Aviation and Aerial View

Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations
in the 1930s and 1940s

Boyer, M. Christine.
diacritics, Volume 33, Number 3/4, Fall-Winter 2003, pp. 93-116 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/dia.2006.0004
AVIATION AND THE
AERIAL VIEW
LE CORBUSIERS SPATIAL
TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE
1930S AND 1940S
M. CHRISTINE BOYER
Part One: The Aerial View
Aviation and Equipment. A London publishing house, The Studio, Ltd, sent Le Cor-
busier a letter in January 1935, inquiring whether he would be interested in collaborat-
ing on a new series of books to be titled The New Vision. The promoters explained that
each book in the series would be devoted to a unique event in industrial design, with
specic attention paid to the designers, their aims, and the potential these designs held
for social and human development. They would begin the series with a volume on the
airplane. Le Corbusier was asked to write an introductory essay, supply captions for
the images they had already collected, and offer a few suggestions for additional il-
lustrations.1
Accepting the invitation, Le Corbusier in his reply, however, transformed the proj-
ect: instead of the word airplane he preferred aviation, by which he meant all the
prodigious phenomena opening vast new horizons in space and inuencing the future
of equipment in the broadest sense of the word.2 Already in Precisions (1930) he
had written, I replace the word urbanism by the term equipment. I have already
replaced the term furniture by that of equipment. Such stubbornness shows well that
we are purely and simply claiming tools for work, for we do not want to die of hunger
facing the embroidered owerbeds of aesthetic urbanism [143]. To his bag of equip-
ment, Le Corbusier now adds aviation, a tool of modern communication forging new
modes of exchange and new links between nations.3
The material subsequently sent by the publishing house to Le Corbusier also met
with lukewarm reception: he favored more lively documentation such as the view from
an airplane as it ew over citiesvast open terrain, the sea, and the forests. And he
wanted more picturesque treatment of the lives of aviators, their psychological and so-
cial attitudes including analysis of the great aerial routes being drawn between Europe
and America, Africa, or Asia. The publishing house was unable to fulll Le Corbusiers
1. Fondation Le Corbusier (FLC) B3-14-1, B3-14-4.

2. FLC, B3-14-3. On 22 January 1935 Le Corbursier answers: Par aroplane, je veux bien
comprendre plutt aviation, cest--dire tout le phnomne si prodigieux qui ouvre des horizons
entirement neufs et qui comporte dj des quipements de la plus haute signication [B3-14-
3].
3. Note that in 1928 Le Corbusier had participated in the design of a table called table
tube davion, and that the word quipage in French means the crew.
diacritics / fallwinter 2003 diacritics 33.34: 93116 93
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expectations, reminding him that their focus was limited to the airplane and that they
expected to receive all his material by May.4
What did Le Corbusier mean by aviation and the epic of the air, a phrase he
used in the preface of the subsequent book Aircraft (1935)? What new horizons did
aviation open and how did this affect the perception of space and the process of read-
ing the terrain as a two-dimensional map or a plan? And what did aviation have to
do with equipment? Just the year before Le Corbusier had seen the Exposition de
lAronautique in Milan for which Mussolini offered the maxim: Aviation is grand,
small, or nothing at all, depending on whether public awareness of aviation is grand,
small, or nothing at all.5 Le Corbusier, ever the great publicist, accepted the challenge
to spread the meaning of aviation in the inclusive sense of the word entailing adven-
ture and service, organization, and machinery.
The rapid growth of aviation during the interwar period was mercurial, dramati-
cally reshaping perception of the world and of space. There were daring ights of
aviators challenging the breath of oceans and deserts, the heights of Everest, the length
of Africa, the uncharted terrain of the North and South Poles. The airplane not only
internationalized cartography; it was a tool for exploring and controlling the colonies.
While aerial photography, which recorded in precise detail the realistic shape of land-
masses, coastlines, seas, deserts, and mountains, perfected the process of mapmaking
and enriched the documentary archive of the planet.
Yet even more stunning, aviation continually shrunk the size of the globe after the
initial KLM ight between Amsterdam and Jakarta took off in 1924. Then the time
needed to navigate the 9000 miles was 55 days; within ve years it had been reduced
to a mere 12 days. A world map criss-crossed with national air routes came into view.
In the 1930s civil airlines began to offer passenger and mail service between London
and the Middle East, then on to India and Australia; or between Toulouse and Dakar,
and even shorter ights between Paris and Brussels.6 Although the air was technically
indivisible, still each nationality was intent on assuring that their aerial routes served
their own national interests. To y across Europe it was necessary to change apparatus
several times and zigzag through trunk routes to arrive at a destination. There was no
direct aerial route between England and Egypt, for example, because various European
nations prohibited English ights over their territory. Hence English passengers bound
for the Middle East had to take a train to Geneva and then a hydrofoil to Alexandria.
By 1937 six different intercontinental routes crossed the Mediterranean. Germany, Bel-
gium, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Holland all drew their own national lines across
the seaa mirror reection of the anarchic state of international relations during the
1930s. Added to this global network was an almost invisible event: two thirds of all air
routes until the late 1930s were modest routes in certain parts of the globe, developed
in response to local needs for commercial exchange and serving remote areas such as
Siberia, Canada, Central Africa, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina [see Crochet-
Damais and Martonne].
Aviation destroyed an old order while simultaneously giving birth to temps nou-
veaux. Perhaps this is why Le Corbusier repeats a hypothetical story in Aircraft and The
Four Routes about an aerial locomotion show organized in Juvisy by the Lathams
and Voisins about 1910 [Aircraft 7; Routes 97]. Le Corbusier left Paris at noon travel-
4. FLC, B3-14-21, B3-14-23.

5. FLC, C3-12-6-23. Letter from Le Corbusier to Vogel director of VU. See also Le Cor-
busier, Aircraft 8.
6. Telecommunications were also on the rise: the BBCs Empire Services crackled over
shortwave receivers for the rst time in 1932, and motorized vehicles began to make their way
along modern road networks wherever they spread.
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boyer.indd 94 2/13/06 9:12:56 AM

ing by train the fteen kilometers to Juvisy. But so did 300,000 other enthusiasts. The
railroad company was not prepared for such a crush, and so Le Corbusier arrived in the
pitch dark long after the air show had nished. But he remembered that they amused
themselves on the delayed journey by pelting returning trains with stones and smashing
everything in sightthe furniture, the signal boxes, and even the station. Le Corbusier
wondered [w]as it a symbolic assault by the neophytes of the air against that black
tyranny of the railroad? Or was it a demonstration by the forces of optimism who felt
that in our country laziness was systematically blocking the way? Or was it anarchy?
