Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925 | Hacker News Reader

Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin – a radical urban design for Paris from 1925

clemensgritl.com

80 pointsrevolucien83 comments

It should probably be pointed out that Paris has a history of "knocking it all down" to make space for the New. Haussman did that. Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, one of the most iconic sacral buildings of the world (?) sits on the rubble of its Christian predecessors (as well as an ancient pagan temple, oh well, zeitgeist).

The difference was that Le Corbusier's stuff is, as most of this thread attests, ghastly, maybe except some Platonic space. The earlier rebuilds worked out, mostly because the esthetics stood the test of time, which Le Corbusier's ideas didn't.

By contrast, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was proposed to rebuild the city on a grand, modern design, but in the end that was turned out, and the city was rebuilt much as it was before (except with greater fire safety regulation). This explains why even to this day, City of London, now the main business/finance district, has such a weird layout, with tiny backstreets and anachronistic street names.

While everybody loves Haussman's Paris today, at the time, it was extremely controversial and he was eventually ousted. Paris used to be like the cramped medieval old towns you see throughout the rest of Europe. Here's a classic quote from one of Haussman's most powerful critics:

"We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings, the costly confusion, the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism, that we are going to pass on to our descendants."

Fast forward 100+ years and suddenly that quote sounds hilariously wrong. Makes you wonder what possibilities we're missing out on today by clinging to an aesthetic past.

Just because Corbusier's dystopian prison ideas missed the mark, doesn't mean there isn't a better vision out there for a livable city just waiting to be implemented.

Le Corbusier-style tower blocks never happened in Paris, but they were built all over the US as part of "urban renewal" projects, and there have since been multiple generations growing up in those structures, to become nostalgic for them if it were ever going to happen. It hasn't happened yet.

I don't like Paris' broad boulevards. In my opinion they're the least interesting part of the city. The best places to congregate are always off the main line of commerce, away from cars and trucks. Obviously, proper waste disposal and lamps are good, but I don't know why we're taking it for granted that criticism of Hausmann's aesthetics is "hilariously wrong."

Those grand boulevards also had a security / social goal : to make sure police keep access and make it hard to barricade entire blocks. ( as opposed to narrow street that are easier to close down)

> Fast forward 100+ years and suddenly that quote sounds hilariously wrong.

Does it? I prefer those 'cramped mediæval old towns' to Paris.

Which cramped mediaeval town are you comparing it to?

The parts of Paris that were most affected by Haussmann's renovation are arguably still kind of awful.

The Champs-Élysées for example is a horrible place to actually spend time in, and is currently undergoing major redevelopment to make it a bit more livable.

Not his fault. The Champs-Élysées were almost pedestrian back then.

> Fast forward 100+ years and suddenly that quote sounds hilariously wrong.

Only if you don't care about history and conservancy. Every medievalist is still frothing at the mouth, for good reasons.

Not far from the outcry around when the eiffel tower was erected.

I reject the notion that aesthetics is arbitrary. It is not. I also reject the mystification and the dismissive progressive fallacy that the only reason anyone might oppose change is because they're crusty old reactionary humbugs (of course, if aesthetics is arbitrary, "progress" has no meaning). Le Corbusier's Paris is objectively hideous. It is objectively a nightmare. It would objectively be immoral to inflict something like that on Parisians. It would objectively harm the common good. A nihilistic misanthrope consumed with hatred for humanity, and himself, could do no better. For this reason, I detest language like "clinging to an aesthetic past". It is a hollow comment that begins from faulty assumptions about aesthetics.

Of course, we often make aesthetic judgements in a relative fashion. People visiting Paris today might say Paris is beautiful, but what they mean is more beautiful than some other point of reference. Spend enough time in a beautiful city and your standards will shift such that you will be disappointed by aesthetically inferior cities you had previously thought were beautiful when you revisit them. This is good. Let our tastes become more refined so that we may make the world a more beautiful place. Let us resist mediocrity and ugliness.

So perhaps those critics of Haussmanian Paris were making such a comparison. I certainly don't think Paris is the most beautiful city, but if you had grown up in a Corbusian nightmare or some aesthetically lesser locale, then it would certainly be an upgrade and perceived as such. Still, Haussmanian Paris is at least built according to classical principles and that is the most important factor.

Of course, I am not opposed to development in the realm of art and architecture and so on, but modernist travesties like the ones pictured are not an authentic development, but a barbaric revolt against the past rooted in hubris, madness, or some other defect.

