What Le Corbusier got wrong and right in his design of Chandigarh
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Relevant quote: " High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” "
I stayed in one of Le Corbusier's buildings in Marseilles (now a hotel) and loved it, but his treatment of neighbourhoods seems to ignore human nature/scale to our detriment.
But OTOH I'm thinking that actually living in an environment like that would get, well, quite boring after a while. Lacking all the small ornaments and other minor details that you notice when you're there day in an out. It might look cluttered and disorganized in a glossy architecture magazine, but, well, I guess people actually living there might well prefer it that way.
But Chandigarh today has fantastic segregated bike infrastructure! No other Indian city comes close. The city itself is pan-flat and relatively small (shaped as a rectangle where the longer side is 10 kilometers).
Cycle the routes and you see the vast array of tradesman, workers, maids, and vegetable vendors travel by cycle. Big apartment complexes will have bike stands full of pink bicycles that the maids would use.
Granted the city has far too many cars, but the article doesn't adequately reflect the town and all its people.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/VillaSavoye.j...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Marie_de_la_Tourette#/m...
[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Corbusie...
[5] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Ch...
For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transport, integrate commercial and residential zones and are fairly nice to live in. Most, however, are simply unhealthy for both the planet and the residents.
It's great to live in dense places; but its benefits are countered by huge, empty plazas that take 15 minutes to cross if I just want to walk to the next corner store.
I saw a documentary about one of these projects. It was contemporary footage with interviews of regular people, asking what they thought about them. A woman gave an answer which I felt was very profound: "Who wants to live where you can't see your kids when they're playing outside?"
It just seems so jarringly obvious, how disconnected it is to sit up in a tower block, coming from someone who is probably used to be able to open the front door and be outside. Also it struck me how these areas are always associated in my mind with delinquency (having grown up around them). Perhaps it's just because the parents can't see their kids, duh.
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└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘To be fair, there were pressing issues with large slums all across Europe at that time, and they needed to build lots of homes very quickly. I am not sure there were many alternative to blocks of flats back in the day. The problem is also not really high densities, because it also means that there is a local market for shops, restaurants, etc, which can make the neighbourhoods very walkable and nice. Most large projects had plans for things like cinemas, swimming pools, gyms, shops, and stuff. Often these were not built and instead there were these rows after rows of blocks of concrete.
Transport is a real problem, because these places became less and less attractive as they aged and became more and more isolated.
But smaller population densities would not have helped one bit with that. It would just have encouraged urban sprawl which is even worse in terms of public transport and walkability.
One can dislike the result, but proposing alternatives that ignore the design constraints is disingenuous.
If countries need massive amount of housing but don't have time or money to build it... you're going to get a certain type of solution.
And it can be the best solution given those constraints and still an objectively bad solution.
I consider my neighbourhood in Western Europe a great modernist success:
Blocks are mostly around 7 floors high, with access organized vertically - each floor landing has typically 3 apartments around the lift/stairwell, so no 'streets in the sky'.
Plenty of shops (and entrances!) at ground level of each block.
Lots of parks, schools, trams, etc interspersed amongst the blocks.
Private balconies for all.
For example, Communist-era housing blocks in Poland had standardised requirements for availability of grocery shops, healthcare, transportation, sport and recreation areas, etc. for each community built this way, and generally you never had to walk far to get to a grocery store in my experience. What was problematic is that due to worse processes at the time, it took years for green areas to get, well, green.
Corbusier and many places inspired by him seemed to have put the requirements, but often for various reasons those were stripped out - either due to subpar followers, or costs, or even outright malfeasance (one place I lived in had the design changed by builders while architects were on vacation, resulting in much maligned building)
[1]https://lecorbusier-worldheritage.org/wp-content/webpc-passt...
From memory, he described the cafes and bars of Paris as "fungus which consumes the pavement". He wanted to raze Paris to the ground in order to sort that out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin). There was one line in particular -- I wish I could find the exact text, but it went something like this: "the modern phonograph or victrola can perfectly reproduce the sounds of the orchestra, so there is no more need for the modern man to expose himself to the germs of the audience of the virtuoso of the soloist."
(I threw that book across the room SO many times during architecture school.)
In short: at one scale Corbusier may have had a fine sense of aesthetics and a generally keen mind, but at social scales he was a sociopathic germophobe who absolutely abhorred the complexity of organic living systems.
