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Bad old Le Corbusier. Who would have thought moving architecture away from beauty and into "efficency" would end up so badly? (i am sarcastic)

Arnt 5y ago
It's easy to be sarcastic about him, but be fair. What he was moving architecture away from wasn't so much beauty as it was random slums for most people and beautiful comfort for the 1%. It's easy to look at the hundred-year-old apartments and see the beauty, but that suffers from survivor bias.
- chopin 5y ago
  Two years ago I admired the Edwardian blocks in Edinburgh. I don't think they where built for the 1% and are much more humane.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    Yes. And I don't think Le Corbusier ever wanted to replace the best of the old housing, he wanted to replace the mass of bad building. And he had rather ahem ideas about how people ought to behave, once they had spacious apartments with hot and cold water. Which is the part I was reminded of when I read the article we're discussing. That view of the city as a set of streets to drive through is like his. Very simplistic, one-sided, optimisable but not humane.
- axelroze 5y ago
  Actually I agree that commieblocks/modern-architecture is very efficient in the same way as Ford's car factory in producing a lot fast. And just as Ford said that the car can be had in any colour as long as it black, so the architecture of this period is in any colour as it is dull concrete gray. The dream of equality to the letter is what actually lead to this. We should all be equal => We must all live in ugly soulless copy-paste commieblocks. Would person A be less equal to person B if A lived in a box painted red and B lived in a box painted green? Le Corbusier et al obviously thought the answer is yes. I take a lot of issue with that. Marble pools, huge gardens and other forms of opulence and luxury are a thing to cling in these arguments to but there are many many worker communities who lived in very beautiful buildings at the turn of the 20th century. Why not continue that strategy but go instead for ugliness? The ego of Le Corbusier and the desire to be modern and free of shackles of the past. WW2 destroyed Europe. What to do? Make it so ugly that no one ever again bothers destroying it. By the way beauty was not completely lost in the communist countries. The new steel mill processing plant in Krakow is a community built in renaissance style. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta

Arnt 5y ago

It's easy to be sarcastic about him, but be fair. What he was moving architecture away from wasn't so much beauty as it was random slums for most people and beautiful comfort for the 1%. It's easy to look at the hundred-year-old apartments and see the beauty, but that suffers from survivor bias.

chopin 5y ago
Two years ago I admired the Edwardian blocks in Edinburgh. I don't think they where built for the 1% and are much more humane.
- Arnt 5y ago
  Yes. And I don't think Le Corbusier ever wanted to replace the best of the old housing, he wanted to replace the mass of bad building. And he had rather ahem ideas about how people ought to behave, once they had spacious apartments with hot and cold water. Which is the part I was reminded of when I read the article we're discussing. That view of the city as a set of streets to drive through is like his. Very simplistic, one-sided, optimisable but not humane.
axelroze 5y ago
Actually I agree that commieblocks/modern-architecture is very efficient in the same way as Ford's car factory in producing a lot fast. And just as Ford said that the car can be had in any colour as long as it black, so the architecture of this period is in any colour as it is dull concrete gray. The dream of equality to the letter is what actually lead to this. We should all be equal => We must all live in ugly soulless copy-paste commieblocks. Would person A be less equal to person B if A lived in a box painted red and B lived in a box painted green? Le Corbusier et al obviously thought the answer is yes. I take a lot of issue with that. Marble pools, huge gardens and other forms of opulence and luxury are a thing to cling in these arguments to but there are many many worker communities who lived in very beautiful buildings at the turn of the 20th century. Why not continue that strategy but go instead for ugliness? The ego of Le Corbusier and the desire to be modern and free of shackles of the past. WW2 destroyed Europe. What to do? Make it so ugly that no one ever again bothers destroying it. By the way beauty was not completely lost in the communist countries. The new steel mill processing plant in Krakow is a community built in renaissance style. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta