
Grand Plans: Le Corbusier in the USSR - lermontov
http://calvertjournal.com/articles/show/4868/le-corbusier-in-ussr-corbu-moscow-tsentrosoyuz
======
rtpg
Man I'm really glad he didn't get his way for Paris

There seems to be a similar sort of thinking between grand designs in urban
planning and waterfall style development (because of course everything is like
software development if you try hard enough). A lot of compartmentalizing into
giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In
giant buildings!). And the results seem just as mediocre

Its kind of funny, despite having a lot of the same zoning vocabulary as this
grand plan, playig Sim City for an hour will make you realise how foolish
giant zoning areas are. And it's all because of the simple fact that people
need to live close to various parts of the city.

+1 for first principles. A city is a bunch of people first, a zoning map
second( or ideally, almost dead last)

~~~
draven
"A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce
here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!)."

I'm not familiar with architecture nor city planning, but did these guys ever
stop and look at how city centers work (in Europe at least.) Living spaces,
parks and commerce places are all mixed, an arrangement that's the result
organic growth and restructuration over time, converging towards a (at least
local) optimum for people living there.

~~~
_delirium
Part of their motivation was scale: how do you house 10x as many people? Or
50x? As countries were rapidly urbanizing, it looked clear that the
traditional European city center design couldn't handle the population influx,
leading to a proliferation of ramshackle slums, lengthy commutes from the
suburbs, etc. The modernist housing-block was one proposed solution, to
provide housing at large scale while still letting light in, having high
standards of cleanliness, etc.

What actually happened in most places was the long-commute option, though. A
European city center like Stockholm looks nice and quaint as a historical
piece, but as a livable city it doesn't work very well, because it doesn't
have sufficient living space for most of Stockholm's population. Instead, most
Stockholmers live in modernist housing blocks out in the suburbs, and commute
in. So you still have the modernist housing blocks, they're just placed in a
more out of the way location. Is that better or worse? Better for the scenic
Stockholm city center, but probably worse for livability.

~~~
gozo
Uhm. I'm not sure that is entirely correct. The city proper of Stockholm is
very dense, often comparable to Paris. While not as uniformly dense there is
higher building often six to eight floors, compared to the usual five in Paris
[0, 1].

The modernist housing blocks in Stockholm were to some degree supposed to be
self-supported in what was called an ABC-area. ABC (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum)
is an acronym in Swedish for work, housing and service (or center). That's why
they are as disconnected from the city as they are.

The problem with Stockholm is that the city stops very abruptly once you go
outside the main islands. You essentially have suburbs just a couple of
kilometers from the city center. While Paris just goes on and on. This becomes
quite clear if you look west on a satellite maps of Stockholm [2] or compare
panoramas [3, 4].

[0]
[http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e532796...](http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e53279637d3640c58edd542d50d99e89&extent=17.545,59.1193,18.5592,59.4706)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris)
[2]
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/@59.3275603,17.9835409,9633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x465f9e1e43cac981:0x79938dc7521d624b!6m1!1e1)
[3]
[http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG](http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG)
[4]
[http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg](http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg)

------
zorked
Brasilia, the capital of Brazil (mentioned in the article) was built by
disciples of Le Corbusier. It is a horrible place, a totalitarian technocracy
modeled as a city, a place that forgot that humans exist. But it is also a
very interesting failed experiment.

~~~
toolslive
Le Corbusier and followers are responsible for quite some ghettos in France
and Belgium, and still he's seen as a hero by many architects.

As a consequence, instead of starting over, money is being poured into
preservation and restoration of these monstrosities .

An example from Leuven: [http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-
project](http://www.cvaa.be/en/project/social-housing-project) or Antwerp:
[http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63](http://www.standaard.be/cnt/tp2cvh63)

you can find many more

~~~
agumonkey
These aren't even monstruosities. Compared to actual social-architectural
catastrophies they're cute.

There's a few stuff that went very very bad in this era of urban growth, and
Le Corbusier was only part of it. If you look at his first big 'bar' in
Marseille, cite radieuse, it was an acceptable concept, spacious hallways,
carefully designed flats, with good lighting, good thermal thinking. Then you
have national projects that took the idea of 1000s of people in a small land
surface and removed all the actual individual value and beauty. It was all
cramped and low-cost. Industrialization of social structures, that went sour
pretty fast. Even though, based on the ads of the day, they truly believed in
doing good and being correct in their proposal.

------
blowski
I find it interesting how people love tearing everything down and starting
again from scratch, whether it's developers doing a complete rewrite, a new
government scrapping the previous government's entire plans, or an architect
suggesting to demolish an entire city to be replaced with their own design.
I'm just as guilty as anybody else, so it's not a judgement. It just seems to
be something innate in many successful people.

------
emmelaich
I love Alexei Sayle's take on Corbusier, linked from this blog article:

    
    
       http://blog.jasonbrackins.com/2012/12/brutalism.html

~~~
paul
A good summary of why I dislike brutalism so much:

We were experiencing one of the defining characteristics of Brutalism. The
atmosphere of totalitarianism. The brutalists were masters of putting you in
your place, which was in submission to the state (and the architect). The
huge, blocky forms immediately create a dichotomy of scale. You are minuscule
next to these things. The walls are flat. No decoration. Even the texture is
on a small scale (no feature larger than a brick) and uniform. This lack of
features reinforces the dichotomy. There is nothing human size in this place.
The very structure of the building screams out "You are small. We who built
this, we are large. You are small! We are in control!"

~~~
dreamfactory2
Brutalism is anti-totalitarian. It was a utopian movement using the latest
technologies to rebuild accommodation and social environments with incredibly
constrained postwar budgets after the devastation of the air war in Europe.

------
rrrazdan
FWIW Le Corbusier is responsible for perhaps the most livable city in India.
Chandigarh. It is perhaps one of the few orderly cities in India.

------
carsongross
Le Corbusier was a monster, the purest of anti-humanist modernists, and he
would have destroyed Paris in the name of ideology.

The office park and faceless, isolated and dehumanized tower are his legacies.
The fact that he is still taken seriously, let alone respected, is a testament
to the gnosticism, anti-humanism, puritanism and anti-historical rancor that
has characterized the building (and broader artistic) community since 1900.

But that's none of my business...

~~~
scarmig
LC was the culmination of a barbaric trend, yes. But isn't it important to
take the purest exponent of anti-human modernism seriously, since he's
influenced our lives so much?

~~~
carsongross
I can see the argument, like one should read 'Mein Kampf' or 'The Communist
Manifesto' for historical reference.

On the other hand, I think its important to recognize that the mainstream of
academic architecture does _not_ reject his work, and continues to reject, in
the main, the works of people like Jacobs and Alexander.

So, yes, perhaps we should still read some of his stuff (a lot of it is
pretentious nonsense, in my opinion) but only with a proper understanding of
what his aesthetic lead to.