He concluded that [s]ignicant portents must have been in the air to have upset to such
a point of frenzy a quiet, springtime Sunday afternoon [Routes 9899].
If Le Corbusiers Esprit Nouveau articles on Eyes That Do Not See were in-
tended to increase awareness in the 1920s about the prodigious new world that modern
technology and science had created, as evidenced in the marvels of the steamship, the
automobile, and the airplane, in the 1930s it was the birds-eye view from the air-
plane that he wanted to explore and the third dimension it added to architecture. The
aerial view touched Le Corbusier profoundly, for he was a man who lived to see. The
view from the airplane was decidedly visual: it enabled Le Corbusier to develop a new
awareness of the way the entire landscape in its natural setting was congured, of the
negative effect man had on the land, and of the dependency of the earth on its fragile
biosphere. This reading engendered a new mode of thought about natural laws visual-
izing these as organic chains of events. The sun became a dictator and the meander of
rivers a law. Flying through the air, immersed in clouds, buffeted about by the wind and
noise, was an ecstatic experience for Le Corbusier. He called the exploration of space
truly cosmic. Both the visual spectacle as well as the heroics and camaraderie of the
daring pilots leading the crusade lled him with poetic passion.7 At the same moment,
however, the new eagle eye of the airplane gave evidence of the spectacle of collapse
for the airplane indicts telling the truth about unruly expanses of urban space and
placing the blame on the authorities responsible for controlling the land [Aircraft 5,
11].
Le Corbusier rst gained insight into this synoptic aerial view when he ew to
Moscow in 1928, a view reinforced by ights over South America the following year
and over the desert of North Africa in 1933. The living tableau of the lay of the land
seen from on high completely transformed his visual imagery, concepts of geography,
and procedures of mapmaking. He witnessed not only the vast open terrain of space
but the mosaic pattern of land ownership and the curvature of the earths horizon as
well. The multidirectional ow of rivers, the freedom of the airplanes mobility through
space, and the great speeds of travel transgured his thought. Sitting in an airplane with
sketchbook in hand, he forged a hybrid system of analysis varying his angles of obser-
vation: the vast expanse of the landscape was read as a new planned text, its contours
and masses reduced to so many lines traced out on a grid, while ows and meanders
7. Le Corbusier proclaimed that architectural creation concerns both utility and passion.
The creation of an object as an extension of our body answers utilitarian needs. It can be called
living if it moves, hence we approach biology. Such an object involves mechanical functions:
the airplane, the submarine, the dirigible. Our joys are shared among these living beings, which
we can caress with the hand and the eye (the airplane, the race car, the boat) and spiritual crys-
tallizations, which are products of our intellect and our thought. We are proud of and feel affec-
tion for these objects touched by both utility and passion. . . . That is when the word architecture
can be applied, when the spectator reads clearly the intentions and is moved. Even though the
word architecture also involves bidets, central heating and the machine for living in, it must
always understand that its focus is man who has both a head and a heart, and who lives in order
to act [Une Maison-Un Palais 45].
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coursed through the space. Lyrical intuition now joined his bent for Cartesian rational-
ity.
Le Corbusier, while sketching Rio de Janeiro during a ight in 1929, confessed
that the conception of a vast programme of organic town-planning came like a revela-
tion [Aircraft caption 114, n.p.]. This double vision of reason and poetry, analysis and
revelation, for the next two decades not only modeled his urban images but sustained
their geopolitical afterimage as well. The adventure of aviation had a decided impact
on the future of global relationships as it seemed to destroy old concepts of spheres
of inuence and the balance of powers and to conjure up instead a new world order
and transnational organizations for peace. Le Corbusier was well aware of Antoine de
Saint-Exupry, the writer of aviation novels, who proclaimed: The aeroplane is not
an end in itself: it is a tool, like a plough [in Ory 13]. Delighting in the metaphor, this
tool would enable Le Corbusier to conceive of great geomorphic structures stretching
across space, rendering obsolete existing parcels of land, forms of the city, and regional
and national boundaries. In the temps nouveaux, those of the second industrial revolu-
tion, the concentric city of the rst industrial age was rejected and new geopolitical
alignments drawing the north and the south together imagined instead.
During the 1930s Le Corbusier plunged into the study and design of over 20 differ-
ent city plans in which architecture and urbanism forged a new unity. He spoke of this
in Precisions (1930):
Moscow with its steppes, at the pampa and in Buenos Aires, in the rain forest,
and in Rio, have deeply rooted me in the soil of architecture. Architecture acts
by intellectual construction. It is the mobility of the mind that leads to the far
horizons of great solutions. When the solutions are great and when nature
comes to join them happily, or better still, when nature integrates itself in
them, it is then that one approaches unity. And I believe that unity is that stage
to which the unceasing and penetrating work of mind leads. [245]
Le Corbusier is being deliberately paradoxical. The soil of architecture envisions

both natural transformations of the land, such as the advance of forests or the drying
up of riverbeds, and such human interventions as the construction of huge dams and
tunnels, the clearance of land, and urbanization spreading beyond control. It draws
together both natural forces and man-made constructions. It is as if Le Corbusier were
standing on a balcony gazing on the marvels of sunsets, cloud formations, mountain
ranges, forests, and valleys deeply attentive to the message nature directed to his soul,
to the ideas that turned in his mind. But simultaneously it is as if he were studying a
map or aerial view on a atbed where nature lay exposed to be exploited for the benet
of mankind. To draw up a plan is to make an abstraction, a projection onto the land that
implies action and transformation. Thus a plan becomes a working drawing: rst used
as a tool of description and then to manage the surface development. Consequently the
representational map or plan and the living tableau embody two different aspects of
nature. To contemplate a landscape is to establish a cosmic bond with nature or draw
from it a metaphysical meaning. Such enthrallment is the antithesis of the cartographic
view [see Corboz]. Yet Le Corbusier intentionally deposits both of these notions in the
soil of architecture.
