Urban Form and Design - Debating the American City
1. PLAN 4003: Urban Form & Design
Week 4: Debating the American City
Anuradha Mukherji
Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
2. MORDERN PLANNING & LE CORBUSIER
- Critiques traditional physical structure of
cities
- Utopian vision of modern city geared
towards the car
- Not grounded in how people live, interact,
and enjoy cities
- Enamored with products of industrialization
– car, mechanization, standardization
3. CORBUSIER’S ARGUMENT
PACK DONKEY’S WAY
VS
MAN’S WAY
Man: Governed by reason, intelligence,
experience, goals
Pack Donkey: Comfort, convenience, lack of
concentration, meanders, line of least
resistance
5. Camillo Sitte, Study of Medieval Plazas
This image is attributed to Public Domain (PD-US-1923)
6. Piazza Del Campidoglio (Rome, Italy)/Capitoline Hill, Michelangelo, 1537, Italian Renaissance
This image is attributed to Giulio Menna @ 2010 (CC BY-ND 2.0)
7. CAMILLO SITTE’S IDEAS
- Straight lines are unnatural, do not follow
terrain
- Need both art and function to make cities
appealing
- Lack of urban public space in cities
- Isolated block of buildings, and no unifying
factors, boring spaces
8. This image is attributed to United States Geological Survey
Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Complex, St. Louis, Missouri
9. CORBUSIER’S IDEAS
- Modern city functions along straight lines –
sewers, tunnels, highways, traffic circulation
- Divided into grid system, no need for curves
- Stress on functionality, no artistic tradition
- Bare, efficient, functional – main purpose of
carrying traffic, gas, water, electric lines
- No discussion of street as a public space –
crooked streets as pack donkey’s way
10. CORBUSIER’S IDEAS
- High-rise vertical towers with lots of leftover
space in-between
- Standardized super blocks using repetition,
mechanization, and industrialization of
construction
- Dense city center comprising business and
residential towers with garden cities on
periphery
- Technical, civil engineering project
11. BRASILIA, Capital of Brazil
This image is attributed to www.urbanity.es, Accessed February 2013
15. Construction Phase, National Congress, BRASILIA
Built upon 20th century principles of urbanism as expressed by Le Corbusier
Applied to the scale of a capital city, only other example is Chandigarh, India
This image is attributed to www.oesquema.com.br, Accessed February 2013
16. Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to m.feher.pestana @ 2010 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
17. Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed www.urbanity.es, Accessed February 2013
18. Central Monumental Axis, BRASILIA
This image is attributed to www.indirameza.wordpress.com, Accessed February 2013
33. CORBUSIAN CITY
- Theoretical top-down design, gigantic at
eye level, not to human-scale
- No sensitivity to local contexts
- Forgot how people lived for centuries –
need a car in a Corbusian city
- Centralized and controlled by designer, no
input from people
34. NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT
This image is attributed to New York Regional Survey @ 1929
- Growing congestion
and traffic
- New plans for regional
expansion
- Idea of a self contained
neighborhood unit
- Centered on school and
community center
- Bound by arterial roads
- No vehicular traffic
through neighborhood
- Unit – school, residential,
shops, parks
- Codified by FHA into
sub-division standards
