly believed in doing good and being correct in their proposal.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    Doesn't them being ghettoes mainly have to do with them being occupied by poor people, not the architecture? Europe also has ghettoes in a number of other architectural styles. And in the other direction, Manhattan is packed full of International Style modernism, and yet not considered a ghetto... because it's full of wealthy people.
emmelaich 11y ago
I love Alexei Sayle's take on Corbusier, linked from this blog article: http://blog.jasonbrackins.com/2012/12/brutalism.html
- paul 11y ago
  A good summary of why I dislike brutalism so much: We were experiencing one of the defining characteristics of Brutalism. The atmosphere of totalitarianism. The brutalists were masters of putting you in your place, which was in submission to the state (and the architect). The huge, blocky forms immediately create a dichotomy of scale. You are minuscule next to these things. The walls are flat. No decoration. Even the texture is on a small scale (no feature larger than a brick) and uniform. This lack of features reinforces the dichotomy. There is nothing human size in this place. The very structure of the building screams out "You are small. We who built this, we are large. You are small! We are in control!"
  - dreamfactory2 11y ago
    Brutalism is anti-totalitarian. It was a utopian movement using the latest technologies to rebuild accommodation and social environments with incredibly constrained postwar budgets after the devastation of the air war in Europe.
rrrazdan 11y ago
FWIW Le Corbusier is responsible for perhaps the most livable city in India. Chandigarh. It is perhaps one of the few orderly cities in India.
carsongross 11y ago
Le Corbusier was a monster, the purest of anti-humanist modernists, and he would have destroyed Paris in the name of ideology. The office park and faceless, isolated and dehumanized tower are his legacies. The fact that he is still taken seriously, let alone respected, is a testament to the gnosticism, anti-humanism, puritanism and anti-historical rancor that has characterized the building (and broader artistic) community since 1900. But that's none of my business...
- scarmig 11y ago
  LC was the culmination of a barbaric trend, yes. But isn't it important to take the purest exponent of anti-human modernism seriously, since he's influenced our lives so much?
  - carsongross 11y ago
    I can see the argument, like one should read 'Mein Kampf' or 'The Communist Manifesto' for historical reference. On the other hand, I think its important to recognize that the mainstream of academic architecture does not reject his work, and continues to reject, in the main, the works of people like Jacobs and Alexander. So, yes, perhaps we should still read some of his stuff (a lot of it is pretentious nonsense, in my opinion) but only with a proper understanding of what his aesthetic lead to.
- jamespitts 11y ago
  That he survived WWII in an intellectual sense is unfortunate. His buildings, like Albert Speer's, are a concrete rendering of the idea of 20th century dictatorship. Thankfully there was already resistance to his ideas -- even his friend Salvador Dali loathed his architecture. But it took a long time before intellectuals such as Jane Jacobs developed a complete framework that explained why modernist buildings are so damaging (beyond prudence and horse sense). His aesthetic offers a great lesson, and the lesson can be applied to any field: large-scale changes, applied top-down, incur a risk of inflicting deep social damage. This is why user feedback is so important. This is why going with your gut or channeling a theoretical framework must be strongly tempered by empiricism.
- 11y ago

42 points by lermontov 11y ago

rtpg 11y ago

Man I'm really glad he didn't get his way for Paris There seems to be a similar sort of thinking between grand designs in urban planning and waterfall style development (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough). A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!). And the results seem just as mediocre Its kind of funny, despite having a lot of the same zoning vocabulary as this grand plan, playig Sim City for an hour will make you realise how foolish giant zoning areas are. And it's all because of the simple fact that people need to live close to various parts of the city. +1 for first principles. A city is a bunch of people first, a zoning map second( or ideally, almost dead last)