Heroics and myth-making. Le Corbusier was spiritually aroused by the feats of the
aviator who was sent out to challenge unchartered realms, to y above the icecaps of
the Poles and across oceans and deserts, and over the highest of mountain ranges. Dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s, the aviator was laden with dreams of grandeur soaring beyond
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mundane reality into the heavens beyond. Yet returning to earth, he was expected to be
an exemplar and leader of men. Aviation provided new standards for worldly reform
and spiritual regeneration: it enriched the world by the challenges it posed, the auda-
cious bravery it required, and the elite leadership it demanded [see Fritzsche]. Heroes
were teamed together, exemplars of the virtues of service and perseverance, overcom-
ing dangers and risking death: Nungesser-and-Coli or Costes-and-Bellonte were daily
reminders that the aviators feats relied on a crew and a network of support from the
ground, be it hangars, fuel stops, weather stations, or radio signals and ags.8
Equipment stood for all of these new organizational methods that aviation en-
gendered, including the precisioning of time and the collapsing of space. Le Corbusier
told a story in The Radiant City (1935) about a visit to the Amsterdam airport where
he met the head of the East Indies airline. Only those who have had the experience of
ying high over vast stretches of territory and mountain chains could understand the
emotions Le Corbusier felt while gazing on the vast mural map of Europe, Africa, and
Asia marked with red and blue lines representing eight different legs own by this line.
He shook with excitement as he realized that airplanes were at that very moment y-
ing along those lines but at different times of the day. There were amazing gures to
contemplate as well: the weekly mail to the East Indies amounted to 1200 kilograms
or one-fth of what went by sea. Imagine that when the airline carries two-fths of the
load it will have paid for itself! Soon the problem of night ying would be solved, the
head of the airline proclaimed, then days of ight time will be cut from each journey.
Already the relays of this journey, really a spiritual Odyssey, have established the links
in a global chain that stretched from Greece to Egypt, Arabia, India, and Indochina.
In twenty short years what breathtaking solutions have been accomplished since the
rst ights of Voisin, Santos-Dumont, Wright, or Latham. To arrive at such collective
action, personal participation must be felt every step of the way, and the materiality of
labor enlightened by a spirit of cooperationall of this informed Le Corbusiers ex-
tended meaning of equipment and underlined his political alignments [Radiant City
179; see also Routes 102].
During the 1930s, the aviator became increasingly free of his former reliance on
the ground. His instruments and equipment enabled him to y without having to rec-
ognize landmarks or the slope of the terrain in order to stay on course. Now he could
y through the day and the night, through sun or fog, keeping to a rigorous schedule
and arriving on time. So Le Corbusier exclaimed: The airplane no longer pays atten-
tion to the millennial fact of the route on the lands; it passes above, across, no longer
concerned with gradients determined by slopes or distances. At assigned ends . . . the
steamship of the air with its merchandise and people land [Trois tablissements 130].
To misunderstand this new globalism was to misunderstand the marvels of aviation.
The Americas, Europe, Eurasia, and Eurafrica were no longer continents but direct tra-
jectories of communication owing between dots on the map. Life could now develop
in rare points on the globe, while other dots would be disqualied, even extinguished,
because they did not lie on an aerial route. Already in 1945 the Congress of French
Aviation had begun a planning initiative based on this modern concept to guide urban-
ists in their new task of postwar reconstruction. Le Corbusier offered the congress his
schemes outlined in Urbanisme des trois tablissements (Urbanism of the Three Estab-
lishments) (1945), for certainly the impact of the airplaneor so he believedwould
bring life or death to the radiocentric city. Some cities would be qualied while others
were disqualied, and in their place new linear industrial cities and radiant farms would
develop instead [13841].
8. The rst successful aviation novel in France was Joseph Kessels 1920s book quipage
(The Crew). It was quickly adapted for the cinema three times within ten years [Ory 5].
boyer.indd 97 2/13/06 9:12:57 AM

The airplane made every place accessible, nothing of naturenot mountains,
oceans, icecaps, nor desertsstood in its way [Fritzsche 17275, 185]. Its birds-eye
aerial view surveyed every nook and cranny throwing a net of surveillance over the
world. The aerial view appeared to make national boundaries obsolete: it was easier
to understand the natural formation of regions, the unity of river valleys, the expanse
of farmlands, and the location of mineral deposits. Did the aviators humility in front
of natures forces, and the awareness of the cultural diversity of the world, hold out
the ideal of a new peaceful community of nations as Saint-Exupry and Le Corbusier
hoped? Aviation with its stress on technical mastery, elite leadership, organizational
discipline, and a new world order created an array of geopolitical consequences both
utopian and reactionary. It seemed to prove that nature (and thus capital, as reied na-
ture) could be overcome, that a revolution of perception and visual interpretation was
at hand, that a new world order was imminent. Aviation was truly transformative!
A Geopolitical View: Or the Science of the State as a Realm in Space. It is impos-

sible to read Le Corbusiers enthusiastic account about the epic of aviation and the
revolution of equipment without considering his politics during the 1930s and 1940s.
From 1931 to 1936 he contributed to and joined the editorial board of two neosyndical-
ist periodicals, Plans (193132) and Prlude (193335), and some of his articles ap-
peared as well in Lhomme rel, an extension of Prlude [see McLeod]. Standing under
the motto ni droite ni gauche (neither right not left), the editors of these reviews were
against the abstract man of democracy and the materialist man of communism. They
opted instead for lhomme rel based on mans interest and his natural relationships
with the machine and with work [see Golan and Lagardelle]. Utilizing the terms order
and revolution, they sought a third way which they believed only the young would
discover and open up. They sought a route toward the second industrial era bringing
peace and harmony in its wakepeace that was necessary for reconstruction.
During the years of the depression, when building projects were few, Le Corbusier
turned his attention toward urban planning, echoing many refrains the neosyndicalists
detailed in their reviews. He asked in the concluding chapter of The Radiant City what
authority would recognize that the country needed total planning?
Waste, that snickering and drunken tyrant, at present claims all our labor, all
our sweat. Waste is strangling us, bewitching us, bogging us down, sucking us
dry of all our substance. . . . Authority, it is up to you to see the truth of things,
to contradict this folly, to stop this insane race into chaos once and for all.
The Plan will kill waste. . . . But at the moment we have the drama of
ghting for subsistence added to our usual ration of emotional drama, and
that is why there are revolutions rumbling underground or exploding all over
the place.
The Plan is revolutionary. We must accept the Plan and make it a real-
ity: city, village, farm. [342]
All of these words appear innocent enough until they are relocated within the neosyn-
dicalist paradigm and its apolitical stance. Neosyndicalism, a loosely dened doctrine
without a coherent ideology, was nevertheless anticapitalist, antistatist, and antidemo-
cratic. In the midst of world depression, not capitalism, nor fascism, nor communism
offered answers. The rst editorial of Plans in January 1931 declared that during these
pressing times, man had been left without a clear set of directives, a precise set of aims,
or a plan. It was the reviews intent to aid in the creation of a new order and to offer man
a general direction.9 Believing that the individual joined collective society through so-
9. La ligne gnrale, Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 7-9.
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cial groups found naturally in regional or professional units, the editors placed rural and
industrial syndicates at the base of their societal reorganization. Industrial syndicates
would regulate output with the best interests of the nation held rmly in mind so that
overproduction and underconsumption, strikes and economic anarchy were avoided.
