Le Corbusier (1887–1965)

Le Corbusier was not content designing houses; he wanted to rebuild cities. Many critics, even to this day, blame him single handedly for the urban renewal projects executed decades after he first published this classic treatise on the contemporary city. Necessary reading, if anything for recognizing how later architects and bureaucrats misinterpreted many of his ideas.
(From my blog post on Le Corbusier: https://archidose.blogspot.com/2013/06/so-you-want-to-learn-about-le-corbusier.h...

New technologies and ideas are presented through the combination of short texts and photographs (two other titles in the “New Vision” series looked at Locomotives and Photomicrography). Using images gleaned from a wide range of sources, this book is a celebration of flight, both as a clear demonstration of man’s mastery of the air and for providing a new perspective on the world. Aviation is presented as the inevitable pinnacle of human achievement and served as an unequivocal show more demonstration of how progress could be attained through wholeheartedly embracing new technologies and ideas. Here, photographs of aircraft in flight and abstract close-up images are used to celebrate form. The myriad shapes and types of sleek, gleaming aluminium aeroplanes that were at the pinnacle of 1930s design all serve to underline the rupture between the discredited legacy of the past and a New Age of progress. https://propagandaphotos.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/aircraft-le-corbusier/

The master architect of modernism explores the architectural and aesthetic appeal of airplanes while simultaneously exploring how their use drastically changes our understanding of cities. The influence of Le Corbusier (the pseudonym adopted by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) as the leading prophet of high-modernist urban planning and design cannot be underestimated.
Published in 1935, Aircraft celebrates flight and casts the aeroplane as the pinnacle of modern technological achievement. The Wright Brothers had made their first flight only 32 years earlier. Combining photographs with short, dramatic captions, Aircraft was compiled and written by the seminal French modernist architect, Le Corbusier.
Aircraft was produced by The Studio as part of their New Vision series, which introduced the reader to modern, pioneering technologies and ideas. Although The Studio commissioned Le Corbusier to focus on the industrial design of aircraft, the architect chose to widen his subject to aviation as a cultural and social phenomenon.
The result is a book that captures the enthusiasm and ideas surrounding the aerial age. Le Corbusier opens the book by emphasizing the ‘ecstatic feeling’ that flight produces in him. It is ‘symbol of the New Age’, promising adventure, progress and wild possibility. He idealizes the aesthetics of the machines, too, which possess ‘Clearness of function’ (a core principle that underpinned Le Corbusier’s utopian architectural schemes).
Ultimately, Le Corbusier’s interests as an architect and urban planner are at the centre of this work. He explores how flight offers us a new perspective – the ‘bird’s eye view’ – on the environments that we inhabit. Specifically, he is interested in the implications for urban environments: ‘the airplane eye … now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be. And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming. The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse.’
Le Corbusier’s captions are typically bold and uncompromising. The text that accompanies image 9, for example, reads: ‘THE BIRD’S EYE VIEW … MAN WILL MAKE USE OF IT TO CONCEIVE NEW AIMS. CITIES WILL ARISE OUT OF THEIR ASHES.’ Although motivated by utopian ideals surrounding social injustice and urban planning, Le Corbusier’s vision calls for an authoritarian level of destruction that has been seen by some critics to resonate with fascist thinking. show less

Le Corbusier presents what he calls a technical solution to existing problems. In the 1920s, these problems were predominantly related to the advent of the motor car, and the need to replace what he calls the "pack-donkey's way" with straighter, faster motorways. We see the same problem today with a rail network designed for the limitations of steam trains which now hinder the use of very long, modern freight trains. In many ways, Le Corbusier provides an historical institutionalist account show more of the problems of town planning. He admits that the great cities of the world are so located because this is where they should be. Rather than proposing new cities be built elsewhere, he suggests that the centre of the great city needs to be pulled down and rebuilt. History will be preserved in large gardens, like a peaceful cemetery or an art gallery, but otherwise, the value of such history is over-stated when one considers the appalling conditions, the tuberculosis, and so on, that inhabit the relics of the past. Critics of Le Corbusier point to the relative failures of his building projects, and typically his criticisms of disorderly cities such as New York did not win him any friends. Yet, if taken in an appropriate context, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning reads like Machiavelli's The Art of War, where the diagrams of troop displacements are replaced by conceptual plans for future great cities. In The Art of War, the diagrams are regarded as historical relics that do not take away from the serious ideas that Machiavelli presents on modern warfare. Similarly, if one can look beyond Le Corbusier's diagrams of grand schemes, there is a kernel of truth that continues to haunt us to this day: Can our great cities be sustained? When taken in this context, Le Corbusier's work is brilliant. Indeed, there are so many contemporary solutions to congestion and living conditions focused on "working cities" and "sleeping cities" that simply echo what Le Corbusier was claiming almost 100 years ago. One cannot deny that history has "forgotten" many of the solutions Le Corbusier once raised to the extent that technical solutions to our town planning problems today seem somehow new - even innovative. Clearly, these are not new, only forgotten. show less

Passionate writing. The rhetoric of the last chapter made me think of Mon Oncle as a reaction. Corbusier does lay it on thickly. As a rural Midwesterner, his appreciation of grain elevators gladdened me. There are lots of ideas for contemplation buried inside.