Athens Charter | Hacker News Reader

Athens Charter

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38 pointspantalaimon13 comments

People love to dump on Corbusier for all the ills of 20th C city planning. Worth noting

- These congresses were groups of architects (generally of private houses) struggling to come to terms with how to plan massive cities. At a time of population explosions, new ways of living, modern construction technology etc. City planning really didn't exist as a discipline. No hard science or social science around cities. Etc. You cant really blame them for not getting things right.

- Much of this work led to postwar quickly and cheaply built social housing. Which was much needed in the postwar world however turned worse later especially when public housing became segregationist ghettos for lower classes in the late 20th C. You cant really blame these early modernists for that.

- Corbusier in fact had many of the ideas that did stick (as opposed to many of the other attendees) - the unitee d'habitation was an incredible system. He obviously didn't understand streets or social interaction in a way that Jane Jacobs did much later but he did understand mass production, concrete and internal apartment planning in ways that led the world.

> City planning really didn't exist as a discipline

That’s a weird take, when clearly large urban planning projects happened before that faired a lot better in retrospect

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobrecht-Plan

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan_of_Chicago

To your second point, this continues today: currently in the US, the more sprawl-friendly the local geography and politics, the lower the housing prices, because it's easier to build out than to replace old residential homes and apartments with new, denser versions.

There's a certain type of YIMBY that lets perfect be the enemy of good there.

Corbusier and his acolytes were almost singly responsible for the many urban planning (and related social justice) atrocities of the mid century, especially in the US.

If you’re interested in the more recent counter-movement trying to roll back some of these mistakes, see the Charter for the New Urbanism: https://www.cnu.org/who-we-are/charter-new-urbanism

Atrocities are those plywood 'houses' and whole urban sprawl in USA and Canada. They have enormous environmental cost, in contrast of those ideas of Corbusier. And even then, you suburban cardboard bungalow inside is Corbusier, just think a second about that.

I suppose I see the axes quite differently! If a city is going to be there, there are going to be a bunch of costs; but I don't want built space to be constrained and crummy for people by being either (A) favela/bidonville/slum decrepit and pest-riddled (if versatile)

(B) manicured like a plywood subdivision to maximize resale value, at the expense of freedom to add on and be playful, cf Daniel Pinkwater's classic book "The Big Orange Splot"

(C) homogenized by high design prefabricators "because people don't mind having identical phones if the phones are cheap but good, so, people won't mind having identical homes on that basis either"

(D) unwalkably sited

(E) arrayed in vertical cul-de-sac residential stalks with no personal private space to sculpt at ground level or (F) mass-customized for them by AR/VR&cement-extrusion-robot-rental prefabricators and perhaps well-meaning building code officials who will find it much safer to pre-warranty the strength of such homes than try to verify the safety of people's own manually cobbled-together creations

I'd rather suggest that the downsides of B thru F can be avoided if (A) were pursued in the absence of economically, legally and politically marginal conditions that usually are its handmaiden and raison d'etre.

A neighborhood where everyone is well-housed but often inclined to iterate their physical surroundings and contribute to greater building skills and greater building beauty would be a pretty interesting environment in which to raise a family...

He's also responsible for a lot of urban atrocities in the former soviet countries, with endless rows of commieblocks lined up on extremely wide avenues / urban highways.

At least it can accommodate some form of mass transit, but it's even more anti-individualistic, soulless, and dehumanized than the US sprawl.

In both cases, those mistakes were the result of central planning. Most of them were fixed with the Aalborg charter, which reverted from central planning to a more organic, spontaneous growth with a bit of regulatory oversight.

A lot of people (in this thread and elsewhere) try to defend corbu as a visionary whose ideas were ruined by cheap construction of whatever, but it’s simply not the case.

Humans need nature and green space, that’s an easy thing to agree with.

But putting small amounts of green space in between everything (rather than centralizing it) is an awful idea.

Not only does it make everyone travel (probably drive) past the green space to get anywhere, it makes the green space worse by making it a pseudo space where it’s not nature (you still see buildings), but it’s also not useful civic space for the city.

He made cool buildings and his are some of the few brutalist buildings people think look cool, but he was just dead wrong on urban design.

Le Corbusier is a cautionary tale of human hubris and the worst part of 20th century modernity.

completely tangential comment--the "criticism" section mentions the Pruit-Igoe development and it eventual demolition. Film of the derelict development and its demolition was in the Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi, and the Philip Glass music behind that section is one of my favorite sections of the score.

> a 1933 document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. The work was based upon Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) book of 1935

I had to do a double take here. How can a 1933 work be based on something from 1935? Apparently someone changed[1] it from 1943 to 1933. The body still states 1943, so that's probably the correct date.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/815386201

Tom Wolfe had the definitive word on Le Corbusier:

https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242...

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