At the same time, rural syndicates would reach downward to preserve family values,
vernacular traditions, and organic rootedness in the soil in order to stabilize agricultural
production. Arranged in hierarchical groups, and led by elite technocrats from the top,
these collective institutions would replace the anarchy of individual pursuits, class war-
fare, and war between nations. Le Corbusier declares that the regional plan considers
the geographical situation, climatic conditions, ethnographic makeup, the nature of the
soil and subsoil. It assures that production will harmonize with the needs of the region,
adjacent regions, and federations of regions at both the national and international level
[Des canons 118].
The state, the neosyndicalists argued, was the natural inverse of individualism; it
was strong only because the individual was weak; he might participate in democracy,
but the state never reciprocated by listening to his interests or needs or the things that
concerned his region or profession. Democracy and capitalism merely exploited his
weaknesses to their advantage. If individuals were organized into natural groups, how-
ever, then they would achieve a new freedom and a new culture more suitable to the
second machine age. In a revolutionized society, lhomme rel would be offered ratio-
nal tools to enhance his functioning: housing, health, sports, reform of values, money,
and property. To engender this new order, the neosyndicalists revolution needed
plans, led by a particular category of decision makers. And the authorities had to un-
derstand that a plan was total machinery [see Lamour and Lagardelle, De lhomme
abstrait]. Le Corbusier expounded on the transformations about to be achieved in the
rst issue of Plans:
The world is not coming to an endbut coming back to life. . . . A great

adventure is beginning; great changes of fortune are imminent; the surge of
change will be both wide and deep. We are about to see new things. . . . There
is a new perspective in the world . . . our minds, already learning to cope with
the new dimensions ahead, have already freed themselves, have already torn
themselves away from the table cluttered with the remains of a centuries-old
meal: those rotting cities, those innitely subdivided elds, that incoherent
distribution of population, that morality now becoming as fragile as a bubble.
Our minds are insisting on a clean tablecloth. [Invite lAction 00]
The neosyndicalists placed their faith in a planned economy, a revitalized culture,

and a new European federation. The basis for this new world order was the abolishment
of capital, since money was the true evil leading to rivalry, exploitation, and war. To
overcome the three crises of industry, agriculture, and condence [spirit], three crises
which affected the le monde blanc (the white world) in the 1930s and produced an
inhuman civilization where man was no longer the master of his destiny, his machines,
or his work. Plans proposed the rational reorganization of collective civilization by as-
sembling ve major unions out of the nations of Europe: the Baltic and Scandinavian
states, the Mediterranean states, the West European states, the Danube states, and Ger-
many.10 Eventually the orienting axes of latitude, for so long a dominant paradigm for
the Western world, was replaced with a longitudinal axes along natural north-south
alignments. France now formed a Latin federation with other nations associated with
10. La ligne gnrale, Plans 4 (Apr. 1931): 5-6; La ligne gnrale, Plans 6 (June
1931): 58; Premire tape, Plans 7 (July 1931): 48.
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the Mediterranean basin: Spain, Italy, and those of North Africa. In addition there was
a Central European Federation, an Oriental Federation (the USSR), and the British
Empire. This network of federations, it was hoped, would produce economic stability
and peace.
There are no unmediated maps: whether it is the regional redistribution of France
or north-south realignments, these geographical illusions constitute the production of
space. The neosyndicalists projected their ideas of a new world order onto the maps of
France, Europe, and the colonial empire, forcing incompatibles together and overriding
established boundaries. It was not an innocent remark to write of the white world of
the west, of regionalism, ethnography, and race, of north-south axeseach statement
drew boundaries and distinctions at the very moment when aviation eradicated these
markers of space. The neosyndicalists converted the chaos of the economic depression
and the political chaos of the 1930s into a pictorial atlas of space according to the same
schema as that achieved in an aerial view. It is not farfetched to draw parallels with the
discipline, organizational management, and perceptual revolution engendered by the
word aviation and the general line that the neosyndicalists sought. As Le Corbusier
wrote in 1937,
The world is coming back to life! This is the slogan before the eyes of the
visitor to the Pavilion as he exits from the demonstration of urbanism of the
temps nouveaux. It is necessary to know how to extend contingent miseries, to
be transported above local events, in order to acquire this special viewthis
birds-eye viewfrom on high, which grasps the DIRECTION of masses in
movement. [Des canons 137]
The Airplane Indicts. Every technological invention opens up new routes of discov-
erysuch was the case of the airplane and the aerial view in the twentieth century.
The polar opposite to the microscope, which visually explored the realm of the in-
nitely small, the aerial view revealed space so vast that its comprehension could not
be absorbed in a single glance. It revealed the constant struggle man had made against
nature until he had nally subdued the space of the world and turned it into a gigantic
geometric representation. From the air a new geometry rearranged the image into new
representational forms: boundary lines of elds slashed zigzags across the terrain, lin-
ear traces of canals, roads, and railways left their sharp clear marks; elevated plateaus
and depression stood out in relief, windswept deserts and ice elds appeared as serrated
expanses while mountains turned into heavily creased folds.
Take an airplane. [Le Corbusier commanded in Radiant City.] Fly over our
19th century cities, over those immense sites encrusted with row after row of
houses without hearts, furrowed with their canyons of soulless streets. Look
down and judge for yourself. I say that these things are the signs of a tragic
denaturing of human labor. They are the proof that men, subjugated by the
titanic growth of the machine, have succumbed to the machinations of a world
powered by money. The architects of the past hundred years did not build for
men: they built for money. [341]
Flying across the wild stretches of South America, on his way back to Buenos
Aires in 1929, Le Corbusier observed the settlers farms, then hamlets, villages, small
towns, and nally the capital city [Radiant City 81]. His reactions were guided by a
visual framework he saw from the sky: all South American towns since the conquest
had developed according to a living unit, the cuadra (square) with sides 110 meters in
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length. It was a simple geometrical unit determined by the length of a mans stride and
the distance he was able to see and thus was suitable for the control and exploitation of
the land itself. But the aerial view revealed an appalling disease on the land, the wasting
of an organism drained of its vital energy by a lack of vigilance. At the end of the jour-
ney appeared the immense scab of Buenos Aires: a skin disease spreading beyond all
proportion. Where nature would have provided the requisite structure of viscera, lungs,
bones, and limbs, human heedlessness had allowed an organic form of life to exceed
the dimensions of its cellular structure. Now the city was nothing more than a mass of
protoplasm [Radiant City 81].
