LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIENT CITY

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City

Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism To Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 1967). Le Corbusier's book was first published in French in 1933. The excerpts below are from Part 3, "The New Age," pp. 86f., and Part 4, "The 'Radiant City,'" pp. 90ff., 127-34. For pictures of Le Corbusier's designs, click here.



From Part 3:

4. Basic Pleasures

For all men, in cities and in farms:

sun in the house,
sky through their windowpanes,
trees to look at as soon as they step outside.

I say: the basic materials of city planning are:

sun,
sky,
trees,
steel,
cement,

in that strict order of importance.

Yet when I look about me, I see city authorities — reputedly the most modern in the world — planning towns that will deprive men, for a century to come, of the BASIC PLEASURES! […]

* * *

But we must not forget a second group of basic pleasures: action, participation in collective work, the realization of which by communal effort is an undertaking that represents concrete benefit for all and the elimination of one of the greatest causes of unhappiness amongst the humbler members of society.

These are the supreme joys that each individual can earn by a spiritual or "maternal" participation in working for the collective good.

That is what citizenship is! […]



From Part 4:

1. These studies are based …

These studies are based on an unalterable, indisputable, essential foundation, the only true basis for any attempt at social organization: individual liberty. Where the planning of collective life threatens to demolish the liberty of the individual, we must respect it; at a time when the consequences of machine-age evolution seem daily more likely to destroy it, we must revive it; it is our aim, in this rich new era, to create an even greater measure of individual liberty now that modern technology is providing us with new and fabulously powerful means of progress.

This present work is not the development of an arbitrary structure, an exposition of some idealistic system, or pure speculation on the part of a brain that has wilfully set itself above the struggle of life. The ideas it presents are all derived from that struggle, they are the products of our age. Their spiritual direction is that of our age because they have been developed from the actual, carefully observed, tangible, material condition of the world we live in.

[…]

Every day the anxiety and depression of modern life spring up afresh: the city is swelling, the city is filling up. The city simply builds itself anew on top of itself: the old houses towered in a cliff at the edge of the streets; the new houses still tower in new cliffs along the same streets. All the houses are on streets, the street is the basic organ of the city, and the house is the individual, infinitely repeated mold. The street becomes appalling, noisy, dusty, dangerous; automobiles can scarcely do more than crawl along it; the pedestrians, herded together on the sidewalks, get in each other's way, bump into each other, zigzag from side to side; the whole scene is like a glimpse of purgatory. Some of the buildings are office buildings; but how is it possible to work well with so little light and so much noise? Elsewhere, the buildings are residential; but how is it possible to breathe properly in those torrid canyons of summer heat; how can anyone risk bringing up children in that air tainted with dust and soot, in those streets so full of mortal peril? How can anyone achieve the serenity indispensable to life, how can anyone relax, or ever give a cry of joy, or laugh, or breathe, or feel drunk with sunlight? How can anyone live! The houses are cliffs facing one another across the street. Worse still, behind the houses that face the street [there] are more houses still. They are built around courtyards. Where is the light? What do I see out of my window? Other windows, only six or ten yards away, with people behind them looking back at me. Where is freedom here? There is no freedom for men in this present age, only slavery. A slavery to which they themselves consent, and which is no longer even confined within set limits. To live, to laugh, to be master in one's own home, to open one's eyes to the light of day, to the light of the sun, to look out on green leaves and blue sky. No! Nothing of all that for the man who lives in a city. The man in a city is a lump of coal in a brazier; he is being burned up simply for the energy he produces. Then he fades and crumbles away. Every year, fresh contingents flood in from the country to replace those who have been burned out.

The houses look out onto the streets, or the houses look out onto a court. Offices too. Workshops as well.

More, the office, the workshop and the houses are heaped pell-mell on top of one another: din, smells, noise, a bubbling poison brew. How does one live? How does one laugh?

More recently, there has been a reaction, one made possible by the railroad. The laborer, the clerk and the shopgirl have been whisked out of the city along steel rails. Like an exploding shell, the city has shot out in all directions, pushing its tentacles out as far as the eye can see. At dawn, then again in the evening, the laborer, the clerk and the shopgirl sit in their railroad cars and are pulled along the rails. Their little houses are surrounded by greenery, away in the country. What could be nicer? They can really enjoy themselves — every Sunday. That's only one day out of seven, but never mind. So on Sunday, there they are, all alone in their little green nests: their boy friends, their girl friends, live on the opposite side of town, in another suburb. So on Sundays, the laborer, the clerk and the shopgirl still tick off the hours without living and without laughter. Or rather, there they are back in their railroad cars riding those steel rails again. Suburbs? Suburbs are broken, dislocated limbs! The city has been torn apart and scattered in meaningless fragments across the countryside. What is the point of life in such places? How are people to live in them?

