10 ms·

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

80 points by revolucien 4y ago

richliss 4y ago
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 people want to live in Bath.
- api 4y ago
  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.
  - Oarch 4y ago
    As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    "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."
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion
    - shoo 4y ago
      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?
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  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?
  - swayvil 4y ago
    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.
    - beecafe 4y ago
      You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.
      - swayvil 4y ago
        The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.
        vidarh 4y ago
        Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.
        yywwbbn 4y ago
        Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?
        swayvil 4y ago
        Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.
- bregma 4y ago
  They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.
  - shoo 4y ago
    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.
- maborowsky 4y ago
  I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings. Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.
fennecfoxen 4y ago
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 you get all their space in between that’s hostile to you hanging out there, barren plazas which don’t function as a park and are strictly segregated from any meaningful street retail… It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Yes. There's a colossal failure of modernist architecture to think about the "user experience". People don't like being mechanized.
- isolli 4y ago
  Agreed, but as a counterpoint, read this story on a very interesting housing project in Montreal (1967). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074
- captainmuon 4y ago
  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 the buildings and so on. But it fails spectacularly. The resulting cities are completely inhumane. There is no space for natural development, for "lucky accidents", no mixed zoning, no entertainment and shopping close by to living quarters, the kind of stuff people now want from an urban lifestyle. And you can't really walk anywhere. One thing I really hate in these kind of cities is that you can't just go anywhere straight, you are 'channeled around'. Whether you are on foot or in a car, you have to shut off your brain and follow the signs. You can't follow your 'desire path', and even if you would, you will walk for a long time through 'non-places' where there is nothing. I was trying to walk a couple of blocks in one of these cities in the hot summer, and it was brutal (there are places like this in the US, France, China, ...). Nothing is human scale, and that is why it feels dehumanizing.
nemo44x 4y ago
Even the Nazis weren’t this ambitious once they took Paris. Yikes.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  In fact, the Nazis tried to not damage Paris too much because Hitler liked the architecture. (Yes, when the Americans came, the plan was to demolish the city. But that was much later).
lelag 4y ago
I love how even the statue facepalm at the end...
everyone 4y ago
I think of the 20th Century as being the century of quacks. Guys like Corbusier and Freud proposing radical new ideas based on no data, zero research, basically pulled out of their assholes. And then somehow these ideas become widely accepted and implemented. There was a lot of damage done then that we are still dealing with the consequences of.
OpieCunningham 4y ago
Le Corbusier, a pioneer of YIMBYism. To be fair, housing costs in Paris would be much more reasonable, both due to such a glut of housing and the subsequent decreased interest in living there.
- adolph 4y ago
  Destroy the village in order to save it http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/it-became-necessary-to-destroy-town-to.html http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/it-became-necessary-t...
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  What? No, advocating for destroying the old world and remaking it according to a"scientific" vision isn't particularly yimby. Ymimby is about not banning people from doing what they want with their property.
bambax 4y ago
The fact that one of the shots prominently features a statue doing a facepalm [1] makes one question if this was intended to attract or in fact deter? [1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58764f376a49630b1d2d77d0/1557911763291-7R8TZRQMBR8AB3V7T8MB/Le+Corbusier+Plan+Voisin_3.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58764f376a4963...
dirtyid 4y ago
Big fan of megablock living in east Asia. Radiant City plan wouldn't have fared well in real life, but I imagine project if built, would be remediated into nice high density mix use neighbourhoods over time. Infill some street level retail, updated cladding over time. Could have worked, and probably better quality units for more people than constantly modernizing Haussmann blocks.
rich_sasha 4y ago
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, maybe except some Platonic space. The earlier rebuilds worked out, mostly because the esthetics stood the test of time, which Le Corbusier's ideas didn't. By contrast, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was proposed to rebuild the city on a grand, modern design, but in the end that was turned out, and the city was rebuilt much as it was before (except with greater fire safety regulation). This explains why even to this day, City of London, now the main business/finance district, has such a weird layout, with tiny backstreets and anachronistic street names.
- cm2187 4y ago
  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.
  - febeling 4y ago
    One problem was that people started believing that there's no such thing as beauty. How do you build a beautiful building, if you think beauty is an illusion anyway? I have the idea that it's related to atheism. Once you believe all of life and all of nature is ultimately some brute atoms buzzing back and forth anyway, then what your imagination creates is likely to look pretty brutalist. If you believe it's angels and God's creation all the way down you will place meaning and symbols into the large elements and every tiny bit. Anyone else can see this connection?
Linda703 4y ago
netfortius 4y ago
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".
birriel 4y ago
3-D Model of Plan Voisin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4 And the Pruitt-Igoe segment from Koyaanisqatsi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE Just bad ideas.
mynameishere 4y ago
What's radical about putting up a bunch of prisons? We did that.
a-dub 4y ago
it's kinda like the silver towers at stuyvesant town scale with freeway revolt era transit. interesting to read that freewayifying the urban cores wasn't just an american obsession (although this seems to predate the american phenomenon by about 30 years). i wonder how far it got? was there a french cognate to the freeway revolt? iirc, paris already has some of the highest housing density in the world.
twelvechairs 4y ago
Tearing up Paris of course would have been an unmitigated disaster. But all the same its important to realize how visionary this (and the slightly earlier Ville Contemporaine) was in the 1920s. Corbusier saw the city of the future far before others - cars as the dominant mode of transport giving people freedom to travel far, simply constructed skyscrapers with standardised apartment types but also with sanitation and services for all (a huge issue in Paris of that era). Of course along with this he didn't see the big issues we know now through bitter experience - car dominance destroying street life, lack of human scale and beauty in mass-produced buildings, poor safety/security, bleak open spaces, etc. Some perhaps are unfair to blame on him as they are in our mind as a result of poor/cheap implementation in other schemes. But we should at least marvel at what Corbusier did understand for his time and how clearly he was able to express it.
contingencies 4y ago
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.

