Ville Contemporaine
The Ville contemporaine (French pronunciation: [vil kɔ̃tɑ̃pɔʁɛn], Contemporary City) was an unrealized utopian planned community intended to house three million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922.
Plan
The centerpiece of this plan was a group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in curtain walls of glass. The skyscrapers housed both offices and the flats of the most wealthy inhabitants[citation needed]. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces.
At the center of the planned city was a transportation hub which housed depots for buses and trains as well as highway intersections and at the top, an airport.
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 aeroplanes 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
- Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (concept)
- Ville Radieuse
References
- "Le Corbusier". From here to modernity. Open2.net - BBC/Open University. Retrieved 2006-08-02.
External links
- Drawings at the Le Corbusier Foundation Archived 2023-05-12 at the Wayback Machine
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- Villa Fallet
- Villa Jeanneret-Perret
- Villa Savoye
- Villa Schwob
- Villa Le Lac
- Planeix House
- Villa Cook
- Maison Guiette/Les Peupliers
- Villa Stein
- Curutchet House
- Maisons Jaoul
- Villa Sarabhai
- Villa Shodhan
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Le_Corbusier_%281964%29.jpg/100px-Le_Corbusier_%281964%29.jpg)
- Tsentrosoyuz building
- Notre-Dame du Haut
- National Museum of Western Art
- Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
- Open Hand Monument
- Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau
- Pavillon Suisse
- Immeuble Clarté
- Immeuble Molitor
- Cabanon de vacances
- Mill Owners' Association Building
- United Nations Secretariat Building
- Sanskar Kendra Museum
- Museum and Art Gallery
- Secretariat Building
- Palace of Assembly
- Baghdad Gymnasium
- Maison du Brésil
- Church of Saint-Pierre, Firminy
- Firminy-Vert Stadium
- Complexe du Capitole
- Couvent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
- Maison de la Culture de Firminy
- Usine Claude et Duval
- Governor's Palace
- Palace of the Soviets
- Plan Voisin
- Ville Contemporaine
- Villa Meyer
- Ville Radieuse
- Chaise Longue LC4
- Grand Confort
- Le Corbusier's Furniture
- Poem of the Right Angle (1947–1953)
- Toward an Architecture (1923)
Commons
Wikinews
Wikiquote