Suburban life is a despicable delusion entertained by a society stricken with blindness!

The world is sick. A readjustment has become necessary. Readjustment? No, that is too tame. It is the possibility of a great adventure that lies before mankind: the building of a whole new world … because there is no time to be lost. And we must not waste time on those who laugh or smile, on those who give us ironical little answers and treat us as mystic madmen. We have to look ahead, at what must be build. Awe-inspiring experiments are already taking place before our very eyes: America (the United States) has already rushed into the machine age "before the plaster was dry" as it were. By which I mean that they have advanced into this new unknown like true pioneers and had the courage to improvise. They had no way of foreseeing what the consequences would be, and today they are already finding themselves trapped in many dead-end streets. There is very little happiness to be seen over there; no modern consciousness has been precipitated by all that has happened. America's magnificent, gigantic lesson is a negative one. Nevertheless, the U.S.A. has earned our respect: they are people who have worked. Russia and Italy are both building new regimes at this moment. Moscow, in particular, is attempting to turn a people long allowed to lie fallow into a living nation; they have started from scratch, and are now, with astounding energy, working out a whole new code of living. I am not judging the results, I am not even attempting to evaluate them. How could I begin to do so? Though I have now been to Moscow three times, it was never as anything but a spectator perpetually stumbling into some new pit of ignorance. These things are too vast, too complex, too difficult to define. They are beyond my capacities — as indeed they are sometimes beyond the capacities of the men who brought them about. Life has done its work: the storm, then the fresh shoots. And we are part of the process, much less masters of events than is sometimes believed. How are we to gauge these events? And yet, everywhere where it is feasible to do so, we must in fact gauge, evaluate, judge. For only then can we invent, decide, and act. We must do so.

7. Is Descartes American?

The skyscraper: an explosion sprung from a budding century under the influence of new fertilizers: steel and cement. Cloudscrapers in fact, they're so high! Delight and amazement on the part of those big kids, the Americans. It has become a free-for-all, a contest, "the skyscraper game." The latest sport, a new form of competition. The prize is the publicity obtained. A skyscraper makes a good advertisement: the biggest in the world.

Result: the vast, romantic amphitheater that is now the gateway to America's immensity: Manhattan. The bewilderment of the French bourgeois, who thinks: strange attitude to life they have over here. An esthetic of chaos (romanticism again), an ethic that prizes confusion, a license to unleash disorder. Chaos, violence, primitive strength, the glamor of a besieging army, signs of power, pride in their own strength, national awareness, racial awareness, skyscraper-propaganda, a challenge hurled at the Tour Eiffel: the New World master of the Old. Everything tottering on some brink (and a lot of other things tottering all around the skyscrapers); something is really happening. What? "Let us pay no attention, it's all right for them; but we, after all, we have always represented moderation and wisdom …" (the indisputably uneasy reaction of our own "sages"; sage = man-with-head-in-sand). But there it is: skyscrapers are the fashion. The anarchy of youth is on their side. Skyscrapers mean anarchy.

The skyscraper has petrified the cities. In an age of speed, the skyscraper has congested the city. A statement of fact: the skyscraper has reinstated the pedestrian, exclusively. The pedestrian crawls at the feet of those skyscrapers like a beetle at the foot of a steeple. The beetle is hauled up the inside of the steeple: the inside of the steeple is dark because it is surrounded by other steeples; gloom, despair. But right on top of the skyscrapers that are higher than all the others, there the beetle becomes radiant: he can see the ocean and its ships; he is higher than all the other beetles. And indeed, that is where he generally is: up under the academic cupola surmounting his bizarre steeple. The cupola flatters him, he really rather likes it. He agrees to pay all kinds of money in order to have this stopper on his skyscraper intricately carved.

For the skyscraper is bizarre: at the very top, you will find Brunelleschis or Michelangelos of the first or second Renaissance, or masterworks copied from Rouen or Amiens (final fruit of medieval spiritual unease; now, instead of saying Mass beneath them, we do business). Up and down the façades, perpetual outcrops of stone that keep out all the daylight but provide opportunities for creating "styles"; behind these "styles," it is almost impossible to work; darkness and gloom; hence, electric light. At the foot of the skyscraper everyone is trampling on everyone else, because at ground-level there is no room at all; the skyscraper has been built above yesterday's streets. The skyscrapers are therefore all packed together; and they are too small. America bristles with them. Is it good, is it wise, to be bristling with anything? Is it beautiful to bristle? Is such hirsuteness in a city even mannerly?