80 points by revolucien 4y ago

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 people want to live in Bath.

api 4y ago
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.
- Oarch 4y ago
  As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.
- a-dub 4y ago
  "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."
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion
  - shoo 4y ago
    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?
DocTomoe 4y ago
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?
- swayvil 4y ago
  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.
  - beecafe 4y ago
    You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.
    - swayvil 4y ago
      The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?
        swayvil 4y ago
        Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.
bregma 4y ago
They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.
- shoo 4y ago
  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.
maborowsky 4y ago
I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings. Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.

fennecfoxen 4y ago

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 you get all their space in between that’s hostile to you hanging out there, barren plazas which don’t function as a park and are strictly segregated from any meaningful street retail… It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.

pjc50 4y ago
Yes. There's a colossal failure of modernist architecture to think about the "user experience". People don't like being mechanized.
isolli 4y ago
Agreed, but as a counterpoint, read this story on a very interesting housing project in Montreal (1967). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074
captainmuon 4y ago
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 the buildings and so on. But it fails spectacularly. The resulting cities are completely inhumane. There is no space for natural development, for "lucky accidents", no mixed zoning, no entertainment and shopping close by to living quarters, the kind of stuff people now want from an urban lifestyle. And you can't really walk anywhere. One thing I really hate in these kind of cities is that you can't just go anywhere straight, you are 'channeled around'. Whether you are on foot or in a car, you have to shut off your brain and follow the signs. You can't follow your 'desire path', and even if you would, you will walk for a long time through 'non-places' where there is nothing. I was trying to walk a couple of blocks in one of these cities in the hot summer, and it was brutal (there are places like this in the US, France, China, ...). Nothing is human scale, and that is why it feels dehumanizing.

nemo44x 4y ago

Even the Nazis weren’t this ambitious once they took Paris. Yikes.

