Most of what I saw of him feels cold and failed. That said the "cite radieuse", when inside, felt cozy, original and well built (from walls, orientation thus lighting, heating). People living there said they were very pleased.
Agreed on the Cite Radieuse, the hallways are what I wish all apartment building halls looked like. Essentially interior streets, two stories high with apartment windows facing onto them, large windows to the exterior, benches or places for people to sit and enjoy the sunlight and meet their neighbors. The highrise as the modern incarnation of a village with all of the communal charm would be a delight. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/84/79/92/84799263a8dfa6fef6bf...
Completely impractical since every developer will choose the standard closed in, windowless and unadorned hallway because it is the cheaper option.
> Completely impractical since every developer will choose the standard closed in, windowless and unadorned hallway because it is the cheaper option.
That's one theory I've heard a few times, it served as a basis for urban renewal in the 60s but dumb down on every level to the point of being rapidly unliveable (cue the movies about housing project blues that came soon after)
Urban renewal was the realization of Le Corbusier's ideology at a large scale. It really was his vision. Focussing on a detail whether corridors have light or not, I think is somewhat of a diversion.
Urban renewal did not fail because it was done cheaply, or dumbed down (which it was). It failed because it was fundamentally the wrong approach to city building.
We're still living with the consequences. Our current built environment is modernist; mediated by technology, planned, bureaucratic.
It's due time Le Corbusier is getting his comeuppance. It took a long long time. The first criticism were in the 70s, but postmodernism could not get beyond pageantry. And when I was in college 20 years ago, modernism was still venerated in the architecture departments, because the architect-as-god remained so appealing (btw Ayn Rand was similarly infatuated, it's an odd quirk of history how both communism and libertarians found common ground in this one domain). It's slowly fading. I think the dyke is going to break, and we'll put Le Corbusier where he belongs. A hugely influential misanthrope, who made categorically bad architecture.
(also really sad, because early in his career, Le Cobusier's single family homes were really quite appealing).
I kinda disagree, a little bit. You can live happily in a big housing project, as long as some basics are there. No noise, not too dense, some green spaces and also a fair owner. Lots of buildings failed because owners stopped caring, so everything rot, and people here didn't help either. Some of my family lived in these and it felt ok enough. Some other projects 500m for them became no-go zones. Quite surprising.
That said I'm not pro big-structures[0], I understand it spoils the area too much. Near my town, an ex no-go zone has been replaced by smaller buildings, that was enough to regrow a peacefulness that left for 30 years. It's walkable, the woods nearby are walkable, almost shocking.
[0] even though, I still love them for some reasons
tbf, I do agree with you. For sake of argument, "big housing project", is just another name for "big apartment building". And I agree that many places do "big apartment building" quite well.
But "big apartment building" only works well in a big thriving city, within its existing fabric. Not as in, let's raze the city, and put a big building in this new empty space. And I think Le Corbusier was explicitly about the latter.
Urban renewal wasn't necessarily the wrong solution in itself.
The 18th and 19th centuries weren't necessarily any better at humane building. In the UK postwar worker housing stock was terrible - outside toilets, little or no insulation, no central heating, and often poorly built.
So blocks were a solution of sorts. But they usually were poorly built and unimaginatively designed, optimised for low cost, but with no practical understanding of community or community spaces.
A typical UK block has some decorative grass around it, but that's it. There's no common space, no common facilities, and no colour or texture.
Later renovations which add at least some of the above are more popular and have fewer social problems.
Thanks for that link. I don't know about his personal thoughts, but just judging from his work, LC's architecture certainly had a fascist tinge, in the sense that through that kind of architecture man submits to authority. A-tower-in-the-park is a very authoritarian top-down way to house people. There was also his exaltation of destruction, to create a clean slate from which a new architectural order can arise, and fascists certainly appreciate violence as a force of change.
Just do deviate a little from LC in particular. But both communism and fascism are the political realizations of modernism, in that they only can function through the mediation of high technology.
In communism, equity is achieved through perfect bureaucracy; the system of production and wealth reallocation being a well-oiled machine, perfectly transparent and predictably manipulated. It is in communism, that humans completely submit to the machine the most.
In fascism, dominion is achieved through incessant violent action. Technology is the necessary lever to maintain dominance over the enemy. It is in fascism that humans submit to their leader, exhilarated by their shared power through technology (Tanks! Bombs! Nuclear Reactors!)
Since no technology is perfectly reliable, or technological dominion is never guaranteed, both are doomed to fail.
There's a commonality between modernism and the realization of an the industrial mass consumer society in the 20th century that transcends the ideological divides of the time. Factories, warehouses, office buildings, tower blocks, shopping malls, highways and suburbs all have the same rationales of mass production economics beating at their heart. A skyscraper is simply a "people warehouse".
In this respect the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand. A criticism of a one-size-fits-all lifestyle equally applies across the fascist/communist spectrum, and the "Californian ideology" that SV represented drove a stake into it by standing up for the individual, albeit in an amoral, Randian sense: cool toys for those who could afford them, digital sharecropping for the rest. The highly provisioned, toy-like offices of Google etc follow from that premise.
> the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand
fwiw - I think the growing criticism of modernism are a good thing. The alternative, a more humanistic attitude to life and liberty (corny I know), and a more organic model of political organization seem preferable.
I also agree that the amoral SV-ethos was wrong, because of the elitism you point out.
I think that modernism was a natural fad which has run its course and people realize that we overshot and forgot counter intuitive details that aren't addressed by comfort or "progress".
chapman court in LA was originally built with that kind of hallway on the 2nd floor of a series of work-loft spaces (studio below, living space above). i got to see it via an LA Conservancy tour a few years back. unfortunately, i couldn't find pictures of the hallway, but here are promo pages for the recent renovation with some other pictures ('creative offices' in the 2nd shows one of the loft interiors):
In the US all units in a new residential building with an elevator must be adaptable for accessibility. If each individual apartment was two floors then each would need accommodation for an elevator or staircase lift.
> Inside, wide corridors ("streets in the sky") run along the central long axis of every third floor of the building. Each apartment lies on two levels, such that the room on one side of a corridor belongs to the apartment that is mostly below the corridor floor, while that on the opposite side belongs to the apartment above. On those floors without corridors, the apartments stretch from one side of the building to the other, and each has a balcony on the western side.
If you search for floorplans of it, it looks like there are also interior corridors but I think every apartment has access to one of those wide corridors. I'm not sure what the point of having both interior and exterior corridors is, I would think it would be better to get rid of the interior corridor and give the extra space to the exterior one.
Edit: Well this is disappointing. After further research, it looks like that corridor is just the main one and the rest of the floor have dark, internal corridors and then enclosed balconies. What a missed opportunity, imagine a whole building full of corridors like the ones in the image, if you're going to build two story apartments then why not do it that way?