Bravo!

I think the cutoff is the invention of photography. The only way painters could remain relevant is by doing something original rather than beautiful. Then the other arts followed. Modern classical music is impossible to listen to most ears. And architects followed too, more interested in creating an original shape of glass or concrete rather than building anything beautiful and pleasing. There is hardly any piece of modern architecture that will resist the test of time (and the materials used won’t anyway).

For a long list of examples, I defer to the twitter account architects against humanity.

> I think the cutoff is the invention of photography. The only way painters could remain relevant is by doing something original rather than beautiful.

You are letting them off too easy. Have you ever seen a photograph that looks like https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ICilJlD5nhA/ThQQ_v2LKzI/AAAAAAAAA... ?

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood#/medi... ?

Or https://i.pinimg.com/originals/11/9f/2a/119f2ac0958cb4261015... ?

The modern styles void of any aesthetic appeal are by far not the only ones photography has not supplanted. The layperson may be excused for thinking art's only goal was photorealism, but when coming from experts, that is a deliberate lie, used to ridicule anyone that dares complain how beauty was excised from the modern art world.

It does not seem to be the case to me. At least I cannot see the correlation.

Art Deco buildings are very beautiful, and that happened a long time after photography was invented.

In fact, the soulless style of architecture only started to visibly dominate after WWII.

I don't think that the musicians have responded yet to the reccording technology in a comparable way to painters responding to photographic technology with impressionism and other non-realistic painting techniques (which do seem to have sprung up when photography became widespread)

One problem was that people started believing that there's no such thing as beauty. How do you build a beautiful building, if you think beauty is an illusion anyway?

I have the idea that it's related to atheism. Once you believe all of life and all of nature is ultimately some brute atoms buzzing back and forth anyway, then what your imagination creates is likely to look pretty brutalist. If you believe it's angels and God's creation all the way down you will place meaning and symbols into the large elements and every tiny bit. Anyone else can see this connection?

> I have the idea that it's related to atheism. Once you believe all of life and all of nature is ultimately some brute atoms buzzing back and forth anyway, then what your imagination creates is likely to look pretty brutalist. If you believe it's angels and God's creation all the way down you will place meaning and symbols into the large elements and every tiny bit. Anyone else can see this connection?

I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to religion. If you believe our life on earth is just a brief prelude to an eternity in something much better, why bother building anything beautiful? There'll be plenty of time for that in heaven. Indeed the best buildings and cities you could possibly build on earth pale in comparison to the shabbiest in heaven.

Additionally you wouldn't want beauty on earth to distract from the glory of God. The best way to build is pragmatic, as cheap, durable, and functional as possible with no wasted frivolity. Something like square buildings made of reinforced concrete placed close together so people don't have to spend a lot of time traveling.

So I think it's a wash. It seems like it could go either way honestly.

> I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to religion.

Observation of mine. Old religious buildings and art were inspired. You have to admit that even if you believe the religion itself was bunkum. But look at newer religious buildings and art.

I think old religious buildings and art were better, but we only now have the great ones that have survived. There must have been a lot of cheaply built, unimpressive churches built throughout the centuries that were demolished and forgotten at some point. There must have been a lot of religious art that was the medieval/renaissance/etc equivalent of a kitschy Thomas Kincade painting that no one will remember after it's gone.

It's kind of like old books or old music. We remember the greats but for every Mozart there must have been at least a dozen 18th century composers whose work wasn't as good, never got traction, was never recorded on vinyl/cd and now might as well never have existed. There's like a curation effect over time.

Wonderfully constructed argument.

It may very well be that this is a case of correlation rather than causation. I do agree however that at first sight they do appear to corelate

Nah.

First, I don't think any major aesthetic theory claims there's no such thing as beauty. At best, they question the definition of beauty and the classical canons of beauty.

Second, you can put meaning and symbols into atoms buzzing back and forth (atoms buzzing back and forth are more or less a symbol, anyway).

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp):

> Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his Readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice."...

> The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in 20th-century art.

So here's a major artist, saying that a urinal can be a work of art, needing only the artist's choice to make them so. And here's a major art movement agreeing that that "art" piece is a major landmark.

That doesn't quite claim "there's no such thing as beauty", but it pretty much says there's no such thing as art, other than an artist saying so. But then, who is an artist? Whoever says they are?

And if all it takes is the artist saying so, then a urinal is just as much art as the Mona Lisa.