DocTomoe 4y ago
In fact, the Nazis tried to not damage Paris too much because Hitler liked the architecture. (Yes, when the Americans came, the plan was to demolish the city. But that was much later).

lelag 4y ago

I love how even the statue facepalm at the end...

everyone 4y ago

I think of the 20th Century as being the century of quacks. Guys like Corbusier and Freud proposing radical new ideas based on no data, zero research, basically pulled out of their assholes. And then somehow these ideas become widely accepted and implemented. There was a lot of damage done then that we are still dealing with the consequences of.

OpieCunningham 4y ago

Le Corbusier, a pioneer of YIMBYism. To be fair, housing costs in Paris would be much more reasonable, both due to such a glut of housing and the subsequent decreased interest in living there.

adolph 4y ago
Destroy the village in order to save it http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/it-became-necessary-to-destroy-town-to.html http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/it-became-necessary-t...
wardedVibe 4y ago
What? No, advocating for destroying the old world and remaking it according to a"scientific" vision isn't particularly yimby. Ymimby is about not banning people from doing what they want with their property.

bambax 4y ago

The fact that one of the shots prominently features a statue doing a facepalm [1] makes one question if this was intended to attract or in fact deter? [1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58764f376a49630b1d2d77d0/1557911763291-7R8TZRQMBR8AB3V7T8MB/Le+Corbusier+Plan+Voisin_3.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58764f376a4963...

dirtyid 4y ago

Big fan of megablock living in east Asia. Radiant City plan wouldn't have fared well in real life, but I imagine project if built, would be remediated into nice high density mix use neighbourhoods over time. Infill some street level retail, updated cladding over time. Could have worked, and probably better quality units for more people than constantly modernizing Haussmann blocks.

rich_sasha 4y ago

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, maybe except some Platonic space. The earlier rebuilds worked out, mostly because the esthetics stood the test of time, which Le Corbusier's ideas didn't. By contrast, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was proposed to rebuild the city on a grand, modern design, but in the end that was turned out, and the city was rebuilt much as it was before (except with greater fire safety regulation). This explains why even to this day, City of London, now the main business/finance district, has such a weird layout, with tiny backstreets and anachronistic street names.

cm2187 4y ago
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.
- febeling 4y ago
  One problem was that people started believing that there's no such thing as beauty. How do you build a beautiful building, if you think beauty is an illusion anyway? I have the idea that it's related to atheism. Once you believe all of life and all of nature is ultimately some brute atoms buzzing back and forth anyway, then what your imagination creates is likely to look pretty brutalist. If you believe it's angels and God's creation all the way down you will place meaning and symbols into the large elements and every tiny bit. Anyone else can see this connection?

Linda703 4y ago

netfortius 4y ago

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".

birriel 4y ago

3-D Model of Plan Voisin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4 And the Pruitt-Igoe segment from Koyaanisqatsi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE Just bad ideas.

mynameishere 4y ago

What's radical about putting up a bunch of prisons? We did that.

a-dub 4y ago

it's kinda like the silver towers at stuyvesant town scale with freeway revolt era transit. interesting to read that freewayifying the urban cores wasn't just an american obsession (although this seems to predate the american phenomenon by about 30 years). i wonder how far it got? was there a french cognate to the freeway revolt? iirc, paris already has some of the highest housing density in the world.

twelvechairs 4y ago

Tearing up Paris of course would have been an unmitigated disaster. But all the same its important to realize how visionary this (and the slightly earlier Ville Contemporaine) was in the 1920s. Corbusier saw the city of the future far before others - cars as the dominant mode of transport giving people freedom to travel far, simply constructed skyscrapers with standardised apartment types but also with sanitation and services for all (a huge issue in Paris of that era). Of course along with this he didn't see the big issues we know now through bitter experience - car dominance destroying street life, lack of human scale and beauty in mass-produced buildings, poor safety/security, bleak open spaces, etc. Some perhaps are unfair to blame on him as they are in our mind as a result of poor/cheap implementation in other schemes. But we should at least marvel at what Corbusier did understand for his time and how clearly he was able to express it.

contingencies 4y ago

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.