In Aircraft (1935), a book that he repeats word for word in sections of The Four
Routes (1941), Le Corbusier continued the same theme: the plane accuses! We can no
longer escape its truth and ignore the horror of a citys physical dirt or the failure of
moral integrity in those responsible for such disorder.
The plane has enlightened us. The plane has seen. The plane had indicted.
We now have a record, aero-photographic plates, which proves that at all
costs we must save our cities. [Routes 81]
With the eye of an eagle, the plane examines cities: London, Paris, Berlin,
New York, Algiers, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo. Sinister balance sheets! [Routes
81]
The plane exposes the raw fact: cities have been built solely to make money at man-
kinds expense.
And the plane observes, works quickly, sees quickly, never tires. In addition,
the plane plunges deep into realism. Its implacable eye penetrates the misery
of cities and brings back the photographic record for those who lack the cour-
age to go and see for themselvesfrom the air.
Such are the great cities of the nineteenth century, unnished, cruel,
greedy.
The plane inaugurates in a superlative degree a new stage of conscious-
ness, a modern conscience. The cities must be rescued from disaster; their
rotten sections must be destroyed; new cities must be built. [Routes 81]
The aerial photograph tells the spectator exactly and with realistic detail what was the
state of urban existence. From on high, Le Corbusier continued in Des canons, des mu-
nitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. (1937), each city appears to have a precise face and
enables the eye of the mind to see clearly, exactly, and completely. Yet town authorities
keep these aerial photographs in their le drawers, not on the walls of their ofces.
They never learn to interpret these views. Faced daily with such scandalous records, or
so Le Corbusier believed, these men would no doubt quickly decide not to tolerate such
leprous and fatal disarticulation and start immediately to work for the transformation of
cities and life [Des canons 7; Home of Man 59].
The Birds-eye View. In Precisions, Le Corbusier began to outline the difference be-
tween the aerial view and that seen by the eyes of man placed one meter, sixty centime-
ters above the ground. He reiterates this position in The Home of Man (1942), a small
book he wrote with Franois de Pierrefeu. Utilizing the eye as a tool of registration, the
man on the ground understands that walking creates diversity in the spectacle before
his eyes. But he has left the ground and own in an airplane. The aerial view offers a
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different reading resolved without ambiguity. Nevertheless, he must learn to interpret
this view:
At 500 to 1,000 meters altitude, and at 180 to 200 kilometers an hour, the view
from a plane is not rushed but slow, unbroken, the most precise one can wish:
one can recognize the red or black spots on a cowskin. Everything takes on
the precision of a tracing; the spectacle is not rushed but very slow, unbroken;
along with the plane, it is only the steamer on sea or the feet of the pedestrian
on a road that can give what may be called sight at human scale: one sees, the
eye transmits calmly. Whereas what I call inhuman and hellish are the sights
offered from trains and automobiles, even bicycles. I exist in life only if I can
see.11
The airplane ies over estuaries, along great rivers, high above the savannah, and
it looks down at virgin forests. It presents a new eye: the eye of a bird transplanted
into the head of a man. It enables the eye to perceive immense deltas, the reed beds
of atolls, the slender groups of palm trees, and it reveals the movement of water in the
subsoil and the patterned progression of green veins across the yellow plain [Radiant
City 7879]. This aerial view constitutes a new way of looking and interpreting the im-
ages of space. To rational analysis, comparison, and deduction is added this rsthand
experience of the eye. Perceptionor the interpreted viewLe Corbusier believed,
was more forceful than mere conception. It led to synthesis and action.
The birds-eye view offers a unique observation: it enables the eye to discern the
characteristics of various regions of the world and gauge their diversity. The different
values the eye observes as characters of nature become guides to human creations.
These varied elements combine into clear symphonies: counterpoint and fugue, con-
struction and nature.12 Nature is a thing of mathematical characters and inevitable con-
sequences of purposes. / And the purposes are determined by the characters [Radiant
City 79].
Returning to this theme in the 1940s, Le Corbusier claimed the aerial view enabled
man to see that which hitherto was only seen by the spirit. The whole spirit of our
plans will be illuminated and amplied by this new point of view [Home of Man 125].
The birds eye view has determined that [p]lans are no longer simply a game of the
mind; henceforth they see themselves./ And the spirit proclaims their order and their
grandeur [Home of Man 154]. The birds-eye view, he continued, is an important in-
novation; it enables the mind to see clearly and allows for the development of the third
dimension of height. A great part of the confusion that exists in the reading of plans has
come about because the eyes of man are only one meter, sixty centimeters above the
ground. The aerial view resolves this confusion by allowing a different reexive read-
ing without ambiguity [Trois tablissements 13841].
11. Precisions 7; Home of Man 125. He recounts in The Radiant City that, [s]tanding on
our own two feet, with our eyes a little more than ve feet from the earth, a distance that has
become the basis (the geometricians tool) of all our mesuration, of all the sensations, that affect
us, of all the perceptions that unleash the poetic tide in us, with this human height as a foundation
(feet on the ground, eye such a short distance above it) we have established our accepted scale of
dimensions: all our notions of height and of extent. . . . And on this basis we have observed and
noted the characteristics of the reed, of the tree, of the mountain [79].
12. The music of our constructions [and by music Le Corbusier means the poetic emana-
tions these constructions create] will be produced by the interplay of the characters we have
created. Isnt that how it works in Aeschylus too? [Radiant City 79].
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Part Two: A New Cartography
The Cartographic View. Aviation, the herald of a new age, forged an indissoluble
bond linking the vast subject of architecture to city planning. From the airplane, the
earth looked different and so must architecture, city plans, and geographical maps.
Maps colonize space by extracting from the ground specic geographical facts and
silencing others. Maps are surfaces on which selected facts are exhibited or as Michel
de Certeau described, they form tables of legible results [121]. Yet maps also enable
a spatial imaginary to play over their surface: one can trace out routes to follow, dream
about places to inhabit, or project specic visions onto the lay of the land.
During his trip to South America in 1929, Le Corbusier poured over the maps of
Argentina blending together regional facts with exotic adventures, a form of erotopog-
raphy.
