13 Aug 2010

Le Corbusier

I came across a box under the stairs the other day. It was full of some of my old toys. I’m glad my Dad didn’t throw them out, this one in particular…

I was going to buy it for my friends who are expecting a baby in the next couple of weeks but this is what it looks like now...

Lame. The term ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ springs to mind.

There’s something that has always appealed to me about that Fisher Price car park/garage. I won’t say that as a toddler I appreciated its architectural design (‘Hmmm, Mother dear women, wouldn’t you say that the supporting columns of this Fisher Price Garage are somewhat reminiscent of the Doric style of Ancient Greece?’) but looking at it now I can genuinely see something of Le Corbusier in it, the pioneer of modern high design...

It makes sense though, Le Corbusier being an urban planner/industrialist architect. You can’t get much more industrial than a car park.

Here are a few more of my favourite Le Corbusier designs...


Although I like the simplicity of Le Corbusier’s buildings I think, like many others before me, that his social housing projects are ‘fundamentally flawed’.

Utopian in theory, dystopian in practise.

Thankfully his ‘Plan Voisin’ was never fully adopted in Paris. ‘In it, he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers… placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space’

The ‘Plan Voisin’ model was however eventually adopted by many cities post-World War Two (albeit not as drastically as Le Corbusier had in mind), such as council estates all over Britain and housing projects in large American cities. Now most of them are being pulled down and declared ‘uninhabitable’.

Here's the mammoth Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle which is now all boarded up and ready for demolition...

Jane Jacobs, in her work ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, is critical of Le Corbusier’s urban designing... ‘The public housing projects influenced by his ideas have the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community's development.’

This is the notorious Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago...

Although I think that a lot of the criticism of high-rise housing is justified I expect that a lot of it comes from people who haven't ever even stepped foot inside a block of flats. I sometimes get the impression that it’s not realized or appreciated that there is often a greater sense of community in council housing than in an average suburban street, where people might say hello to their immediate neighbors but may never of even spoken to people who live only a few doors down. I can only speak about my personal experiences in London but I think that lack of community is not necessarily a problem of housing but rather a problem with people, regardless of class or creed.

Anyway, that Fisher Price Car park/garage is too good to throw away. My sister has set aside a little area of the garden to grow herbs in, I’m going to try and convince her to incorporate the garage into it. I think it will look good in a few years time with all the herbs growing in and around it. Like this Le Corbusier building in India…

Doubt she’ll have any of it though.