Le Corbusier-The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning

Urban restructuring need to proceed according to \"the most rational inquiry [and] . . . a spirit of construction and synthesis guided by a clear conception\" (39).

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By and large, this means that very good city centers, which grew up haphazardly from the medieval period around irregular \"donkey\" paths instead of from a clear notion of what a city ought to be, must be cut down, redesigned, and reconstructed so how the machine that may be the modern day city will probably be in a position to work the will of men instead of overwhelm men unable to cope with it. The current age has the means and skills available, Le Corbusier claims, not least because a city \"is profoundly rooted inside the realms of calculations,\" that are the province of engineers (53); it remains for city planners to produce the greatest and greatest use in the principles of geometry and engineering if the current city is to be livable. As he continues elsewhere:

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A type of town planning which preoccupied itself with our happiness or our misery and which attempted to generate happiness and expel misery would be a noble support in this age of confusion. This kind of a preoccupation, producing its correct science, would imply an essential evolution in the social system. It would denounce over a one hand the harsh and futile individualistic rush for egotistical gratification, by which our good cities were created. It would show, on a other hand, that at the important moment an automatic recovery had taken place; that feelings of solidarity, pity as well as the desire for beneficial had inspired a strong will for the a clear, constructive and creative end. (59)

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Throughout The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, Le Corbusier makes use of diagrams and photographs that illustrate how meandering thoroughfares, mixture of irregular architectural styles, and overdeveloped city centers throughout the world have resulted in extremely congested living conditions that retard the speed and efficiency with which one can conduct business and travel from location to place. He compares the \"anguished tumult\" of the medieval type of Sienna as well as the \"serrated outline\" of Pera, a medieval center of pirates and vagabonds, to the \"implacable order\" of Roman architecture as well as the integrated classical shapes of Stamboul (61). The former pair of cities Le Corbusier classifies as \"barbarous\" because they exemplify no conceptual intelligence controlling growth though they hinder the people\'s pleasant experience of the city. But inside the geometrical plans on the latter pair, he finds the sort of order that is consistent with rational human experience: \"Whenever the line is broken, jolted, irregular and constructed without rhythm . . . our senses are painfully and grievously affected . . . But when the line is continuous and regular . . . and governed by a clear guiding rule, then the senses are solaced\" (60).

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All of this elements to a modernist conception of structures, and Le Corbusier is in favor of geometrically produced skyscrapers. But in insisting on a human scale, Le Corbusier also defines how skyscrapers and indeed all structures must appear inside the urban context. This really is in which his theory of urban architecture, notably in his master design to your city of 3 million, comes into play. As he explains inside a caption for the ground plan of his modern-day city, \"Strictly speaking the city is an immense park\" (175).

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