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    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning
    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning
    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning
    Ebook377 pages4 hours

    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning

    By Le Corbusier

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    About this ebook

    In this 1929 classic, the great architect Le Corbusier turned from the design of houses to the planning of cities, surveying urban problems and venturing bold new solutions. The book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age.
    Today it is revered as a work that, quite literally, helped to shape our world. Le Corbusier articulates concepts and ideas he would put to work in his city planning schemes for Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp, as well as schemes for a variety of structures from a museum in Tokyo to the United Nations buildings. The influence it exerted on a new generation of architects is now legendary.
    The City of To-morrow and Its Planning characterizes European cities as a chaos of poor design, inadequate housing, and inefficient transportation that grew out of the unplanned jumble of medieval cities. Developing his thesis that a great modern city can only function on a basis of strict order, Le Corbusier presents two imposing schemes for urban reconstruction — the "Voisin" scheme for the center of Paris, and his more developed plans for the "City of Three Million Inhabitants," which envisioned, among other things, 60-story skyscrapers, set well apart, to house commercial activities, and residential housing grouped in great blocks of "villas."
    For those who live in cities as well as anyone interested in their planning, here is a probing survey of the problems of modern urban life and a master architect's stimulating vision of how they might be solved, enlivened by the innovative spirit and passionate creativity that distinguished all of Le Corbusier's work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 9, 2013
    ISBN9780486319483
    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning

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    • 4/5
      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 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.

    Book preview

    The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning - Le Corbusier

    Staedtebau.

    FIRST PART

    GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

    Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it.

    ROUEN IN THE TENTH CENTURY, BUILT ON THE RECTILINEAR ROMAN PLAN

    The cathedral was built on the site of the ancient public buildings. In 1750 the new wall took in the neighbouring approaches ; the fate of the town was decided. The heart of the city has remained rectilinear throughout the ages.

    I

    THE PACK-DONKEY’S WAY AND MAN’S WAY

    MAN walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going ; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it.

    The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade ; he takes the line of least resistance.

    But man governs his feelings by his reason ; he keeps his feelings and his instincts in check, subordinating them to the aim he has in view. He rules the brute creation by his intelligence. His intelligence formulates laws which are the product of experience. His experience is born of work; man works in order that he may not perish. In order that production may be possible, a line of conduct is essential, the laws of experience must be obeyed. Man must consider the result in advance.

    But the pack-donkey thinks of nothing at all, except what will save himself trouble.

    *

    The Pack-Donkey’s Way is responsible for the plan of every continental city ; including Paris, unfortunately.

    ANTWERP IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

    The city has grown year by year, its plan being dictated by the existing roads leading to it. The result is an ingenious series of adaptations made during many centuries. None the less, the plan is a fine one of a curvilinear type.

    In the areas into which little by little invading populations filtered, the covered wagon lumbered along at the mercy of bumps and hollows, of rocks or mire ; a stream was an intimidating obstacle. In this way were born roads and tracks. At cross roads or along river banks the first huts were erected, the first houses and the first villages ; the houses were planted along the tracks, along the Pack-Donkey’s Way. The inhabitants built a fortified wall round and a town hall inside it. They legislated, they toiled, they lived, and always they respected the Pack-Donkey’s Way. Five centuries later another and larger enclosure was built, and five centuries later still a third yet greater. The places where the Pack-Donkey’s Way entered the town became the City Gates and the Customs officers were installed there. The village has become a great capital; Paris, Rome, and Stamboul are based upon the Pack-Donkey’s Way.

    The great capitals have no arteries ; they have only capillaries : further growth, therefore, implies sickness or death. In order to survive, their existence has for a long time been in the hands of surgeons who operate constantly.

    The Romans were great legislators, great colonizers, great administrators. When they arrived at a place, at a cross roads or at a river bank, they took a square and set out the plan of a rectilinear town, so that it should be clear and well-arranged, easy to police and to clean, a place in which you could find your way about and stroll with comfort—the working town or the pleasure town (Pompeii). The square plan was in conformity with the dignity of the Roman citizen.

    But at home, in Rome itself, with their eyes turned towards the Empire, they allowed themselves to be stifled by the Pack-Donkey’s Way. What an ironical situation ! The wealthy, however, went far from the chaos of the town and built their great and well-planned villas, such as Hadrian’s villa.

    ULM : THE ANCIENT STRATIFIED ENCAMPMENT

    Six centuries later, everything remains the same !

    They were, with Louis XIV, the only great town-planners of the West.

    In the Middle Ages, overcome by the year 1000, men accepted the leading of the pack-donkey, and long generations endured it after. Louis XIV, after trying to tidy up the Louvre (i.e. the Colonnade), became disgusted and took bold measures : he built Versailles, where both town and chateau were created in every detail in a rectilinear and well-planned fashion ; the Observatoire, the Invalides and the Esplanade, the Tuileries and the Champs Élysées, rose far from the chaos, outside the town ;—all these were ordered and

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