The brutal outcomes of machine thinking
Le Corbusier offers some wonderful advice, but mostly horrible cityscapes
I’m not an architect, but I have opinions about the design of buildings and the spaces between. I’m not a fan of the imposing, monolithic structures of brutalist architecture.
The emergence of brutalist architecture in the mid-20th century marked a significant departure from the principles of traditional urban design.
Architects like Le Corbusier, who were instrumental in popularizing brutalism, focused on grand, utilitarian structures that often overshadowed the human element. His approach to architecture and urbanism was both revolutionary and controversial, impacting not only the aesthetics of buildings but also the broader aspects of urban life, including the role of automobiles in cities.
The term "Brutalism" comes from the French "béton brut," meaning "raw concrete." His buildings, such as the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille and the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, have stark, geometric forms with an emphasis on concrete. They were designed to serve a purpose with little to no regard for traditional aesthetics. They come out looking like a fortress or bunker, putting humans in a scale of widgets in a giant machine.
Le Corbusier valued efficiency, order, and the car as a central element of city life. It’s not that he hated cities and thought they should be blotted out by concrete. He thought of population clusters as giant machines that served functions. The outcome of his brand of urbanism is what you’d see in a dystopian sci-fi movie. Ironic, because he thought cities should be full of parks in between the giant slabs of concrete.
The city should be designed to give its inhabitants the maximum of comfort and the maximum of chance.
Le Corbusier’s concept of the "Radiant City'' was an environment where residential, industrial, and commercial areas were strictly segregated, connected by highways and large arterial roads to facilitate fast automobile transit. Again, not anti-city. He wanted to clean up the grime and see people move efficiently through space. But we know today the segregation of functions and the emphasis on highways fuels sprawl, disconnected communities, and the degradation of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.
One reason I’m drawn to Le Corbusier is that I see him as a sort of Lex Luthor villain. Not the one you’ve seen in movies, but the one sketched out over years in comic books. Lex wanted earth to thrive, and he saw Superman as a threat, an alien with the power to destroy earth.
Le Corbusier was so fond of humans as these little pieces of a central productivity machine that he lost the humanity of block-level, neighborhood-level design. Not everything should be scaled up for the sake of efficiency. That big systems thinking is one of the massive failures of traffic engineering. Some aspects of everyday life need to be slow and even clunky.
“Less is more,” Le Corbusier often said. But as it happens, less focus on how humans interact individually with their physical surroundings leads to more problems: wasteful land consumption, dangerous roads, unhealthy downtowns, and a total reliance on the automobile.
But you can learn a lot from the bad guys. Sometimes the tactics are worth adapting to modern work. Other times the ideas, implemented differently, are good guiding principles. I’ll leave you with Le Corbusier’s own words worth celebrating:
Streets are the arteries of the city; illuminated by the sun, they must radiate joy all day long and until late at night. They are the only places where we can come together. So they are the most important places in the city, and they must be our primary concern.
You had me at "Le Corbusier + horrible"
İ like the first picture a lot actually -- lots of green! And a demystifying expression of the clash between modern society and nature as such.