The Ville contemporaine (, ''Contemporary City'') was an unrealized
utopia
A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia (book), Utopia'', describing a fictional ...
n
planned community
A planned community, planned city, planned town, or planned settlement is any community that was carefully planned from its inception and is typically constructed on previously undeveloped land. This contrasts with settlements that evolve ...
intended to house three million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
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. 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 Shock of the New'' is an eight-part documentary television series about the development of modern art written and presented in 1980 by Robert Hughes for the BBC, in association with Time-Life Films. It was produced by Lorna Pegram, who als ...
'':
"...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
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Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (concept)
The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, or E.P.C.O.T., is an unfinished concept for a planned community, intended to sit on a massive swath of undeveloped land near Orlando, Florida, that was developed by Walt Disney in co ...
*
Ville Radieuse
Ville radieuse (, ''Radiant City'') was an unrealised urban design project designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1930. It constitutes one of the most influential and controversial urban design doctrines of European modernism.
Al ...
References
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External links
Drawings at the Le Corbusier Foundation
{{Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Unbuilt buildings and structures
Proposed skyscrapers
Architecture related to utopias