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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

This is so true. What a visionary. Paris would be a totally different beast if it was not for him. This makes you regret that there were no such visionary (on a similar scale) in the twentieth century.

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Ugh, regarding the lack of such a twentieth century visionary, look up Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for an idea of what such a thing might have looked like!

The problem with LeCorbusier era (IMO) is that few people may understand what he was doing, and large scale project and industries would have led to yet another clusterfuck. Also his big plan, like many utopic and euphoric ideas of this era are only good on paper or as set for SF movies (lookup where total recall was filmed)

Look at Corbusiers own work. It was pure shit. It doesn't matter if you had 100% sign on from every industry. Garbage in, garbage out.

Le Corbusier indeed built shit after he became an ideologue first, and an architect second. Before that, his family residences were quite appealing though. But those were so bourgeois, the horror.

The work of Walter Burley Griffin in laying out the Australian capital city of Canberra deserves a mention...certainly a 20th century effort...

I backpacked Australia for 6 months back in 1985 and saw his work first-hand...though I'm in no way an urban planner, or civil engineer I had no trouble appreciating the influence of his methodology and planning...beautiful layout...

Beautiful photos of Canberra from Mt. Ainslie here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#/media/File:Canberra_...

I would like to agree. But unfortunately architects followed the same path as painters. Architects until the XIX were concerned about making things beautiful, carefully respecting ratios, etc. Modern architects have no such concern and now are trying to make things original, even if it means people must live in a world of raw concrete. Millions of tourists travel to see Paris. No such enthusiasm to visit modern cities. I would think twice before letting a modern architect wipe out a whole city.

New York had Robert Moses, who fucked the city up so badly that the subway carries half the people it once did, and the population has only just reached the pre-Moses highs.

Not all grand visions are for the best.

Manhattan owes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson_Downing

Oscar Niemeyer? Frederick Law Olmsted?

Albert Speer?

Charles Bulfinch for Boston.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham

I highly recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City

Robert Moses? Maybe not with the same aesthetic results but for better or worse NY (and by influence much of the urban us) would be very different without him

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