I . . . measured the lines of the rivers, the great stretches of plains and pla-
teaus, the barrier of the Andes, studied the network of railroads that already
irrigate your country. I knew for the rst time that Argentina is immense, that
it begins at the latitude of the Chaco whose Indians are naked and that it goes
all the way to the icebergs, to the Tierra del Fuego. . . . I ew far over your
country by plane. I saw that it was empty, that there was enormous room for a
fantastic expansion. [Precisions 202]
Sensing that people came to Argentina from all over the world bringing with them an
explosive energy, he imagined that Buenos Aires was predestined for greatness and
consequently Le Corbusier confessed that, like these immigrants, he too was charged
as full of energy as a dynamo [Precisions 202]. Returning to Buenos Aires, this time
on a hydroplane, he saw the city from 500 meters up in the air. It was a bristling tumul-
tuous city, a sign of a prodigious vitality, but also of improvisation, of incoherence.
Against this painful sight his cartographic eye juxtaposed an ordered arrangement of
glass skyscraper prisms on an enormous platform of reinforced concrete jutting out
into the sea. As he imagined, the simple horizontal line where the pampa met the ocean
would be punctuated with crystalline cubes lit up at night.13
His travels took him onward to Rio de Janeiro, a remarkable city that clear-
ly enchanted him. He began his account with a refrain when one is in Rio de
Janeiro . . . and proceeded to describe the blue bays, sky and water, the white quays
and pink beaches, and the successive promontories falling into the sea. Taking on the
mantle of a conquistador, he labeled the terrain a geography map of the time of the
Conquest, with its gulfs, its mountains, its boats; the inscriptions are the lights at night,
on the cliffs. . . . He embellished the site by bestowing metaphors and tropes on the
land. The high plateau and the mountains coming down to meet the sea were like the
back of a hand spread open. A second metaphor found the promontories to be like a
sort of disorderly green ame above the city always, everywhere, and which changes
appearance at ones every step [Precisions 234].
13. Le Corbusier believed the destiny of Buenos Aires lay toward the east. He crossed the
city and arrived at the sea, actually in the Rio, at the very point where the reasons for the citys
existence were crystallized. Where the ground of the pampa met the Rio a steep slope, the Bar-
ranca, fell away, keeping the city behind it. To overcome this shift of levels, Le Corbusier pro-
jected an enormous platform of reinforced concrete over the customs warehouses and the docks,
over the railway lines, out into the sea, sinking great concrete piles into its estuary. Here he laid
the foundations for his skyscraper business district [Precisions 205, 208].
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He was ecstatic with the site and returned to his refrain: when one has climbed the
favelas of the blacks high up on the steep hills where they have painted their houses of
wood and wattle in many bright colors. Placed almost on the edge of the cliffs, the front
of the house is raised on piloti, while the door is on the back toward the hillside. There
is pride in the eye of the black, for he has a view of the sea, the harbors, the islands, the
mountains, the estuaries and the eye of the man who sees wide horizons is prouder,
wide horizons confer dignity; that is the thought of a planner [235]. He was itching to
project his own imaginary cartography onto this space.
When one has gone up in an airplane, glided like a bird over its bays and peaks,
and torn away in a single glance all the secrets it hides from the man on the ground,
then Le Corbusier confessed, one understands the lay of the land. By plane, everything
becomes clear to the cartographic eye and you have felt ideas being born, you have
entered into the body and the heart of the city, you have understood part of its destiny .
. . a violent desire comes to you, crazy perhaps, to try a human enterprise here too, the
desire to play a match for two, a match of the afrmation of mankind against or with
the presence of nature [Precisions 23536].
when one has taken a long ight over the city like a bird gliding, ideas attack
you.
Ideas attack you when, for three months, one has been under pressure,
when one has descended into the depths of architecture and planning, when
one is on the way to deductions, when everywhere one envisages, one feels,
one sees consequences.
In the plane I had my sketchbook and as everything became clear to me I
sketched. I expressed the ideas of modern planning. [Precisions 236]
In this sketch of Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier drew an immense expressway joining

at mid-height the ngers of the promontories and connecting the city with the high
hinterlands of its plateau [Precisions 242]. This viaduct architecture had a highway on
top and housing below, and each apartment was equipped with hanging gardens and
window walls raised high above the ground. It is almost the nest of a gliding bird as
if his airplane had touched down on this ephemeral land [Precisions 244]. Out at sea, he
took up his sketchbook again and drew the mountainous peaks and the great faultless
horizontal beltline he had conceived suspended above the city.
The whole site began to speak, on the water, on earth, in the air; it spoke of
architecture. This discourse was a poem of human geometry and of immense
natural fantasy. The eye saw something, two things: nature and the product of
the work of men. The city announced itself by the only line that can harmonize
with the vehement caprice of the mountains; the horizontal. [Precisions 243]
Next he took a ight over Sao Paulo where he commanded the pilot to y low over
the ground toward the center of the city so he could see its outline, where rises occurred
in the land, and where the business district pushed upward toward the sky, an indisput-
able sign of disease. By automobile, he measured the time it took to travel from point to
point over valleys, contours, and slopes. He grew to understand the general topography
of hills and hollows, and the inadequate network of streets that tried to go straight in a
hilly terrain. And then suddenly he was seized with the solution: he drew a horizontal
line 45 kilometers in length from hill to hill, and then a second line at right angles.
These straight horizontals are the expressways coming into the city, in reality cross-
ing it. You wont y over the city with your autos, but you will drive over it. Do not
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build expensive arches to hold up your viaducts, but carry your viaducts on reinforced
concrete structures that will make up ofces in the center of the city and homes in the
outskirts. He called these horizontal expressways earthscrapers and wondered, is
there anything more elegant than the pure line of a viaduct in an undulating site and
more varied than its substructures sinking into the valleys to meet the ground? [Preci-
sions 24142].
From hindsight, Le Corbusier would write in 1935 that [I]deas can be expressed
through diagrams, proclaiming that his South American trip was a stimulant for clear-
cut energy ideas [Radiant City 221]. Reecting back over his failure to implement
any of his many urban schemes beginning with the City Mondiale at Geneva in 1929
and ending with his various proposals for Algiers throughout the 1930s, Le Corbusier
valiantly declared the more difcult the adventure, the more barred by obstacles mak-
ing his plans unrealizable, the more his enthusiasm grew. He recalled the grand lyrical
exercises he planned for the cities of South America and the airplane ights over the
pampas, the savannahs, and the virgin forests, along the great rivers where future cities
of colonization began to appear, farms of the pioneers, towns on the bend of rivers, the
immense and disarticulated cities on the delta. And suddenly he realized that the Radi-
ant City was born at that moment, a modern doctrine of urbanization replacing the un-
speakable misery of existing conditions [Le Corbusier, Lurbanisme et le lyrisme].
