Le Corbusier
The First City as a System Thinker
The Museum of Modern Art in New York just closed a large exhibit on the early 20th Century Architect Le Corbusier. It was fascinating to see the roots of both modern architecture and modern cities. Although these days we take many of the things he pioneered for granted, it was fascinating to see how early and how completely he though of both the city and the home as a system. His two main ideas that have now contributed enormously to modern architecture and city planning were:
The House is a Machine for Living In: Coming soon after the industrial revolution, Le Corbusier seems to have been greatly influenced by the transition from items that needed to serve multiple uses to justify the cost, to ones that could be easily and cheaply engineered for specific use cases. His belief that homes should be designed around our needs and these beliefs were expressed in many ways:
- Inclusion of garages (cars were just developing at the time), but separation of them from the main house. One thing that struck me about one of his earlier homes was that the garage was at the perimeter of the property. This forced the occupants to walk up to their home and enjoy the outer view of their house. Something that doesn’t happen much in the days of attached garages.
- Roof Space: Many of Le Corbusier’s designs attempted to integrate the indoor and outdoor to allow for more exposure to nature and the sun, around which he designed all of his spaces. For example, he never built north facing windows in the northern hemisphere so that all spaces had direct sun exposure.
- Ground Space: Le Corbusier was fascinated with the idea of raising a house above the ground on concrete pillars resembling stilts. This allowed for a 88% to 12% ratio of ground to structure and allowed for more walking and activities to occur in the open air.
The Radiant City: Le Corbusier’s second main idea was in most ways, just an extension of Le Corbusier’s ideas from one house to an entire system. As he states in one of the videos playing in the MOMA exhibit: “Most people think of architecture about building pretty houses one at a time, but its actually about how they all work together” or something to that effect. The key principles of the radiant city include:
- Separation of vehicles from pedestrians
- Raising of buildings to allow for open green space and pedestrian shortcuts
- Banning the building of apartments that face north and thus don’t get any natural sun.
- Filling the areas in-between and on top of buildings with recreational space
The exhibit progresses chronologically though Le Corbusier’s life, letting the visitor experience the evolution of his architecture just the same way I imagine he did. This format lets the exhibit build on itself. It starts a little puzzling: “I’m not really sure what these city plans have to do with the house on the side of a hill…” but it gradually makes more and more sense as you internalize Le Corbusier’s principles and see his later creations through his own eyes. “Ah I see how this complex was designed to maximize land and separate automobiles from humans”. The exhibit doesn’t even need the descriptions of the pieces to explain the meaning of each piece. We are Le Corbusier and its patently obvious that the apartment complex model in front of us is built on stilts to allow for pedestrian walkways, the gaps in the building allow for more light to reach the ground while those bars rising towards the front of the building are highways leading to the inevitable garages within the building.
Possibly the most interesting part of the exhibit was that although he had these great ideas about how people should live, the visual aspects of his architecture are not pleasing. This puzzled me for a bit but then I stumbled upon a reason that makes a lot of sense. Le Corbusier’s ideas where fairly new and different from anything that had been seen before. He exerted so much energy executing the system aspect of the building and complexes that he simply did not have time, even if he did care, to make his buildings anything other than a rectangular box. Later in life he must have had more time on his hands because you can see the style of the buildings improve considerably. This raises a principle that I find to be true across all endeavors: complexity can only be built one step at a time. Once he figured out the system aspect of his buildings, Le Corbusier moved on to the aesthetic design.
At the end of the exhibit one is left with a meaningful impression of the process of transforming a society. Here was an architect that lived in the early 20th century and yet we still are only beginning to reach the full potential of his ideas: The city should make us better.
