People love to dump on Corbusier for all the ills of 20th C city planning. Worth noting<p>- These congresses were groups of architects (generally of private houses) struggling to come to terms with how to plan massive cities. At a time of population explosions, new ways of living, modern construction technology etc. City planning really didn't exist as a discipline. No hard science or social science around cities. Etc. You cant really blame them for not getting things right.<p>- Much of this work led to postwar quickly and cheaply built social housing. Which was much needed in the postwar world however turned worse later especially when public housing became segregationist ghettos for lower classes in the late 20th C. You cant really blame these early modernists for that.<p>- Corbusier in fact had many of the ideas that did stick (as opposed to many of the other attendees) - the unitee d'habitation was an incredible system. He obviously didn't understand streets or social interaction in a way that Jane Jacobs did much later but he did understand mass production, concrete and internal apartment planning in ways that led the world.
Corbusier and his acolytes were almost singly responsible for the many urban planning (and related social justice) atrocities of the mid century, especially in the US.<p>If you’re interested in the more recent counter-movement trying to roll back some of these mistakes, see the Charter for the New Urbanism: <a href="https://www.cnu.org/who-we-are/charter-new-urbanism" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnu.org/who-we-are/charter-new-urbanism</a>
A lot of people (in this thread and elsewhere) try to defend corbu as a visionary whose ideas were ruined by cheap construction of whatever, but it’s simply not the case.<p>Humans need nature and green space, that’s an easy thing to agree with.<p>But putting small amounts of green space in between everything (rather than centralizing it) is an awful idea.<p>Not only does it make everyone travel (probably drive) past the green space to get anywhere, it makes the green space worse by making it a pseudo space where it’s not nature (you still see buildings), but it’s also not useful civic space for the city.<p>He made cool buildings and his are some of the few brutalist buildings people think look cool, but he was just dead wrong on urban design.
completely tangential comment--the "criticism" section mentions the Pruit-Igoe development and it eventual demolition. Film of the derelict development and its demolition was in the Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi, and the Philip Glass music behind that section is one of my favorite sections of the score.
> a 1933 document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. The work was based upon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) book of 1935<p>I had to do a double take here. How can a 1933 work be based on something from 1935? Apparently someone changed[1] it from 1943 to 1933. The body still states 1943, so that's probably the correct date.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/815386201" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/815386201</a>
Tom Wolfe had the definitive word on Le Corbusier:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312429142/ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242...</a>