Radiant Cities of Different Stripes
An exhibit opened October 2, at The Crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool,
covering the career of architectural giant, Le Corbusier. It is the first major exhibition of his life and work in Britain in over 20 years with original drawings, furniture, paintings and models never before seen in the country.
Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris in 1887, was a painter, poet and
theorist as well as an architect. He designed for the modern, machine driven era of the 1920s and 30s. The Villa Savoye, completed in 1931, was a culmination of his five points of architecture with its slim concrete columns, slab floors with open interiors, wide bands of windows, and roof gardens. Corbusier also devised his own system of architectural scale called the "Modulor." It was similar to Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," using the proportions of the human body to improve architecture.
via flickr /Artwork: designslinger]
City planning was an important component of Corbusier's professional life. The
Contemporary City Plan he presented in 1922 was designed to relieve Paris of it's burgeoning slum problems. The Plan called for clearing the land of all the old buildings (except for a few historic landmarks) and replacing them with modern high rises of steel and glass clustered around large expanses of open green space. In the 1930s, he produced a revised version, called The Radiant City, which expanded on the original city plan and introduced new ideas for making the individual buildings more user friendly.
By the end of the Second World War, Le Corbusier tried another version of his urban
housing scheme by constructing a series of unites, the individual housing block of the Radiant City. Rather than 60 unites in a vast bulldozed landscape, a small cluster of unites or a single building standing alone, was proposed. The Unite d'habitation in Marseilles is the most famous of the few that were built. A self-contained community, the building housed a market, laundry facilities, a day care center, and a roof garden. Controversial at the time, the Unite has found new admirers, and a new life, artists and designers clamoring to move into the building.
One of Britain's most recognized architects Sir Edwin Lutyens, designed the Cathedral
crypt that houses the Le Corbusier exhibit. The 1933 construction of the crypt was just the beginning of a church building, that was going to be the largest cathedral in the world when completed. The plan never came to fruition and the crypt is the only part of Lutyens original design that makes up the Cathedral today. He was England's foremost architect of the time, recognized for capturing the essence of the British country house and the deft handling of classical detailing in commercial and memorial projects around London. His largest commission came when he was asked to be the chief architect for the design of New Dehli in India.
It seems unlikely then that Lutyens would have been asked to design a public housing
project, given that his clientèle was primarily upper class, wealthy and connected to the business elite. He was working as the consulting architect for Grosvenor House, when the Duke of Westminster decided to donate land to the city for the construction of worker's housing with the stipulation that Lutyens serve as architect for the project. The dilapidated housing stock in the area had been condemned and demolished. Lutyens designed a complex of buildings lining Page Street, called the Grosvenor Estate, that provided 600 housing units in a series of courtyard structures not far from Parliament in Westminster.
Corbusier's work will be housed in Lutyens' building until January of next year. It is
somewhat ironic that Corbusier's urban planning theories have been demonized while the modest project produced by Lutyens is the model currently embraced by community planners. The gigantic, towering, low-income urban renewal projects of the 60s and early 70s are being demolished in favor of small scale clusters of housing for a variety of income groups. Of course 40 years from now, we may see hundreds of unites marching across the landscape because some days you're in; and the next day - you're out!
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