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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
by captainmuon 5y 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.
- Sharlin 5y agoQuite so. And in reality those large parks would have (and did!) turn into fields of asphalt and concrete, as automobile infrastructure expanded to fill all available space (Le Corbusier and his contemporaries didn't quite get how drastic the consequences of automobilization together with separation of functions would be…)
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoI think this is an under appreciated point. Something I find striking in watching historical footage of urban areas is just how empty the roads were. Just the other day I was watching some restored footage of Paris in the 1920s, and they drove the camera car through famous areas that today would be a near parking lot most of the day, but back then were wide open. If you look at car centric infrastructure through this lens, it's easier to understand how it all went so wrong. The American dream as designed in say the 1950s was quite pleasant if you could afford it. A nice modern house on clean brand new wide open roads. Sure you have to drive everywhere vs walk to the neighborhood main street for errands but gas is cheap and those roads make it all so fast and convenient. Of course the problem is non of this scaled, but that didn't stop us from trying, and ending up with the worst of both in many ways.
- Bud 5y agoLe Corbusier just didn't have this figured out. But Christopher Alexander did. See "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building".