Page 65 - Studio International - January 1968

the end almost a formula, though always relieved with the economic bases he required being pro- actually a heap of rubble. Consider the proposals
by a plastic idea. vided by the state or by government-backed for Whitehall, the destruction of the Foreign
In practice we have found city-building complex corporations or local authorities. He anticipated Office, or of St Pancras. After Euston it is un-
and that the problem, if reduced to its components, part of the growing state control of all aspects of thinkable. . . . But these are little local difficulties.
somehow loses its reality. For the city is not a our lives. The advent of a really mass society Le Corbusier had a grander vision; because he had
simple aggregation; it is a series of relationships requires endless state control over incomes, work, a justifiable belief in his own talent and invention.
constantly changing in time. And the rate of change investment and so on, which is compounded by an He predicted an architecture which required to be
is increasing. increasingly complex and expensive technology. invented with each building. Prototypes are seldom
An example is the rate and scale of investment in As the great projects accumulate we must learn to successful in the hands of the average architect,
cities where once a house or a shop was replaced; provide a social as well as an economic control. In who could, if it was not a question of pride, pro-
today whole areas are 'redeveloped'. In the process short we must learn how to manipulate value, and bably do quite well with a set of simple pattern
we have found a great many social disadvantages: so retain the complexity of social structure that books. Perhaps industrialized building (another
the disappearance of small traders, the loss of many gives life and meaning to cities. Le Corbusier prediction) will provide these.
valuable, but no longer economic, fringe activities. Third lesson : massive redevelopments have In short, Le Corbusier put up the intellectual
Above all, a simple ironing out of value, and there- taught us to value our existing environment. A scaffold that has propped up two generations of
fore, because of the lack of rent differentials, an great deal of it is beautiful and valuable. We need copyists and compromisers. Forty years after, most
inhibition of possibilities of growth and change. only to discover it. At present architectural talent of his revolutionary talk is now the orthodoxy of
Le Corbusier's proposals for massive redevelop- is spread too thin to comfortably consider a the planning establishment. Though it seems an
ment are now in process of becoming actualities, massive intervention in any environment that isn't inevitable end, that's no safe place for a lyric poet.

Above, 'The Radiant City', 1922.

Left, The Hall, the Business City's Forum. 'And a
view of the roads before the harbour, view of the
Saël; a dazzling promenade. I appeal to the calm
judgement of the people of Algiers.'