If only all this were merely a Hollywood mock-up made of plaster! Alas, it is made of steel, it is built on granite, and it is faced with stone from top to bottom (why face it with stone, I wonder?). You can see it in Manhattan, you can see it in Chicago. A vast mishap.

Several years ago, a society was formed in New York for the purpose of demolishing Manhattan!

* * *

PURPOSE OF THE SKYSCRAPER

To decongest the center of the city by increasing the population density in order to diminish internal distances. A contradictory postulate, though now imperative, and at last made miraculously possible by the advent of the skyscraper.

To create a business center for a region or a country. By a hitherto unheard-of concentration of population (superdensities), to shorten internal distances, and save time (within each 24-hour sun cycle); to restore the ground-level of the city in its entirety to traffic of all kinds (decongestion); in fact, to create an entirely new relation between the new population densities and the ground surface necessary for efficient traffic systems. To help in the separation of varying speeds: stationary (offices), lowspeed (innumerable pedestrians), highspeed and superspeed (cars, streetcars, subways). To guarantee that this place intended for intensive labor is provided with silence, fresh air, daylight, vast horizons (wide views, "breadth of vision"). To bring decent living conditions and a light-filled atmosphere to places where everything at the moment is rottenness, filth, milling crowds, din, disorder, delay, fatigue, wear and tear, and demoralization. To create the nobility, the grandeur, the serene dignity made possible by suitable proportions. To provide a sublime expression (the mature fruit of machine-age evolution) of this century's strength. To bring back the sky. To restore a clear vision of things. Air, light, joy.

* * *

Nineteenth century architecture is underestimated. It was discovery, it was change, it was the unknown that lay ahead, the surprise of tomorrow, movement itself. Change and movement itself, these are what create souls. The nineteenth century was an age of hypothesis. Between theory and practice, what difference is there? What distance? What length of time must pass between the theory and the putting into practice, between the spiritual revelation and the reform? The divinatory flash and the reform are contiguous, the one follows the other automatically, they lie end to end. But if this reform continues without cease, if it becomes a bombardment, if it gives us no respite, if it overwhelms our normal capacities for assimilation, then we give it a different name: we call it revolution. The word revolution conveys a simple fact, it describes an event that is in itself unconnected with the uproar, the conflict, the violence of physical battle; it is a word signifying simply that something else has replaced something that has ceased to exist. Condorcet created the word revolution. And he did so several years after the fall of the Bastille (dictionary definition: "is used for changes taking place in the affairs of the world.").

The nineteenth century was swept by a desire for the grandiose. When man is torn from his state of inertia, thrust into new undertakings, swept up by a wave of initiative, bound to the prow of some new development that is hurtling forward like an avalanche, ever faster, ever vaster (consequences engendering consequences — the snowball principle), then he rises to sublimity. He finds himself in the position to … He becomes capable of fulfilling these new responsibilities. He becomes farsighted, a demiurge; he succeeds, he triumphs. What dazzling and radiant moments, what treasurable instants those are, however fleeting, when the lightning flashes out before us, our certain guide! And when that vision is followed by a full awareness of its meaning, then a new stage has been reached.

The nineteenth century was a time of fervor: new discoveries were made each day. There was no time to think about whether a discovery would make money, about whether it could be used as the foundation of a "Limited Company with a capital of …". The reality of the latest discovery, the possibilities of tomorrow's hypothesis, the budding dream, it was all one and the same thing: fervor, enthusiasm! A passionate race towards the most spiritual of goals. Masterworks: the product of disinterest. "Big money?" Such brutish considerations had no place in this race; in the sphere that we are concerned with here, the reign of precise calculations was inaugurated, "modern techniques" were hammered out. The old world was abolished: from then on we were able to build with steel; steel and glass; and then, later on, reinforced concrete and glass. From then on, nothing in the outward aspect of our material creations could resemble the aspect of the past. But the constant remained: emotion produced by beauty or harmony (as you wish).

At the various Expositions Universelles in Paris, nineteenth century France was able to see with its own eyes the new children of that age: the palaces of iron and glass.

The Académie was shaken into awareness, then into action, and saw to it that all these things were demolished, for it is only too true, alas, that the pure air of high achievements is poison to mediocre minds. Almost alone of all these works the Tour Eiffel still survives, together with a few bridges (bold, slender, intelligent and beautiful) over mountain torrents or great rivers.

