In this selection, from The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1929) utopian urban planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) exemplifies the energy and efficiency of the Machine Age. His was the bold, nearly mystical rationality of a generation that was eager to accept the scientific spirit of the twentieth century on its own terms and to throw off all pre-existing ties – political, cultural, conceptual – with what it considered an exhausted, outmoded past. In 1922 he presented the public with his plan for “A Contemporary City of Three Million People.” Laid out in a rigidly symmetrical grid pattern, the city consisted of neatly spaced rows of identical, strictly geometrical skyscrapers. This was not the city of the future, Le Corbusier insisted, but the possible city of today. It was to be built on the Right Bank, after demolishing several hundred acres of the existing urban fabric of Paris. His idea of “the skyscraper in the park” is today ubiquitous. Whether in relatively complete examples like Brasilia, designed by modernists Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, or Le Corbusier’s own Chandigarh, India – where totally new cities were built from scratch – or in partial examples such as the skyscraper parks and the high-rise housing blocks that have been built in cities worldwide, the Corbusian vision has truly transformed the global urban environment, as has his idea that “the city of speed is the city of success.”
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