220
PARTISAN REVIEW
The distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boule–
vard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces
together; the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the
highway, a means for putting them asunder. For Le Corbusier, perhaps
the greatest of twentieth-century architects and certainly the most
influential, this separation was the very basis of modernist planning
and design. Before any genuinely modern building could be done, he
said in 1929, "We must kill the street!" The street that Baudelaire
knew, an arena for endless collisions and confrontations, would have
to give way to the highway, "a factory for producing traffic." This
"truly modern street," like the modern factory, would be a maximally
automated one: no people, except for people operating machines; no
unarmored
a~d
unmechanized pedestrians to slow the flow. "Cafes and
places of recreation will no longer be the fungus that eats up the
pavements of Paris." The macadam would belong to the traffic alone.
Le Corbusier and his disciplines in the 1920s unfurled a vision of a
fully integrated new world of high-rise towers, surrounded by great
expanses of grass and open space-"the tower in the park" -linked by
aerial superhighways, serviced by subterranean garages and shopping
arcades. This vision had a clear political point, stated at the end of
Vers
une architecture,
Le Corbusier's great modernist manifesto of 1923:
"Archileclure or Revolution.
Revolulion can
be
avoided."
The political connections were not fully grasped at the time, but we
should be able to understand them now. Revolutionary theme: the
street belongs to the people. But if we can manage to wipe the street off
the map, then maybe we can keep that revolutionary "people" from
coming into being. Antirevolutionary theme: no streets, no People. In
the post-Haussmann street, the fundamental social and psychic contra–
dictions in modern life converged and threatened at any moment to
erupt. Kill the street, and maybe these contradictions need never come
to a head. Thus modern architecture created a modernized version of
pastoral: a spatially and socially segmented world-people here, traffic
there, work here, homes there, rich here, poor there, barriers of grass
and concrete inbetween-where haloes could begin to grow around
men's heads again.
Meanwhile, inside a great many of those heads, mystified modes of
social thought have taken root. The twentieth century has generated
two powerful mystifications of modern life. The first may be called
"modernolatry." This word, coined shortly before World War I,
