Le Corbusier, 1924
High-Rise in a Green Setting: Le Corbusier’s Prototype for Modern Living
The Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, is one of the most influential of all twentieth-century architects. He is famous as the creator of outstanding houses that brought a new sense of space to domestic architecture, as the designer of large Unités d’habitation that offered a new form of high-density urban architecture, and as a city planner of daring and vision. He was many other things too – a painter, writer, designer of furniture and one of the creators of the style known as Brutalism.
Le Corbusier had a clear sense that architecture should respond to the needs and pressures of modern life. People who drive cars, are surrounded by modern gadgets and machinery, and live at the fast pace of the twentieth century had different architectural needs from the Victorians; the modern city, with its rapid growth and variety of functions, needs a different approach from cities such as Paris or London, which have evolved over centuries.
He also hated the unplanned nature of the traditional city, with its changing vistas, vastly varying buildings, streets that sometimes curve and are sometimes straight – everything due to the accidents of time. As the art critic Robert Hughes points out: ‘being random was loathed by Le Corbusier’. So the architect sought to impose order everywhere. He created his own system of proportions, based on those of the human body. He developed a theory of house design founded on five basic principles. He designed a system of modular building construction, the Dom-Ino system, which consisted of standard-sized concrete slabs and uprights, which could be clad with a range of different walls and windows, and he began to propose new city designs, based on a more logical and more modern approach.
Le Corbusier felt that American cities, with their grid plans and skyscrapers, might be the best model for the modern city. Grid planning is logical and the Americans’ use of high-rise allowed the high density needed as populations exploded and downtown prices soared. In an interview in 1932, he says: ‘The United States is the adolescent of the contemporary world and New York is her expression of enthusiasm, juvenility, boldness, enterprise, pride and vanity. New York stands on the brink of the world like a hero…’
But even New York, with its exciting cityscape, skyscrapers and grid plan, has its limitations. For Le Corbusier, the skyscrapers were too close together, the streets too narrow, the buildings and green spaces not sufficiently integrated. Clearly, an ambitious planner would want to start again from scratch. So Le Corbusier began to create proposals for a new kind of town plan – an ideal city, not one designed for a specific location. He made several city plans along these lines, and by the 1920s was getting close to his ideal with a ‘Ville contemporaine’ (also known as the ‘City for three million inhabitants’), a plan of 1922. Some of the key features were clusters of cross-planned skyscrapers set among parkland, lower-rise residential buildings, a central hub containing rail and bus stations, and the zoning of different types of buildings.
Le Corbusier’s ideas about the city reached their mature and complete form in the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) of 1924–30, which adopts most of these features. Ville Radieuse is fully zoned – different parts of the city are set aside for specific functions. A group of office towers about 656ft (200m) tall form the business district. Nearby is a transport hub linking this zone to the residential districts on either side. The residential buildings are in the form of mid-rise blocks some 164ft (50m) tall. These structures are not simply apartment blocks. They are the mixed-use structures that Le Corbusier called Unités d’habitation, which incorporate laundries, restaurants, shops, childcare and recreational facilities as well as apartments. They are set in parkland that provides places for the occupants to relax, play sports, socialize and so on. Well away from the office towers and residential zone is the city’s industrial area. The overall plan is on a linear grid, and Le Corbusier’s idea was that it could be expanded as needed and adapted to suit different settings.
A notable feature of the buildings – both the tall office towers and the lower residential blocks – is that they were raised above the ground on concrete pillars, or pilotis as Le Corbusier called them. This meant that the ground beneath them is clear, and helps to create the impression that these very large buildings do not so much occupy the land as hover above it. The parkland surrounding the apartments and offices hardly seemed to be interrupted by the buildings at all.
The zones are linked by roads on more than one level, often set below ground level. These arteries separate vehicles from pedestrians, keeping the city’s green areas at one remove from the noise and pollution of the internal combustion engine, while also allowing through traffic to move at speeds that aren’t possible on conventional city streets.
In one way, the Ville Radieuse idea has something in common with the Garden City movement that had begun thirty years earlier. There was the same concern to set people’s homes among greenery, to bring something of the countryside into city life. But Le Corbusier’s plan was actually completely different from celebrated English garden cities such as Letchworth or Welwyn. The English cities are low-rise and low density – the houses sprawl across the land and are set along curving streets that try to recreate the randomness of rural roads and villages. Ville Radieuse, by contrast, is high-rise and high density, and the roads are straight. The whole thing looks much more planned and controlled.
There is a more profound difference, too. The Garden City is inspired by individualism – each person or family lives in their own house (often semi-detached), with its own garden, separated from its neighbours by wooden fencing or a hedge. Corbusier’s city, on the other hand, is a collective community. People live in apartments and share communal open space.
Although Ville Radieuse was not built, it was influential. The notion of separating vehicles and pedestrians was pioneered in North America in mostly low-density developments in the 1930s. Ville Radieuse showed how it could work in a high-density city, with a mix of tall buildings and green spaces. Hundreds of towns were replanned using this principle after the Second World War. All over the world planners of the 1950s and 1960s showed how the theory could work in practice. The idea of combining high-rise blocks with park-like green spaces also appealed, and was taken up in developments such as the Alton estate in Roehampton, southwest London. And in a few places Le Corbusier himself got the chance to build individual blocks that, in larger numbers, would have been the basis of the Ville Radieuse. The Unité d’habitation, Marseilles – a kind of vertical village of apartments, shops, crèche and hotel – survives to show how the vision might have worked.
