The City of To-morrow and Its Planning

In this 1929 classic, the great architect Le Corbusier turned from the design of houses to the planning of cities, surveying urban problems and venturing bold new solutions. The book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age. Today it is revered as a work that, quite literally, helped to shape our world. Le Corbusier articulates concepts and ideas he would put to work in his city planning schemes for Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp, as well as schemes for a variety of structures from a museum in Tokyo to the United Nations buildings. The influence it exerted on a new generation of architects is now legendary. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning characterizes European cities as a chaos of poor design, inadequate housing, and inefficient transportation that grew out of the unplanned jumble of medieval cities. Developing his thesis that a great modern city can only function on a basis of strict order, Le Corbusier presents two imposing schemes for urban reconstruction -- the "Voisin" scheme for the center of Paris, and his more developed plans for the "City of Three Million Inhabitants," which envisioned, among other things, 60-story skyscrapers, set well apart, to house commercial activities, and residential housing grouped in great blocks of "villas." For those who live in cities as well as anyone interested in their planning, here is a probing survey of the problems of modern urban life and a master architect's stimulating vision of how they might be solved, enlivened by the innovative spirit and passionate creativity that distinguished all of Le Corbusier's work.… (more)

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LibraryThing member madepercy

Le Corbusier presents what he calls a technical solution to existing problems. In the 1920s, these problems were predominantly related to the advent of the motor car, and the need to replace what he calls the "pack-donkey's way" with straighter, faster motorways. We see the same problem today with

a rail network designed for the limitations of steam trains which now hinder the use of very long, modern freight trains. In many ways, Le Corbusier provides an historical institutionalist account of the problems of town planning. He admits that the great cities of the world are so located because this is where they should be. Rather than proposing new cities be built elsewhere, he suggests that the centre of the great city needs to be pulled down and rebuilt. History will be preserved in large gardens, like a peaceful cemetery or an art gallery, but otherwise, the value of such history is over-stated when one considers the appalling conditions, the tuberculosis, and so on, that inhabit the relics of the past. Critics of Le Corbusier point to the relative failures of his building projects, and typically his criticisms of disorderly cities such as New York did not win him any friends. Yet, if taken in an appropriate context, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning reads like Machiavelli's The Art of War, where the diagrams of troop displacements are replaced by conceptual plans for future great cities. In The Art of War, the diagrams are regarded as historical relics that do not take away from the serious ideas that Machiavelli presents on modern warfare. Similarly, if one can look beyond Le Corbusier's diagrams of grand schemes, there is a kernel of truth that continues to haunt us to this day: Can our great cities be sustained? When taken in this context, Le Corbusier's work is brilliant. Indeed, there are so many contemporary solutions to congestion and living conditions focused on "working cities" and "sleeping cities" that simply echo what Le Corbusier was claiming almost 100 years ago. One cannot deny that history has "forgotten" many of the solutions Le Corbusier once raised to the extent that technical solutions to our town planning problems today seem somehow new - even innovative. Clearly, these are not new, only forgotten.

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