Hacker News Reader

Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

The big problem with Le Corb is not that his stuff is ugly. It’s that his designs are inhuman. No one with any choice wants to live or work in that kind of development. It’s striking! Bold! Architects love the look! But form should follow function and Le Corb’s idea of function is “a machine for living” and there’s not too much room in that vision for things extraneous to living like “dreaming” or “enjoying life,” so you get all their space in between that’s hostile to you hanging out there, barren plazas which don’t function as a park and are strictly segregated from any meaningful street retail…

It’s like a NYC housing project. Just put the people into a machine for living and call it a day.

View on HN

This. And the funny thing is Le Corbusier and other modernists intended to design for humans:

- They add large parks between the buildings

- You get the huge highrises and long boulevards because of separation of function, because they want to put the living quarters far away from the smelly factories

- They use a lot of concrete and prefab components to keep everything affordable

- They design community areas into the buildings

and so on. But it fails spectacularly. The resulting cities are completely inhumane. There is no space for natural development, for "lucky accidents", no mixed zoning, no entertainment and shopping close by to living quarters, the kind of stuff people now want from an urban lifestyle. And you can't really walk anywhere.

One thing I really hate in these kind of cities is that you can't just go anywhere straight, you are 'channeled around'. Whether you are on foot or in a car, you have to shut off your brain and follow the signs. You can't follow your 'desire path', and even if you would, you will walk for a long time through 'non-places' where there is nothing.

I was trying to walk a couple of blocks in one of these cities in the hot summer, and it was brutal (there are places like this in the US, France, China, ...). Nothing is human scale, and that is why it feels dehumanizing.

Quite so. And in reality those large parks would have (and did!) turn into fields of asphalt and concrete, as automobile infrastructure expanded to fill all available space (Le Corbusier and his contemporaries didn't quite get how drastic the consequences of automobilization together with separation of functions would be…)

I think this is an under appreciated point. Something I find striking in watching historical footage of urban areas is just how empty the roads were. Just the other day I was watching some restored footage of Paris in the 1920s, and they drove the camera car through famous areas that today would be a near parking lot most of the day, but back then were wide open.

If you look at car centric infrastructure through this lens, it's easier to understand how it all went so wrong. The American dream as designed in say the 1950s was quite pleasant if you could afford it. A nice modern house on clean brand new wide open roads. Sure you have to drive everywhere vs walk to the neighborhood main street for errands but gas is cheap and those roads make it all so fast and convenient.

Of course the problem is non of this scaled, but that didn't stop us from trying, and ending up with the worst of both in many ways.

Le Corbusier just didn't have this figured out. But Christopher Alexander did. See "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building".

This "Not Just Bikes" video[1] recently on YouTube makes a similar case for generic concrete business parks in the USA and Canada compared to one in the Netherlands. That nobody with any choice wants to live or work there, that they are full of hostile in-between space and strictly segregated from housing and shopping by 6-lane roads, and inhuman feeling. Designed with car access as the priority and bus access as an afterthought and without pedestrian or cycle access at all, as if the only reasons to be 'outside' at all are driving or parking.

The Netherlands one in the video has dedicated roads for busses which get priority over cars at traffic lights, dedicated paths for bikes and pedestrians which get priority over busses and cars at traffic lights and are separate from the roads so people aren't walking right by vehicles, and a train station. It has narrow car lanes with both directions separated with an easier pedestrian crossing experience, floodwater management integrated as a nice looking canal feature rather than as a storm drain by a road; pretty building design and path design to make a more pleasant environment to walk in, and buildings having large and accessible entrances for pedestrians without forcing them to cross bits of mud or large expanses of car park.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Agreed, but as a counterpoint, read this story on a very interesting housing project in Montreal (1967).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940074

Yes. There's a colossal failure of modernist architecture to think about the "user experience". People don't like being mechanized.

There are hidden function. The good ratio of height / width produces a familiar feel. Some tiny "non useful" spaces are actually useful for people to project their lives onto, sit there, stand, talk.

Well, thing is, despite he utter ugliness of his designs in mass, one of his high-rises, a tad smaller, could be a nice piece of architecture. One, not a whole city of those...

It seems he would really enjoy working in the 21st century.

Designing striking CGI buildings for movies without the "downside" of humans actually having to live there :)

But what's wrong with living in a tiny space stacked together with everyone else like tinned sardines on the shelf?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com