It was apparently very difficult for people to speak up during the forced reloactions and demolishing, but in hindsight it's viewed a destructive act. Too late.
It's not like there wasn't any room for architectural experiments. Many suburbs were built at that time on empty land (with both good and bad results).
This is not to say that new is always better, to be clear, but cities are living things, sometimes I'm worried we're trying too hard to preserve everything for the future
Moses was a complex man and he did stuff good and bad. The unique thing about Moses is that he was an incredibly talented individual, both genius and villain. His acquisition, wielding, and addiction to power is fascinating.
The other thing is that he attracted the attention of the greatest biographer of the modern era. His legacy is documented in depth while the people who destroyed Baltimore, Cincinnati, Syracuse, etc get the benefit of anonymity.
Caro boiled it down to one idea: “Moses loved the public but hated people.”
If you haven’t, it sounds like this is a topic you’re into and i would recommend that you read “The Power Broker”. It’s a summer read (as in June-September), but is a uniquely awesome book.
- "unnecessarily large scale" is the reason that it is the only city in India that doesn't suffocate it's own residents
- wide avenues, open spaces and numerous public parks encourage families to step out of their residential sectors often. Walk into any park after 4pm during the week, and you will see children and adults of all ages exercising/ playing sports
- It is also one of the few places where the bureaucracy has enforced strict building codes to prevent the kind of construction creep you see in large tier 1 metropolitan centers
ps. see comment below, it was the work of multiple architects
The first problem with Brasilia is that it's horribly located. We did avoid the Stockholm fate of having our historical cities razed, but moved the seat of power to the middle of nowhere. I know that overpaid lower-ranking bureaucrats have houses in the outer rings, near the lakes; but no one who has an actual choice lives in Brasilia. I don't know if it fully qualifies as a city. If the capital ever moves, it will be a ghost town in three weeks and start crumbling (bad architecture and bad construction) within the year.
The capitol complex really settles the arguments. You have the NYS Capitol, which is an amazing expression of the excess of 19th century monumental building. Across one street is a circa 1910 replica of a Greek temple turned office building, with a gross 1950s addition in the rear. Across the park is an Art Deco mid rise, and then you have the Empire State Plaza, which is an interpretation of Brasilia in the US.
It’s designed as an over proportioned Roman forum built on a parking garage and mall-like concourse, but the buildings themselves are bizarre. Full of little warrens, and dependent on chaulk and constant maintenance to endure.
The architects sold the place based on the modernist form, but the building interiors are really not designed for their intended use. Function always follows form in these sorts of buildings.
Few know, but Islamabad is also began its existence as a 100% planned city. Pakistan invited C. A. Doxiadis to do the planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinos_Apostolou_Doxiadi... . He was considered to be of Corbusier's calibre if not more, at the time.
Faisalabad was planned back in British time. And the now infamous Model Town, as the name suggests, too.
Dhaka, and Karachi were also supposed to get plans at around late sixties, but we all know how it went...
Diodiaxis left Karachi plan half finished when 1971 happened, and Dhaka had an initial burst of orderly development for a few years, but it was cut short after Mujib was murdered, and 20 years of instability followed.
Karachi, and Dhaka now are prime examples of "urban hells" in the world.
Many places where people complain of a failed designed city are complaining about its uniformity, whereas most places that people rate highly will have an enormous range of styles, sizes, ages and even geometry.
It seems like a more useful design would need to be organic. You could have an open competition for people to simulate how a real town would have grown over time taking into account what happened in that part of the world (famines, wars etc.) to end up with something that could look much more varied and interesting but which could be built to modern standards of efficiency and also can design things like roads and services more sustainably, instead of creating something that cannot be maintained for reasonable money (digging up roads all the time, tarmac etc.)
But I feel like some maps and aerial views and wider shots would've illustrated some of the higher-level discussions for a Westerner like me.
I kept craving more visuals to correspond to what the author was talking about. Often the phots they did provide contrasted quite strongly with the descriptions - like when discussing the upper-class Sector 23 and the more cosmopolitan Sector 17 (these names are almost cartoonishly dystopian) the photos seem to be almost reversed, since the Sector 23 photo looks much more run-down contrasted against the open and polished plaza shown of Sector 17.
Tourists still flock to old parts of towns and 19th-century factories are refurbished into elite apartments.
Please don't post paywalled articles.