Skyscrapers Assembled
SKYSCRAPERS ASSEMBLED IT IS worth noting that the several American cities which have recently discussed their sizes and states of health refrained from even so much as inquiring whether they ought...
...Our architect deals summarily with diverse structural picturesque-nesses, which he terms "junk...
...If they had room for all of us (or if all our work could be done in them) nobody would be living in the country except Mr...
...Exasperating delay, frightful noise, the acrid smell of discharged gasoline, and almost innumerable fatalities...
...Rome, Venice and all the lovely cities which antedate the nineteenth century were faithful to these rules...
...A factory manager can see to it that work is done with the least possible expenditure of time and energy...
...But the fundamental alternative-to be or not to be-is meeting with a more and more positive reply...
...Indeed they are so dependent upon these terminals that they put up with all manner of evils in order to derive every possible advantage from the railroads...
...A city is created by the fact that crowds of people cannot remain inaccessible and earn their living...
...Le Corbusier makes an interesting application to the subject dealt with in a recent Carnegie report...
...We cannot imagine a "contemporary" Paris, equipped to meet the peculiar conditions of this day and age, for the reason that we know and love a Paris that grew during more than nineteen centuries...
...Similarly we find it difficult to adopt the very sensible housing ideas advanced by Le Corbusier because we and our grandparents have always lived in another kind of house...
...Thousands of children grow up without ever knowing the feel of grass...
...politics has governed for the sake of politics...
...To apply them now, however, necessarily means reckoning with the determining factor in modern industrial life, which is transportation...
...Sport at the very door of one's house is needed, so that everyone-men, women and children-on reaching home can change their things and come down for play and exercise, to fill their lungs and relax...
...The age is, we have so frequently been reminded, one of great inventions and mechanical resources...
...In order that the crowds may move, subsidiary transportation is in order-that antiquated leviathan, the street-car...
...Into these streets crowds are precipitated...
...That it will not do to forget...
...Exhibition sport," he declares, "has nothing to do with real sport...
...Of course there have been attempts at improvement, and energetic crusades for one kind or another of reform...
...The results...
...SKYSCRAPERS ASSEMBLED IT IS worth noting that the several American cities which have recently discussed their sizes and states of health refrained from even so much as inquiring whether they ought to confess their sins and turn country...
...In New York City a thousand lives are snuffed out annually in traffic accidents, and the damage to property runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars...
...A heedless people," Le Corbusier reminds us, "or society, or town, in which effort is relaxed and not concentrated, quickly becomes dissipated, overcome and absorbed by a nation or a society that goes to work in a positive way and controls itself...
...uniformity of detail...
...In order to solve the traffic problem in so far as it affects the home, play, business and nature (for the fume-infected congestion of today slaughters all but a few scraggly trees) Le Corbusier applies the structural right angle, as expressed in reinforced concrete, to so many building and planning problems that it is difficult to imagine oneself in the city universe he wishes to erect...
...To us the celebrated Voisin plan (so called because it was sponsored by the well-known manufacturer of automobiles) looks very like a nightmare...
...But the "condition of discomfort" in which the serried outline of Gotham leaves us is of the greatest importance to civilization...
...automobiles and trucks...
...Too frequently this ghastly commentary on urban inefficiency is accepted as a kind of fate not to be avoided...
...Other thousands are massacred by the terrible engines of their "playgrounds...
...Perhaps nobody else has dwelt with this wonder so persistently as Le Corbusier, the French architect who is sometimes called a fool and sometimes an incomparable genius...
...Overbuilding and overcrowding have, curiously enough, gone hand in hand...
...All towns are, therefore, primarily railroad stations...
...For these we hold no brief other than that they analyze evils which are too frequently slurred over while the eminent necessity for capturing the murderer of Alkali Al absorbs all minds...
...To him it seems evident that the business districts of all modern cities must be reconstructed...
...walks which bring the pedestrian directly in the path of speeding traffic...
...The effect is easily guessed when one bears in mind that today's million will be tomorrow's two million, inured to a disorder which- in all serious literalness-stifles life itself...
...Business has created the city and then forgotten it...
...The sports ground must be at the door of the house...
...The publication of his most important book-The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning- in a good English version by Messrs...
...The centre of the great city is like a funnel," says Le Corbusier, and so we must realize that the street is "but a machine for traffic, an apparatus for its circulation...
...Borsodi and the Kentucky mountaineers...
...His square residence blocks, which look so scientific, could probably not be made to appeal even to those who reside in depressingly uniform American suburbs...
...If we compare New York with Stamboul," says Le Corbusier, "we may say that one is a cataclysm and the other a terrestrial paradise...
...But since the whole plan reposes upon what a character in one of Sean O'Casey's plays terms "a state of chassus," all these remedial endeavors get nowhere...
...When one looks at this "condition of discomfort" a little more closely, it is seen to contain matters of the gravest practical importance...
...Humanity is therefore obliged to wonder rather constantly if the cities are aware of their importance, and if the line of prospective development is sane...
...If the man who has clung to a subway strap every night of the year does not himself go mad, he may well wonder if the world is crazed...
...Study the palliatives which Chicago and New York have introduced and you see tinkering which is well-nigh as effective as a small boy's effort to mend a broken wagon with tears...
...It is also a knout, for countless souls...
...To bring about this Utopia, the city must be built vertically...
...Cities are the really normal forms of modern existence...
...and he sponsors the maxims which the Abbe Augier recommended to Louis XIV when there was question of rebuilding Paris: "Chaos, disorder and a wild variety in the general layout...
...The stations, observes Corbusier, are generally the centres "of a network of extremely narrow streets...
...But if it means taking a bus or the tube, and traveling miles with a heavy bag to carry, sport becomes impossible...
...The stadium provides a spectacle where other people's marvelously developed biceps and calves may be seen...
...It is a confession that we have not mastered the material sufficiently to make it cease being an encumbrance to our souls...
...The chief reason why this is so is because man tends, consciously or otherwise, to make time an important element in his conception of the city...
...Regardless of the value and appeal of the suggestions sponsored in The City of Tomorrow, its basic point of view is of the utmost importance...
...The modern urban community has expended practically no intelligence upon the business of sane living...
...But order in living...
...The city is a knot...
...Once admit this much, however, and it follows that the whole urban plan must be changed...
...Payson and Clarke may therefore be used as an occasion for presenting views of the modern city with which Europe has busied itself during several years...
...Everybody agrees that both the East and the West Sides are messy and probably uninhabitable...
...The normal apartment dweller admits, at least once in a while, that Cowper was right...
...For it makes all the difference in the world whether uniformity be conventional...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 3