But I think this does somewhat trace back to febeling's point. If nature is all there is, and nature is deterministic, then art is just what deterministic people do. It's not intrinsically different from non-art. And when people believe that, they act like what they do is just the same as the Mona Lisa, when we can look at it and tell that no, it's not.

I'm not sure about that, I'm an atheist myself and I still find religious building beautiful. Even if there is no god there, and even if the buildings were ugly, they are filled with the feelings of lots of people. That is beautiful in itself. Just like I'm not really into sports, but the energy of a stadium is something beautiful to see, and very real. There's something special happening in those places. Same thing with an old house. Many people lived there. That's powerful.

I believe that we are still in a very long transition period.

The journey from apreciation of devine beauty towards apreciation of natural beauty passes through the stage of nihilism.

The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so you get all their space in between that’s hostile to you hanging out there, barren plazas which don’t function as a park and are strictly segregated from any meaningful street retail…

It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.

This. And the funny thing is Le Corbusier and other modernists intended to design for humans:

- They add large parks between the buildings

- You get the huge highrises and long boulevards because of separation of function, because they want to put the living quarters far away from the smelly factories

- They use a lot of concrete and prefab components to keep everything affordable

- They design community areas into the buildings

and so on. But it fails spectacularly. The resulting cities are completely inhumane. There is no space for natural development, for "lucky accidents", no mixed zoning, no entertainment and shopping close by to living quarters, the kind of stuff people now want from an urban lifestyle. And you can't really walk anywhere.

One thing I really hate in these kind of cities is that you can't just go anywhere straight, you are 'channeled around'. Whether you are on foot or in a car, you have to shut off your brain and follow the signs. You can't follow your 'desire path', and even if you would, you will walk for a long time through 'non-places' where there is nothing.

I was trying to walk a couple of blocks in one of these cities in the hot summer, and it was brutal (there are places like this in the US, France, China, ...). Nothing is human scale, and that is why it feels dehumanizing.

Quite so. And in reality those large parks would have (and did!) turn into fields of asphalt and concrete, as automobile infrastructure expanded to fill all available space (Le Corbusier and his contemporaries didn't quite get how drastic the consequences of automobilization together with separation of functions would be…)

I think this is an under appreciated point. Something I find striking in watching historical footage of urban areas is just how empty the roads were. Just the other day I was watching some restored footage of Paris in the 1920s, and they drove the camera car through famous areas that today would be a near parking lot most of the day, but back then were wide open.

If you look at car centric infrastructure through this lens, it's easier to understand how it all went so wrong. The American dream as designed in say the 1950s was quite pleasant if you could afford it. A nice modern house on clean brand new wide open roads. Sure you have to drive everywhere vs walk to the neighborhood main street for errands but gas is cheap and those roads make it all so fast and convenient.

Of course the problem is non of this scaled, but that didn't stop us from trying, and ending up with the worst of both in many ways.

Le Corbusier just didn't have this figured out. But Christopher Alexander did. See "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building".

This "Not Just Bikes" video[1] recently on YouTube makes a similar case for generic concrete business parks in the USA and Canada compared to one in the Netherlands. That nobody with any choice wants to live or work there, that they are full of hostile in-between space and strictly segregated from housing and shopping by 6-lane roads, and inhuman feeling. Designed with car access as the priority and bus access as an afterthought and without pedestrian or cycle access at all, as if the only reasons to be 'outside' at all are driving or parking.

The Netherlands one in the video has dedicated roads for busses which get priority over cars at traffic lights, dedicated paths for bikes and pedestrians which get priority over busses and cars at traffic lights and are separate from the roads so people aren't walking right by vehicles, and a train station. It has narrow car lanes with both directions separated with an easier pedestrian crossing experience, floodwater management integrated as a nice looking canal feature rather than as a storm drain by a road; pretty building design and path design to make a more pleasant environment to walk in, and buildings having large and accessible entrances for pedestrians without forcing them to cross bits of mud or large expanses of car park.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Agreed, but as a counterpoint, read this story on a very interesting housing project in Montreal (1967).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074

Yes. There's a colossal failure of modernist architecture to think about the "user experience". People don't like being mechanized.

There are hidden function. The good ratio of height / width produces a familiar feel. Some tiny "non useful" spaces are actually useful for people to project their lives onto, sit there, stand, talk.

