Three Reminders to Architects: i. Mass, ii. Surface, iii. Plan

[Amy]

The way Corbusier is ‘reminding’ architects of the three topics in this essay (mass, surface and plan) is very much true to how architecture is taught today. The ‘plan is the generator’ also aligns with how I’ve been taught as an architecture student that the exterior of the building should reflect what is going on inside the building. As Corbusier says, the plan is the basis from which rhythm, emotion and experience of architecture extrudes from.

I am however very glad that his urban plan for ‘a city of towers’ remained just a hypothetical one. This book was originally published in 1923 and most of the essays were published in Corbusier’s magazine L’Esprit Nouveau before this in 1921. Corbusier clearly loved this idea of a city of towers and was very concerned with overcrowding in Paris, which is what lead him to developing his urban plan for Paris, ‘Plan Voisin.’ I almost felt personally offended when I read the quote: ‘cafes and places for recreation would no longer be that fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris’. Over-spilling cafes and street activity is seen as a tourist attraction in itself now! It’s something we find charming and gives character and a sense-of-place. I think Corbusier had good intentions with his brutal city plans but I’d rather read about them and look at the drawings that experience them in real life.

- Praise Architecture

[arjn]

With the US actively demolishing Corbusian high-rise social housing projects, one could call the whole 'City of Towers' business a failed experiment. Yet it continues to have a strong hold on the popular imagination (img search "utopian city" and one is flooded with Plan Voisin-like images; towers, and green open spaces). I don't know how modernist housing experiments performed in Europe and Asia, but it's visible where these ideas originate from.

Having lived in Corbusier's Chandigarh for a couple years, my experience of his planning has been a mixed bag. The roads work great but the capitol doesn't. In his own work, he was more forgiving to pedestrian plazas and recreation zones than the word "fungus" would allow us to believe, but his plazas still remind me more of soulless concrete than 'garden city'. To be fair to him, he took over an initial master plan laid out by Albert Mayer and did not start from scratch, but Chandigarh is a good place to see his ideas from this essay in action. With mixed results.