During the nineteenth century we lived through a great era, a pure and lyrical age of architecture based on mathematical calculation. Since then, everything has fallen into an appalling state of mediocrity again. We the young, the newcomers, accused by our contemporaries of fomenting revolutionary ideas, we place an infinitely low value on what we are doing. Few people are aware of this, since the works of our spiritual forebears have all been destroyed — those works that would have shouted the truth to our faces every day.

* * *

Napoleon I founded the Ecole polytechnique. I should like at this point to attempt the task of rendering the notion of what is called calculation readily comprehensible:

Every day, laboratory experiments are undertaken in all the countries of the earth by individuals of different races, culture, and education. The object of these experiments is to express in human terms the hidden facts that determine the specific qualities of matter and the forces that act upon it or in it. In order to measure these things, numbers were created. With the help of numbers we have arrived at a universally accepted notion of distance, time, weight, and temperature, A fixed vocabulary now exists to describe that part of the universe which we have succeeded in comprehending.

The relations of quantity to weight, of weight to distance, of distance to time, of time to temperature, etc., have been observed. We now know what happens in a given form of matter when it is subjected to such and such conditions. There are signs (letters and numbers) to symbolize each of the many results that have been observed: these are called formulas. A formula is a limited power, an ineluctable and circumscribed entity. It can be used to perform only one task, its own, and it performs it exactly. A formula can thus be used in place of a reality that is itself too cumbersome to deal with. Given this, the permutation of these formulas can be achieved instantaneously on any blank sheet of writing paper, instead of necessitating a long period of time spent in the heat, the danger or the congestion of a laboratory.

Battle is joined: the formulas either conflict or form an alliance. They enable one to express a thought, to realize an intention, to pursue a desire. The dream, the hypothesis is measured against the reality of life. Each of these formulas is a sign on a piece of writing paper, but that sign is as unyielding and as clear-cut as a diamond. Such formulas cannot be kneaded together like so much flour and water. They contain the laws of the cosmos, and they will not finally solidify into a unity until the mixture reaches a perfect conformity with all the universal laws involved. No poets are less different from one another than the mathematician, the inventor, and the artist (the true artist!). Everything comes to the same thing in their mediating hands: a reabsorbence of chaos into harmony.

This purely intellectual labor of calculation, which nevertheless calls for intuition, for genius, this drama played out wholly on a few sheets of white paper, is as it were a transubstantiation of raw natural elements (hardness, softness, elasticity, brittleness, tension, heat, noise, violent chaos and disorders that pain the researcher even in imagination), into signs that are words with clear and reliable connotations, that are capable of expressing the world. This accomplished, man is no longer a digger of earth, a miner, a downtrodden Nibelung; he is a demiurge. He has the power of decision over future events. Once his calculations are finished, he is in a position to say — and he does say: "It shall be thus!" The power of calculation is such that the imprudent might be tempted to raise altars to it forthwith, and worship it.

But beware! It is only the mirror of our own very human divinity, and strictly circumscribed by our own limitations!

And yet, the discovery and first use of such calculations galvanized the nineteenth century into hitherto undreamed-of progress.

Numbers were created to measure things. The nineteenth century had instruments of measurement at its disposal so vastly different from those available in previous areas, that numbers attained a wholly new value, and the true science of calculation was born.

* * *

Here is the solution provided by such calculation to the problem of the business center of a great city: superdensity: 3,200 occupants to the hectare (allowing 10 square meters of office floorspace per worker).

Skyscrapers built in quincunx or checkerboard pattern, one every 400 meters. The distance between these buildings will therefore be much the same as the average distance between our Paris métro stations. It is worthwhile here to try to visualize what huge, stupendous spaces the introduction of these skyscrapers will create. Their horizontal projection, by which is meant the plan of any given story, will represent no more than 5 (five) per cent of the ground area allotted to each building.

Despite these unexpected empty spaces, it should be noted also that the internal distances of this city center will be four times less great than those at present existing in even the most overpopulated of Parisian districts (800 inhabitants to the hectare).

These skyscrapers are all built in the shape of a cross 1 in order to avoid central courtyards: there are no courtyards anywhere.

This form provides the maximum possible area of façade, therefore the maximum area of windows, therefore the maximum quantity of light. The offices are never more than 7 meters in depth, measured from the totally glazed surface of the facades: therefore there are no dark offices.