By the early 1940s, in The Home of Man (1942), Le Corbusiers voice became
more commanding. He believed, under the authoritarian rule of the Vichy government,
the hour had struck to put his plans into action. The plane ying over forest, rivers,
mountains and seas reveals some fundamental laws, simple principles which prevail in
nature, and as a result we may hope that dignity, strength and a proper sense of values
will become apparent in the aspect of our new cities [Routes 110]. Now a pact can
be made with nature, it can enter into the lease. Before magnicent palm and banana
trees, and tropical splendors that animate a site, such as Rio de Janeiro, one can install
an armchair. Suddenly the four obliques of a perspective are formed.
Your room is installed before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters our
room.
The pact with nature has been sealed! By means available to town plan-
ning it is possible to enter nature into the lease.
Rio de Janeiro is a celebrated site. But Algiers, Marseilles, Oran, Nice
and all the Cote dAzur, Barcelona and many maritime and inland towns can
boast of admirable landscapes. [Home of Man 87]
The calculator and the poet united in the town planner unravel from the tangle
an unexpected solution.
The tracery they create becomes integral with the countryside. The town
lies like a garment upon the body of the site. Architecture attains majesty and
the citizens partake of essential joys.
A pact is signed with nature. [Home of Man 89]
The Lesson of the Desert. In both books Aircraft and The Four Routes, Le Corbusier
described another lesson in town planning that he learned from the aerial view. He tells
a story about a ight from Algiers, south over the Atlas mountains toward the cities of
the Mzab in the desert. This was a land of thirst and deathto which the Mozabites
had been banished a thousand years before when they built seven cities of the Mzab for
winter and laid out seven oases in the desert for summer. These latter cities were lled
with date and apricot trees, the lush foliage of peach or pomegranate trees; they were
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dazzling spectacles of water and verdure, offering security and coolness. Their mud
houses were molded by hand, built by touching regard. The plans of these houses
should be preserved, Le Corbusier warned, lest some accident erases them from sight.
On the other hand, the winter cities, bathed in the light of the pitiless sun, gained
the appearance of a hell of broken stones, narrow and steep declining streets, silent
walls, stagnation. . . . But from the airplane, as they circled above one of these cit-
ies, spiraling downward, plunging toward the ground and just clearing the roofs, Le
Corbusier was seized with a new awareness. The plane had shown us everything, and
what it had revealed carried an important lesson [Routes 109]. It revealed the entire
layout of the city, enabling the eye to penetrate behind the blind street wall that kept the
pedestrian at bay. The aerial view enabled his interpretive eye to see that
each of the gay little houses opened by means of three ample arcades onto
an exquisite garden. . . . Every house of the Mzab, yes, every house without
exception, is a centre of happiness, serenity, is founded upon the solid rock of
fundamental truth. This city exists to serve mankind, to serve both body and
soul. In the Mzab, no single family was allowed to go without its arcade and
its garden. [Routes 110]
Here was the interpretive lesson: a gulf separated these desert tribes from the cruel,
inhuman white civilization. In the latter, a relentless thirst for money destroyed the
sacred rule of nature.
The plane ying over forest, rivers, mountains and seas reveals some funda-
mental laws, simple principles which prevail in nature, and as a result we may
hope that dignity, strength and a proper sense of values will become apparent
in the aspect of our new cities. [Routes 110]
The airplane is the mark of a new age, it is the peak of a huge pyramid of mechanical
progress that rushes forward into a new era on widespread wings. The aeroplane, in
the sky, carries our hearts above the humdrum of daily living. The plane has given us
a birds-eye view. / And when the eye sees clearly, the mind makes wise decisions
[Routes 111].
The Law of the Meander. Le Corbusier noted that [f]rom the plane I saw sights that
one may call cosmic. What an invitation to meditation, what a reminder of the funda-
mental truths of our earth! [Precisions 4]. One of these truths he baptized the law of
the meander. Flying over the great rivers of South Americathe Parana, the Uruguay,
and the Paraguay Rivershe was struck with a revelation. Studying their courses, he
understood how they followed the law of physics on the steepest gradient, but when
they owed across at terrain, erosion caused a meander to appear. Something had
disturbed the law of nature. He found there were parallels between this theorem and
that of creative thinking and human invention. Following the outlines of a meander
from above, I understood the difculties met in human affairs, the dead ends in which
they get stuck and the apparently miraculous solutions that suddenly resolve appar-
ently inextricable situations. The law of the meander quickly became for Le Corbusier
a personal symbol under which he introduced his propositions for reforms in both
architecture and urbanism. He mused, [f]rom the plane, one understands many other
things [Precisions 4].
As the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s deepened and as Le Corbusier met
constant opposition to his great works of urbanism, he expanded on his theorem of the
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meander. Now he posited that water is a uid and thus mobile, it ows according to the
law of gravity. From then on it is a matter of simple arithmetic. A rivulet meets another
rivulet and width is added. These rivulets form a stream, which meets another stream
and together their widths form a great river. The river ows toward the sea and reaches
a delta where its powerful ow is subdivided before owing gently through the estuary
and out into the open sea.14
From the airplane, the eye can observe, however, where water as it follows its
inevitable course to the sea, meets an obstacle, a rock. This obstacle causes a meander
to be formed, a tiny break in the waters relentless forward ow. Erosion begins as
water is forced to eat away at the opposite bank, causing it to crumble. Forced back to
the opposite side, the same erosion takes place lower down on the stream. Because of
this erosion, water deserts the straight line of gravity and begins to zigzag. Its ow to
the sea having been obstructed by an abnormality, it is forced to form a meander. And
so too, the grand works of urbanism were forced to zigzag when they met the rock of
opposition.
In South America, the birds-eye view from the airplane revealed meanders within
meanders. In terms of human achievements this was a demoralizing view to see ev-
erything sink into silt, where civilizations disappear and great works are engulfed, un-
less a miraculous energy is able to break through the entanglement. Yet Le Corbusier
observed that nature does not stop before such obstacles; it nds a solution even for
perilous maladies.
When the time comes, the meander is dispensed with; the river breaks through
and returns to a straight course once more. Though, even so, this new route
will still be encumbered for a long while with parasites, with evil vapors, with
fevers and rotting decadence.
