Ville Contemporaine

The Ville Contemporaine or Contemporary City was an unrealised project to house three million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922.

The centerpiece of this plan was the group of enormous sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in huge curtain walls of glass. They housed both offices and the flats of the most wealthy inhabitants. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces.

At the very center was a huge transportation center, that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections and at the top, an airport. (He had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers).

Le Corbusier segregated the pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways, and glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller multi-story zigzag blocks set in green space and set far back from the street housed the proletarian workers.

Critics

Robert Hughes spoke of Le Corbusier's city planning in his series The Shock of the New:

"...the car would abolish the human street, and possibly the human foot. Some people would have airplanes too. The one thing no one would have is a place to bump into each other, walk the dog, strut, one of the hundred random things that people do ... being random was loathed by Le Corbusier ... its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipresent architect."

See also

• Ville Radieuse
• Plan Voisin
• Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (concept)

References

• "Le Corbusier". From here to modernity. Open2.net - BBC/Open University. Retrieved 2006-08-02. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |accessyear=, |month=, |accessmonthday=, and |coauthors= (help)