The cruciform skyscraper also provides a maximum of stability in relation to the thrust of high winds. 2

It is constructed of steel and glass. The vertical girders will spring up from the foundations to a height of 220 meters. The first floor will occur not less than 5 to 7 meters above ground level. Between the piles thus left to form a veritable forest in certain areas of the city's surface area, it will be possible to move about quite freely. Apart from five entrance halls for pedestrians, the space underneath the skyscraper is left vacant. Here again, as in the residential neighborhoods, the pedestrian has the entire ground surface at his disposal. He never meets a motor vehicle: all motorized traffic is provided for elsewhere.

All motor vehicles are up on the highway network, which again, as in the residential neighborhoods, is based on a unit measuring 400 by 400 meters. Each skyscraper is built in the center of one of these 400 by 400 meter squares. The highways run 5 meters up in the air (as before). From each of the four highway sections making up the square, a branch road leads off to the road network serving that particular building (thus avoiding any two-way traffic or the need for vehicles ever to meet). These four branch roads lead in to four separate auto-ports. Opening into each auto-port is a loading and unloading bay, of which there are likewise four per building. These four auto-ports provide parking for a thousand cars at the level of the bay itself, a thousand more on the ground beneath, and another thousand still in the auto-port basement. Total: 3,000 cars per skyscraper — far more than will be needed!

The roundabout linking the four parking areas will permit access to any of the four bays in each building from any of the road sections making up the 400 meter by 400 meter square.

At ground level, in the parks, a network of diagonal and orthogonal "landscaped" paths for pedestrians. Beneath the highways, the 400 by 400 meter square is repeated at ground level, though here enclosed by iron fences. Between these fences, underneath the highway, are the traffic lanes for heavy trucks (as before). This is also where the streetcars run.

In the Radiant City, the streetcar (either in its present form or in that of small trains) has been restored to its former eminence (economy and efficiency). The streetcar network does not coincide with the 400 meter by 400 meter highway network; it consists simply of a series of parallel tracks at 400 meter intervals, and therefore includes no intersections. Every 400 meters, the streetcars stop opposite two skyscrapers. There are breaks in the iron fences at these points occupied by sheltered platforms. Simple but functional.

There are wide underground passages, 20 or 30 meters in length, running underneath the streetcar lines and the heavy traffic lanes. (For pedestrians.)

Underground: the subway network of the Radiant City will then take the passengers on to particular buildings, the basements of which will all include a subway station. The line itself will follow one of the branches of the cross; on either side of it will be the platforms, and beyond the platforms will be located the communal services provided for the personnel working in the building: restaurants, shops, etc.

We do not yet know whether, before long, we shall have air-taxis from the Radiant City airport landing on the tops of the business center skyscrapers. It is possible. There will be runway platforms available 25 meters wide by 150 to 200 meters in length. The problems involved have already been largely solved by naval aircraft carriers.

All this works miraculously well "on paper," because the problem has been clearly stated and the necessary calculations made. Since it is the result of calculation it must, therefore, be feasible. Whenever you like! I have already given details 3 of the way in which the operation should be financed, and of the legislative foundation required for the immediate realization of a business center at the heart of a great city. Moreover, my thesis has been accepted by some of the most highly placed figures in the Parisian banking world. Which means that I am not entirely out of my mind. 4

And since 1930 we have been receiving unexpected support from chiefs-of-staff in charge of the country's aerial defense.

* * *

In opposition to New York, to Chicago, we offer the Cartesian skyscraper — translucent, cleancut, gleamingly elegant against the sky of the Ile-de- France.

In place of a porcupine and a vision of Dante's Inferno, we propose an organized, serene, forceful, airy, ordered entity. From below, it could be sublime. From the air (we are all now learning how to look at cities from above), it will be a symbol of the spirit. It will be the city of the modern age: a new scale of things. I insist on this notion of order because it is my answer to the deformed and caricatured lyricism of those "Preachers on behalf of life'' for whom life is no more than accident. For me, life means something brought to perfection, not something botched. It is mastery, not an abortive chaos. It is fecundity (the total splendor of a lucid conception) and not sterility (the dungheap into which we have been plunged by all those thoughtless admirers of the miseries now existing in our great cities).

Instead of New York (magnificent and milling clamor of the machine-age giant in its adolescence), I propose the Cartesian city; I propose the era of "horizontal skyscrapers" (a glance at the accompanying pictures will make it quite clear what I mean). Paris, city of the straight line and the horizontal (man does live on the horizontal plane), follows that line in its style of architecture.

There are those who may laugh at this. But let them go and look again at the façade of Notre-Dame, and at everything that came after it, right up to (though excluding) the academic domes of the past fifty years. The essential grace of Paris lies in its straight lines (and not in its curves, despite the balderdash being talked during the present reaction).