rzzzt 11y ago
> (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough) I think it's the other way round: software development borrowed ideas, process and vocabulary heavily from "rubber meets the road" engineering and architecture at its beginnings, just to have something to work with. :)
draven 11y ago
"A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!)." I'm not familiar with architecture nor city planning, but did these guys ever stop and look at how city centers work (in Europe at least.) Living spaces, parks and commerce places are all mixed, an arrangement that's the result organic growth and restructuration over time, converging towards a (at least local) optimum for people living there.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Many did, and many clearly thought it was too chaotic for their tastes and/or didn't actually stop to think where all the people were coming from or going to. It also gets easier to understand the temptation when you look at the kind of stamps other planners have been able to put on cities. Central Park? Arch de Triomphe with it's radiating avenues? The successful examples puts you in the history books. And even the not-quite-so-successful examples can look amazing and still be fantastic landmarks (e.g. la Défense, with the position of La Grande Arche as one end of the "historical axis" ending at the Louvre). It's not that surprising that a lot of city planners gets seduced by broad strokes and grand structures when the "prize" is to have your work quite literally stand out even on maps.
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  It's very formalized in Barcelona's Eixample - the streets are on a square grid and each block is mix-zoned in order that each is a mini community e.g. you probably have a cafe and restaurant on your block, don't need to go far for a laundry etc
- _delirium 11y ago
  Part of their motivation was scale: how do you house 10x as many people? Or 50x? As countries were rapidly urbanizing, it looked clear that the traditional European city center design couldn't handle the population influx, leading to a proliferation of ramshackle slums, lengthy commutes from the suburbs, etc. The modernist housing-block was one proposed solution, to provide housing at large scale while still letting light in, having high standards of cleanliness, etc. What actually happened in most places was the long-commute option, though. A European city center like Stockholm looks nice and quaint as a historical piece, but as a livable city it doesn't work very well, because it doesn't have sufficient living space for most of Stockholm's population. Instead, most Stockholmers live in modernist housing blocks out in the suburbs, and commute in. So you still have the modernist housing blocks, they're just placed in a more out of the way location. Is that better or worse? Better for the scenic Stockholm city center, but probably worse for livability.
  - gozo 11y ago
    Uhm. I'm not sure that is entirely correct. The city proper of Stockholm is very dense, often comparable to Paris. While not as uniformly dense there is higher building often six to eight floors, compared to the usual five in Paris [0, 1]. The modernist housing blocks in Stockholm were to some degree supposed to be self-supported in what was called an ABC-area. ABC (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum) is an acronym in Swedish for work, housing and service (or center). That's why they are as disconnected from the city as they are. The problem with Stockholm is that the city stops very abruptly once you go outside the main islands. You essentially have suburbs just a couple of kilometers from the city center. While Paris just goes on and on. This becomes quite clear if you look west on a satellite maps of Stockholm [2] or compare panoramas [3, 4]. [0] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e53279637d3640c58edd542d50d99e89&extent=17.545,59.1193,18.5592,59.4706 http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e532796... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/@59.3275603,17.9835409,9633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x465f9e1e43cac981:0x79938dc7521d624b!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/... [3] http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG [4] http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg
ianbicking 11y ago
In these plans it feels like the highest priority is to make the design comprehensible for the planners. An expression of incredible laziness. And still such a common planning behaviour. On a smaller scale you might look at one skyscraper and consider the raw quantity of human activity contained within, all utterly erased by the architecture so that every floor and window looks the same - what a loss! On the level of roads and navigation we can start to consider ignoring comprehensibility entirely. With navigation systems and even more with automated vehicles we can traverse a city without understanding it. Who needs the strict hierarchy of transportation from the Radiant City? Or even the hierarchies we have now. Transportation is the beginning, but commerce will follow - will we need the hierarchy of warehouses, big box stores, local shops, categories of retail...? New Urbanism principles may survive, but only as an aesthetic, urban planning as decoration. The organic city structures we'll see (organic because what use has nature ever had for comprehensibility?) could go more than one way. Like an algae bloom of suburbia, structure without character or meaning. Maybe suburbia is already an expression of this trend. But if we don't fetishize old patterns like New Urbanism, and we don't create spiritually beige non-patterns like suburbia, what other structures do we have to meaningfully organize our cities? I'm somewhat at a loss. But then no one is asking me anyway ;)
api 11y ago
La Corbusier is still alive in parts of Southern California, resulting in places where it feels like you have to get on the highway for 20 minutes to go to the toilet. This kind of design philosophy results in places that look good from a distance and tick off all the desirability checkboxes but are not actually good places to live. The comparison with waterfall development is apt: vision first, reality second, users last.

blowski 11y ago

I find it interesting how people love tearing everything down and starting again from scratch, whether it's developers doing a complete rewrite, a new government scrapping the previous government's entire plans, or an architect suggesting to demolish an entire city to be replaced with their own design. I'm just as guilty as anybody else, so it's not a judgement. It just seems to be something innate in many successful people.

