Fair enough if you don't like Brutalism, but please tell me that you have at least as much dislike for some of the abombinations that have replaced some brutalist buildings:
My problem with Le Corbusier is not the architectural style of Brutalism - some of my favourite buildings are in that style. It was the iconoclasm and outright hostility to existing architecture he promoted. It reminds me of Mao's cultural revolution - he and his followers seemed to delight more in the frenzied destruction of existing architecture than in the act of creation and invention.
This was a facet of many post war movements. Architects imagined they could design buildings that solved social problems as if people are that easily manipulated. Semi officially the end of their line of reasoning came with the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe complexes in st Louis in the 70s although it was clear these architectural social Interventions were utter failures well before then.
Edit:typos due to posting while phone is in a waterproof bag
Architects can design buildings that solve social problems. But they can't use Le Corbusier's authoritarian methods - or any derivative of that mindset - to do it.
This was a typical early 20th century worker housing project. It was pretty successful for the time - so much so it's now expensive and gentrified.
Most people want to live in low-density human-scale housing with plenty of greenery. There's nothing complicated or difficult about this. The problem is that architects want to Make A Statement, and you don't do that by giving ordinary people what they want.
Architects can design buildings that meet people’s needs, but that doesn’t necessarily solve social problems. That’s why it seems simple when in fact building someone a house is not the same as making them self sufficient or giving them the knowledge, skills, and habits to be successful, especially in wider social contexts where social problems live.
The problems that architects solve are much simpler.
Disclaimer - I studied architecture in university and then engineering, and I have a fine appreciation of art and good design but a poor opinion of most architectural theories, including the ones where they give themselves super powers while designing balconies or laying out kitchens.
Those look not unlike American social housing on the East Coast (not NYC). I suspect structural concerns outside the building's design (primarily support for the people living in and maintaining them) are an important input.
Edit: Here's an example, Highland Dwellings in DC.
It is worth noting that a lot of these tower in the park type developments were demolished and replaced with mixed-income housing due to the problems. NYC is probably one of the last places where many of them are still standing (for lack of money to develop them, and also because there are about 600,000 people on the NYCHA waiting lists). But there was a huge federal pot of money for doing this in the '90s and '00s and many authorities did so.
From an architectural standpoint, the difference is that the British homes front the street, whereas your lowrise homes are perpendicular to it, and the towers in the park are generally pointed inward, away from the normal street grid. This has pretty bad effects on crime, because it removes the "eyes on the street" effect from passersby.
That's a fair assessment. I have to imagine that the design distinction of "complexes" (with, as you said, limited direct access to streets) rather than "neighborhoods" contributes. Such layouts make it more difficult for "outside" assistance to "enter" or "retreat" in response to appropriate circumstances. It turns out that making the primary concern of design the warehousing and cloistering of as many human beings as possible in as small a space as possible, far away from employment and resources, does not make as many strides towards the goal of promoting stability and healthy socioeconomic development as may have been hoped.
I'm a 90s kid and so was not familiar with anything but low-rise housing outside of old TV shows and grandfathered infrastructure; your timeline follows my experience, and also the general trend of halting progress on such issues of social justice, where the answer is and has long been known but is warped in execution by a continued, if lessening, marriage to clearly-incorrect-but-politically-attractive notions about what "those people" need and/or deserve.
It's worth noting that HOPE VI and the demolition of public housing solved the immediate problem of "the housing projects are dangerous" but did not solve the deeper problem of the people in those projects and their communities having issues with poverty and crime. There is some debate about whether or not HOPE VI demolitions mostly just served to disperse crime around a city rather than keeping it in problem areas; I can't find the articles anymore due to Google's dislike of older material, but it was blamed for general citywide crime issues in Chicago, for example.
(It was also a political marriage of convenience because in the '90s, railing against welfare was in vogue, and HOPE VI generally did not result in 1:1 replacement of public units, so it was a backdoor way to reduce the population on welfare.)
I don't really think the issue is density. Plenty of low traffic, low density suburban areas have high crime as poor people move into the suburbs; public housing had few eyes on the street because the design intentionally kept out passersby, and if anything suburban neighborhoods with high walking distances, mazelike streets and inconvenient, unpleasant walking environments are more extreme than that, and also have lower amounts of residents to boot. At least in NYC (and probably true of a lot of very inner-city housing projects) the towers in the park usually replaced existing urban neighborhoods at far lower densities than what had previously existed, because so much of the land was just idle greenery (that usually wasn't useful, in the form of small, segmented lawns often fenced off). Compare that with, say, Vienna, where the masses are housed in public housing in large midrise (5-10 story) buildings.
Coincidentally, this large midrise form factor is also what dense gentrifier buildings look like in many cities around the US, from Seattle to DC.
Agreed, Brutalism as an art movement is not without merit.
But Le Corbusier tried to cancel every architectural movements before him.
Ecole de Royan is a nice example of an architecture that is also inspired by Brutalism and the Bauhaus movement, but done in a much more humane and artsy way.
The problem with him aren't the buildings themselves so much IMO. It's his "towers in a park" style. It's like he never actually lived in a city before. You want things to be walkable. Instead, you end up with huge buildings with nothing in between. You get all of the downsides of density with none of the upsides.
He was against the concept of street.
Light was more important than people.
In fact, many of the proponents of this school of thought are going as far as considering that the constraint of having people living in their space is a hindrance preventing them to fully express their ideas.
Architecture is Politics, and Le Corbusier is embodying the worst ideas of the 20th century.