Well, thing is, despite he utter ugliness of his designs in mass, one of his high-rises, a tad smaller, could be a nice piece of architecture. One, not a whole city of those...

It seems he would really enjoy working in the 21st century.

Designing striking CGI buildings for movies without the "downside" of humans actually having to live there :)

But what's wrong with living in a tiny space stacked together with everyone else like tinned sardines on the shelf?!

As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. Just look at Birmingham, England - they knocked down beautiful buildings to put up brutalist eyesores to then knock down brutalist eyesores and replace them with a different type of modern architecture that will look awful in 20 years.

There's a reason that people want to live in Bath.

They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.

give the people who will live and work in the space ability to locally control the design, as espoused by Christopher Alexander.

that means getting the end users out in the field and teaching them how to build or customise the system to meet their needs using simpler and cheaper traditional materials. maybe perl, javascript, wordpress. maybe excel. maybe bash & cron. smother those high modernist RSI-inducing SaaS user interfaces with a layer of malleable user-written robotic process automation.

High modernists are like the somewhat narcissistic recluse programmer who thinks everything is crap. They shut themselves in and rewrite everything in their own superior paradigm without bothering to look at any real world use case or ask anyone anything. Then they're surprised that nobody uses what they built.

"dude. i know that's not what it's supposed to do, but actually it's better. it's a feature, not a bug. no, no. it's not shitty, and no i'm not refactoring it and neither are you. it works better and they'll never be able to fire us. it's like jane jacobs and shit. leave it alone. the bits are happy."

this module is a thriving, multi-use community of interacting concerns and responsibilities. yes, it would be more legible to central administrators like us if we evicted all the requirements and implementation details, paved it over, then redeveloped it into a high modernist Corbusian hexagonal microservices architecture. but truly, who would want to live or work inside such a bleak module structure, where instead of simply nipping downstairs to share surplus resources with unrelated business logic in the parent stack frame, you would have to traverse through endless tiers of serialization, transit, deserialization & be subjected to endless authoritarian checkpoints for authorisation by central authorities?

haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion

As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.

I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings.

Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.

Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?

Why not build more Baths next to the old one instead?

I don’t know about building codes in Britain, but in almost all of the US it would be illegal to build a carbon copy of the beloved older cities we have, because huge roads, parking lots, and setbacks are all mandatory.

And of course, these short-sighted car-centric ideas are all part of the problem.

In North America there are planners and activists trying to change this[1] & world-wide, planners can achieve walkable, people-centric urban planning [2].

[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

The Chinese did that. They ended up with still-overcrowded megacities and completely empty "new towns", which often featured fake, "beautifully" old architecture. It turns out that people don't just want affordable housing or nice surroundings, they also want pre-existing culture, something banlieus often lack.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

The problem is too many people.

The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats?

Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?...

Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.

The question is rather, what (possibly horrible, dystopian) methods will we use to prevent a demographic crisis as fertility rates are plummeting most places in the world, as most projections now suggest population decline will start within a century.

Turns out the method that have worked the best against "those who insist on breeding like rats" is to treat them humanely, reduce childhood mortality, increase education and provide a more stable economic environment - do that and fertility rates plummet - with or without additional pressure like China's infamous one-child policy.

As it stands, China is set to face decline within a decade or two despite having dropped their previous draconian measures to reduce fertility rates - their fertility rates are now slowly increasing, but they're still far below replacement. India is set to see decline ~3-4 decades later - they're now about at replacement, with fertility still dropping, but there's a lag of a few of decades from the decrease in fertility to population decline. Sub-saharan Africa will likely be last, but even those countries are seeing declining birth rates (e.g. even Niger, which has one of, if not the, highest fertility rates in the world is at around 6.6 births per woman now, but the rate peaked at 7.9 in 1983 and has been declining consistently since, currently at a rate of about 1.3% a year; UN projections suggest they'll reach ~4 by 2050, and around ~2.3, slightly above replacement, around year 2100)

As a result, expect countries to start competing for immigrants, and to start increasingly desperate attempts to get people to have more children. E.g. China has gone from it's one-child policy to allowing three [1] in an attempt to stem the coming decline, with only little effect so far, and you can expect China will see additional policy changes to try to drive the fertility rates back up.

[1] https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/06/07/chinas-declining-po...

Education of girls and young women. That's it. That's the biggest ROI.

Bravo, you'll make Malthus and eugenics peddlers proud...

Then offer a better solution.

