BOO KS
455
of man is to be allowed to reach the fullness of its powers, we must,
as Mumford insists, design new towns on the basis of new visions.
Yet novelty and modernity alone will not suffice. Le Corbusier,
that Gallic champion of the
Bauhaus
spirit, is a case in point. After
World War
I
he rode his bicycle around Paris while wearing a derby
-and proclaimed that a house was a
machine
a
habiter,
a machine
to live in.
I
t is easy enough to denounce the soulless mechanism which seems
to
be
implied in Corbusier's phrase.
It
is more important first to under–
stand the relevance of his genius. For more than any other modern
architect, he understood the connection between urban design and the
very character of society. He undoubtedly overstated the case when he
argued, in
Ve'rs Une Architecture M oderne
in
1923,
that "building is
at the root of social unrest today." And yet, there is no question that
the present urban chaos which Federal policy has done so much to
create is that aspect of the contemporary crisis which is most immediate
and accessible in the experience of the ordinary citizen.
Moreover, the motives which impelled Corbusier toward the con–
cept of the Radiant City were impeccably humanistic.
"I
say: the basic
materials of city planning are:
sun,
sky,
trees,
steel,
cement,
in that strict order of importance." To accomplish this, he envisions an
environment in which "the 'street' as we know it now has disappeared.
All the various sporting activities take place outside the people's homes.
The city is entirely green;
it
is
a Green City.
...
The keystone behind
this city is the
liberty of the individual."
These are hardly the words of antihumanist. Yet the way in which
Corbusier proposed to implement his vision - by building gigantic sky–
scrapers with a great population density and thus freeing vast areas of
the city for green space - did not actually serve it. For, as a walk
through Stuyvesant Town
in
New York will confirm, all of that sun,
sky and trees tends to be functionless and empty and the buildings
themselves destroy the human scale. And ultimately, as this book clearly
shows, there was a technocrat coexisting with the Mediterranean idealist
in Corbusier. The Plan is drawn up by an elite "away from the frenzy
in the mayor's offices or the townhall, from the cries of the electorate
or the laments of society's victims." The people were going to like
strawberries and cream - in this instance, the Radiant City - or else.
