Le Corbusier as I Knew Him (1977)
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library_of_Birmingham_(32...
Edit:typos due to posting while phone is in a waterproof bag
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.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5114036,-0.2416956,3a,75y,...
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.
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.
Edit: Here's an example, Highland Dwellings in DC.
https://images1.apartments.com/i2/ydNxyNvVCntpdglekPc48HV9vv...
https://livingnewdeal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Highlan...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Also he had well documented sympathies for the Nazi regime.
What happened to Architecture in the 20th century is both sad and instructive about the risks of abusive modernity.
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.
I tried to articulate some of my distaste for the forces that propelled him and others, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-gods
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.
> 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)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
>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)
“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.“
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
like converts who often tend to act way too excessively