Because humans stacked 1000 per acre emitting rivers of sewage is pretty bad too. If it wasn't so normal it would be hellish.

Why would I offer a solution to a problem that is non-existent. The world will have less population by the end of the century.

You would make a more cogent point if instead you were asking about policies improving the quality of life of future people instead of defending genocidal ideas. Sadly you don't.

First you tell me that my horrible solutions are horrible. Then you tell me that there isn't a problem. Your end seems to be the unreasonable one.

Your solutions are bad because they are trying to solve problems that don't exist.

Before you start on a solution, understand your requirements and existing state of the art

You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.

The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.

Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?

Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.

The US is 185th of 248th on Wikipedia's list of countries and dependencies by population density [1], and the US' fertility rate is well below replacement at less than 1.8 [2] (replacement is ca. 2.1), and hasn't exceeded replacement since 1972, which would imply US population growth is down to immigration.

Your statement is also pretty nonsensical. If you visit the highest density spots in a country, then it's naturally going to be high density, and that tells you absolutely nothing about the overall density of the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

From your comments I think I understand your feelings on this issue, but please understand that you're ignoring reality and getting upset about something that isn't even happening. The population is dropping in many developed countries and fertility rates are plummeting. The world with fewer humans you seem to seek is already happening.

Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.

This is a solved problem - provide education and empowerment for women. This is why advanced societies are seeing flat birth rates (indeed often declining).

Tearing up Paris of course would have been an unmitigated disaster. But all the same its important to realize how visionary this (and the slightly earlier Ville Contemporaine) was in the 1920s. Corbusier saw the city of the future far before others - cars as the dominant mode of transport giving people freedom to travel far, simply constructed skyscrapers with standardised apartment types but also with sanitation and services for all (a huge issue in Paris of that era).

Of course along with this he didn't see the big issues we know now through bitter experience - car dominance destroying street life, lack of human scale and beauty in mass-produced buildings, poor safety/security, bleak open spaces, etc. Some perhaps are unfair to blame on him as they are in our mind as a result of poor/cheap implementation in other schemes. But we should at least marvel at what Corbusier did understand for his time and how clearly he was able to express it.

Le Corbusier, a pioneer of YIMBYism.

To be fair, housing costs in Paris would be much more reasonable, both due to such a glut of housing and the subsequent decreased interest in living there.

What? No, advocating for destroying the old world and remaking it according to a"scientific" vision isn't particularly yimby. Ymimby is about not banning people from doing what they want with their property.

Destroy the village in order to save it

http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/it-became-necessary-t...

The fact that one of the shots prominently features a statue doing a facepalm [1] makes one question if this was intended to attract or in fact deter?

[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58764f376a4963...

I think of the 20th Century as being the century of quacks. Guys like Corbusier and Freud proposing radical new ideas based on no data, zero research, basically pulled out of their assholes. And then somehow these ideas become widely accepted and implemented. There was a lot of damage done then that we are still dealing with the consequences of.

3-D Model of Plan Voisin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNBr6de7TD4

And the Pruitt-Igoe segment from Koyaanisqatsi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE

Just bad ideas.

Big fan of megablock living in east Asia. Radiant City plan wouldn't have fared well in real life, but I imagine project if built, would be remediated into nice high density mix use neighbourhoods over time. Infill some street level retail, updated cladding over time. Could have worked, and probably better quality units for more people than constantly modernizing Haussmann blocks.

I love how even the statue facepalm at the end...

The artist makes a good point but it's rather unfairly at the expense of Corbusier who to be fair was capable of real art. Fond memories of Paris myself - including La Défense - but shocked how similar the right-side vision is to the current feeling of living en Chine.

Ceausescu (the Genius Architect of the Carpathians) "did" (ordered others to) just that, in Romania - especially in Bucharest - during his regime of [terror and] "reconstruction".

it's kinda like the silver towers at stuyvesant town scale with freeway revolt era transit.

interesting to read that freewayifying the urban cores wasn't just an american obsession (although this seems to predate the american phenomenon by about 30 years).

i wonder how far it got? was there a french cognate to the freeway revolt? iirc, paris already has some of the highest housing density in the world.

What's radical about putting up a bunch of prisons? We did that.

Even the Nazis weren’t this ambitious once they took Paris. Yikes.

In fact, the Nazis tried to not damage Paris too much because Hitler liked the architecture.

(Yes, when the Americans came, the plan was to demolish the city. But that was much later).

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