zorked 11y ago

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil (mentioned in the article) was built by disciples of Le Corbusier. It is a horrible place, a totalitarian technocracy modeled as a city, a place that forgot that humans exist. But it is also a very interesting failed experiment.

toolslive 11y ago
Le Corbusier and followers are responsible for quite some ghettos in France and Belgium, and still he's seen as a hero by many architects. As a consequence, instead of starting over, money is being poured into preservation and restoration of these monstrosities . An example from Leuven: http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-project http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-project or Antwerp: http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63 http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63 you can find many more
- raverbashing 11y ago
  It might be that his constructions resulted in ghettos but it's not his exclusivity (or that the fault lies exclusively due to his way of building stuff) Yeah, some should be conserved (maybe for historical purposes) but sometimes it would be better to start over
- agumonkey 11y ago
  These aren't even monstruosities. Compared to actual social-architectural catastrophies they're cute. There's a few stuff that went very very bad in this era of urban growth, and Le Corbusier was only part of it. If you look at his first big 'bar' in Marseille, cite radieuse, it was an acceptable concept, spacious hallways, carefully designed flats, with good lighting, good thermal thinking. Then you have national projects that took the idea of 1000s of people in a small land surface and removed all the actual individual value and beauty. It was all cramped and low-cost. Industrialization of social structures, that went sour pretty fast. Even though, based on the ads of the day, they truly believed in doing good and being correct in their proposal.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Doesn't them being ghettoes mainly have to do with them being occupied by poor people, not the architecture? Europe also has ghettoes in a number of other architectural styles. And in the other direction, Manhattan is packed full of International Style modernism, and yet not considered a ghetto... because it's full of wealthy people.

emmelaich 11y ago

I love Alexei Sayle's take on Corbusier, linked from this blog article: http://blog.jasonbrackins.com/2012/12/brutalism.html

paul 11y ago
A good summary of why I dislike brutalism so much: We were experiencing one of the defining characteristics of Brutalism. The atmosphere of totalitarianism. The brutalists were masters of putting you in your place, which was in submission to the state (and the architect). The huge, blocky forms immediately create a dichotomy of scale. You are minuscule next to these things. The walls are flat. No decoration. Even the texture is on a small scale (no feature larger than a brick) and uniform. This lack of features reinforces the dichotomy. There is nothing human size in this place. The very structure of the building screams out "You are small. We who built this, we are large. You are small! We are in control!"
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  Brutalism is anti-totalitarian. It was a utopian movement using the latest technologies to rebuild accommodation and social environments with incredibly constrained postwar budgets after the devastation of the air war in Europe.

rrrazdan 11y ago

FWIW Le Corbusier is responsible for perhaps the most livable city in India. Chandigarh. It is perhaps one of the few orderly cities in India.

carsongross 11y ago

Le Corbusier was a monster, the purest of anti-humanist modernists, and he would have destroyed Paris in the name of ideology. The office park and faceless, isolated and dehumanized tower are his legacies. The fact that he is still taken seriously, let alone respected, is a testament to the gnosticism, anti-humanism, puritanism and anti-historical rancor that has characterized the building (and broader artistic) community since 1900. But that's none of my business...

scarmig 11y ago
LC was the culmination of a barbaric trend, yes. But isn't it important to take the purest exponent of anti-human modernism seriously, since he's influenced our lives so much?
- carsongross 11y ago
  I can see the argument, like one should read 'Mein Kampf' or 'The Communist Manifesto' for historical reference. On the other hand, I think its important to recognize that the mainstream of academic architecture does not reject his work, and continues to reject, in the main, the works of people like Jacobs and Alexander. So, yes, perhaps we should still read some of his stuff (a lot of it is pretentious nonsense, in my opinion) but only with a proper understanding of what his aesthetic lead to.
jamespitts 11y ago
That he survived WWII in an intellectual sense is unfortunate. His buildings, like Albert Speer's, are a concrete rendering of the idea of 20th century dictatorship. Thankfully there was already resistance to his ideas -- even his friend Salvador Dali loathed his architecture. But it took a long time before intellectuals such as Jane Jacobs developed a complete framework that explained why modernist buildings are so damaging (beyond prudence and horse sense). His aesthetic offers a great lesson, and the lesson can be applied to any field: large-scale changes, applied top-down, incur a risk of inflicting deep social damage. This is why user feedback is so important. This is why going with your gut or channeling a theoretical framework must be strongly tempered by empiricism.
11y ago