I would upvote most of your answer, but your last sentence is somewhat overstated. Remember the worst ideas of the 20th century and how many people they killed.
Thank you for saying what many people think, myself included. I was ridiculed many times by architects when I said something similar. Architects should create buildings that ordinary people find beautiful, not ugly, and then claim that people are stupid and do not understand architecture.
> His view of life was moral. He was loyal to mathematics, to order, to living the life he thought worth living.
Le Corbusier dreamed of "cleaning and purging cities of disorder" with "calm and powerful architecture." (his words) His plan for Paris was never realized, though his ideals are apparent internationally, unfortunately. He was addicted to a certain kind of untested, abstract knowledge.
Whether Le Corbusier's vision for Paris was stupid or not, I'm not sure it means we need to go back to some hyper-idealized vision of the past (which I'm not sure ever existed).
In glorifying western ideals of history with flowery language, I think you've forgotten to examine what daily life was like living under the power structures that financed those "magnificent decorative artworks."
You romanticize the idea of a peasant walking past ornamental buildings in an old town square, while forgetting that, those buildings were created as a statement of power and influence by the aristocracy who controlled daily life.
The peasants did not go home to one of those "beautifully" decorative buildings. They went home to a shack with no running water and died of some hilariously curable illness at the age of 35. One of their children probably died before the age of 10. But oh, they had the wonderful mysticism of religion and ornamental wallpapers to gaze upon!
Sure, I guess you could call the 7 layers of crown molding and statues carved into statues "enchanting." As an endeavor of sheer human man hours and craftsmanship, its definitely interesting.
But I wouldn't call the rationalist forces that led to overthrowing those practices bad. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I would enjoy having 3 generations of my family enslaved as "artisans" for the sole purpose of carving patterns in a ceiling so one rich guy can impress his buddies.
FWIW the one opportunity he got to execute on his ideas on a city scale (Chandigarh), it turned out fine.
> Le Corbusier dreamed of "cleaning and purging cities of disorder" with "calm and powerful architecture." (his words) His plan for Paris was never realized
I can't help but point out that today's Paris is very much the product of a 19th C. rationalisation with broadly similar motivations and goals (including a desire for abundant parkland)
There is a huge difference between the Haussmann's renovation of Paris and the ideas of Le Corbusier.
The goal of Haussmann was not to abolish everything that had been discovered and learnt by architects and city planners during the centuries before him, but instead to modernize and get rid of the obviously impractical designs.
Pretty much like refactoring an old and messy code-base.
Yeah of course there's a wealth of difference between Haussmann and Corbusier, 70 years will do that. But if someone had that it was Haussmann that dreamt of "cleaning and purging cities of disorder" with "calm and powerful architecture" I wouldn't've blinked.
>The goal of Haussman was [...] to modernize and get rid of the obviously impractical designs.
That, and make the city easier to pacify with military force. Also it wasn't so obviously impractical. There was a lot written at the time about how Haussmann was destroying Paris by tearing out her heart and splitting her up and so on and so forth.
Corbusier's central thesis was that the world had progressed but architecture had not, to the point where previous architecture was obsolete. With the nostalgic and excessive neoclassical style of the beaux-arts dominating the 19th C. it wouldn't've been hard to get that impression. From the tellingly titled "Towards a New Architecture": "Engineers have been busy with barrages, with bridges, with Atlantic liners, with mines, with railways. Architects have been asleep." He was not alone in that conception. He wasn't even the first of the modernists to articulate it. This desire to make a clean break with existing tradition (which you cast as the unique and defining sin of Corbusier) is more or less the foundation and the entire point of Modernism.
Here's two examples that spring to mind. Loos writing in 1910ish alleged with new industrial processes the waste encouraged by the fact that styles go out of style made ornament criminally wasteful, so he advocated for architecture free of ornament. Theo van Doesberg and the rest of De Stijl gang took it in another direction around 1917, attempting to distil everything into category or continuum. In art and architecture this meant right angles and straight lines only (because angles are binary duh, though sometimes 45-degrees was okay), only black, white and the primary colours allowed, and the inside and outside of the building, painting, etc. existed as a continuum (Mondrian was a member for a while)
The problem with Le Corbusier, in my opinion, is not about art style or aesthetics but about city planning and urbanism, or rather his disregard and even disdain for everything that worked for millennia.
There was an undergrad art history course where the professor contrasted his ideals here w/ Venturi and Scott-Brown's "messy vitality" as encoded in their "Learning from Las Vegas" project
“How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun,”
did, actually, die in 1965 while taking a long swim in the Mediterranean, against his doctor’s instructions. His dead body washed ashore later. It is believed he died of a heart attack.“
With the recent googlemaps timeline feature (also featured in various geographical websites) it's interesting to revisit land use in the last century.
After scanning my native area in the 50s I was staggered by the amount of fields in my now urban area. And basically every housing project (say 5+ building sets) was either an old forest block or a field.
Also even though we're all hearing about how humanity is too big for earth, the rate of new construction has increased in the recent years (albeit different form of urban planning[0]) to the point I have no idea who's gonna make enough babies to populate these buildings.
[0] 70s gigantic projects inspired by Le Corbusier 'cite radieuse' did have unforeseen social defects, a large amount of them have been destroyed and replaced by smaller, more human like buildings and the effects are surprising.. entire areas where I wouldn't land a foot due to the menacing feel is now walkable, you can even start to see the parks as parks to chill
He initiated a school of borderline religious and dogmatic followers who are still active this day.
The existence of Le Corbusier and his school is, in my opinion, the worst thing that happened to architecture, ever.
We're still paying his mistakes.