The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) Review

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The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) ReviewThe French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965; born in Switzerland as Charles Edouard Jeanneret) wrote this book in 1929, in which he proposed what he called the "Radiant City." Unlike Ebenezer Howard (Garden Cities of To-morrow) and Frank Lloyd Wright (The Natural House), Corbusier supported industrialization and the machine as inevitable, glorified plain skyscrapers ("New York is wrong, but the skyscraper remains a noble instrument"), while enthusiastically supporting modern engineering methods and the use of synthetic building materials.
He begins the Foreward by stating, "A Town is a tool. Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual... A city! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation." He asserts that town planning "is bound to become one of the burning questions of the day." "The city of to-day is a dying thing because it is not geometrical. To build in the open would be to replace our present haphazard arrangements, which are all we have to-day, by a uniform lay-out. Unless we do this there is no salvation. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is repetition." He concludes, "Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre." Rather than wasting time by commuting to the city, each apartment block would contain services such as child care and food preparation.
His philosophy of efficiency and simplicity in form and functionality (perhaps exemplified in his prefabricated apartment buildings, and predilection for reinforced concrete) were highly influential in the United States (he was one of the architects who designed the United Nations building, for example), as well as elsewhere.
He observes, "immense industrial undertakings do not require great men. Such works are carried out in the same way as rain fills a water-butt, drop by drop; and the men who bring them to completion are small, like raindrops, and not great like torrents.... The torrent is in MANKIND, it is not the individuals themselves."
In conclusion, he writes, "I invent no utopia in which to build my city. I assert that its proper place is here, and nothing will remove it. If I affirm this so categorically it is because I am aware of our human limitations, aware that we have not the power to begin all over again build our City as we will elsewhere. To desire such a thing is to be reactionary, and to persist in it would make the whole scheme an impossibility. Therefore it must be here."The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) Overview

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