And so it is also in architecture and city planning; in sociology and eco-
nomics; in politics.15
All of the many city plans that Le Corbusier designed during the 1930s and 1940s
came to naught, blocked by forces standing in the stream of their energetic ow. In
1945 Le Corbusier returned to the law of the meander but with a twist of meaning, for
now he believed the aerial route had denitively surpassed all terrestrial routes and this
had major political consequences. He explained:
The earth is born without political frontiers: it is round and continuous; the
human species has multiplied across the four quarters of the world, following
laws of climate, of water-shed, of winds. . . . Roads follow the shortest routes
compatible with the slopes in their path. Obstacles assert their pressure on
this tracery: rivers, mountains, and the routes establish themselves through-
out millenniums. They are relatively predetermined. . . . The three routes em-
14. Radiant City 79. The ow of water is a function of two constants: size and speed. This
lesson must guide the city planner when he establishes beds for the modern uid of the automo-
bile. Water circulates in an unbroken fashion except where it nds a hole. There it forms a lake
and is stationary. This too must guide the planner: parking is a lake of trafc [80].
15. Radiant City 80. He compares the parable of the meander to mans life and to genera-
tions that follow. Long years of fruitfulness can be followed by decadence and collapse. The
worlds seasons and mans have different scales and do not always coincide. Was he born too
soon or too late or at the right conjunction? / Life pursues a natural impulse toward organiza-
tion. Cells reproduce themselves; they divide, multiply and form amorphous agglomeration. An
intention appears, a direction is apparent and an organism is born and further ramications take
place.
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bodied in the earths surface, the roadway, the waterway, the iron way, all
have their destinies xed by the nature of the terrain: Geography. The new
route of the air goes straight, cuts straight, goes everywhere, above all indif-
ferent to geographical obstacles. [Concerning 45]
Plans for reconstruction took on great urgency during World War II, consequently Le
Corbusier decided to play the game of the day and to scout out the pathways to
tomorrow [Looking 77]. He intuitively knew that an equation was a tool in nature, al-
lowing diverse elements to be brought together, and that a meander accumulated these
elements, cascading forward and accelerating in speed, until they broke free and owed
in a straight line. On Descartess coordinate space he could visualize these moving ele-
ments across geometricized space [see Latour].
With one line, one sketch, it is possible to lay down on a sheet of paper the
gurative representation of a thought, a cycle, an era, even one still in the
future. The gures form an equation; this graphic algebra has its rules; the
velocity of it lets the explorer take giant steps over the undergrowth and bare
the principle. And so emerge the guidelines of a state already begun but whose
meaning had not been apparent to all. [Looking 77]
If a serious attempt to ponder the problems of aviation had been made fty, or
even just twenty or thirty years ago, couldnt it have guided a whole swarm of
decisions which had, instead to be taken amidst the perilous improvisation of
sentiment or interest or panic? [Looking 78]
But now the hour was striking, the time had come when the world must absolutely look
ahead. The cascade of elements accumulated in the meanders ow must eventually
break free and ow forward in a straight line. Le Corbusier drew a wedge of territory
containing the diversied features of a continent: suggestive of Europe with a sea to the
north and south, an ocean to the west, and another sea to the east. This watershed its
slopes, valleys, and plainsclearly depicted in an aerial view and created natural path-
ways for streams, brooks, and rivers that led man and things down to the sea [Looking
78, 81].
The purpose of our exploration is to discern, from amidst the present confu-
sion, the efcient, economic and elegant process governing the regular acts of
a society extending over a territory. A measuring instrument should be desig-
nated by which to appraise the value of the solutions that are found. . . .
Efciency considered, not in relation to money but in relation to man,
man being installed in his environment, the environment specic to his action,
his existence.
What is actually involved is the occupation of the ground for various pur-
poses: to produce and to trade in order to consume (feed, clothe and amuse).
[Looking 83]
A Global Viewthe Compression of Space and Time. Le Corbusier was aware as he

traveled across South America, that communication technologybe it the locomotive,
the newspaper, photography, or the cinemawas a conquistador, crushing before its
advance regional customs and habits, ways of acting and dressing. Through these new
communication devices anyone could know, hear, and feel any other part of the world.
All landscapes became familiar, all songs known. The archive of knowledge about the
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world had increased, but with its accumulations a sense of mystery about the world
had disappeared. Now the last white spaces of the map were lled out: one had seen
the blocks of ice of the South Pole and the ripples of desert sand formations up close.
And the locomotive has brought you the suits of London and the fashions of Paris.
You are wearing bowlers! [Precisions 27]. Airplanes go everywhere; their eagle eyes
have searched the deserts and penetrated the rain forest. Hastening interpenetration,
the railway, the telephone unceasingly runs the country into the city, the city into the
country [Precisions 26].
Furthermore, the airplane abetted this globalization for the spherical mass of the
earth was without borders. Only the state depended on the notion of boundaries: a ter-
ritorial unit with frontiers that need to be defended. Yet the telegraph, the airplane, and
the camera have eradicated these boundary lines. Le Corbusier explained that a frontier
is built up in stages: rst the family, then the tribe, and later the region. A centripetal
center of attraction emerges and another one elsewhere and in between these two elds
of attraction a frontier occurs. When two regions conict with each other, the normal
void at their frontiers is lled and the two rise up in arms. That frontier of dissension,
Le Corbusier was well aware had risen once again in the 1930s [Radiant City 193].
Because the beginning of any machine age with its new forms of transportation
always creates disorder and economic chaos, this troublesome situation abets the build-
ing up of a frontier of dissension. Yet a new scale of national administration needed to
be reorganized on economic and spiritual terms. New regional administrative centers
could engender new social aggregations determined by climate, topography, geography
and race. These would be natural regions, spontaneously formed, and they would in
some cases overlap and replace existing political frontiers, or so the neosyndicalists
believed.
Next Le Corbusier considered different means of communicationrailroads,
ships, and airplanes, mail, telegraph, and radionding that they too did not work
in harmony. How then could it be possible to contemplate the development of a new
world unity? He laid out the facts: there are different natural features of geography,
climate, races, and even those tyrannical interior barriers within mankind, the various
natural languages. Yet Le Corbusier commanded, open the atlas, consider the world as
a whole, and base your thinking on the cosmic reality that controls everythingthe
sun. The map of the world reveals that the machine-age civilization is restricted to areas
where the sun is not too hot or excessively cold [Radiant City 194]:
The suns kisses are savage at the equator (where they are perpendicular), in-
operative at the poles (where they are tangential) and in between as we move
along every possible variation of temperature and therefore of climate and
topography (customs, races, pigments, temperature, education, industries,
products, morality, etc.). [Radiant City 109]
Consequently Le Corbusier began to reorder this map: the true line of trade must be
longitudinal, not latitudinal as is the common practice. The spread of commerce east-
ward and westward had caused territories to get in each others way, to compete with
each other, and it consequently had ignored all the space of the globe to the north and
south. The world needed new axes of expansion for peoples pressing against political
frontiers, allowing them to leave the frontiers empty, and protect the world from war
between nations [Radiant City 194].
The Vichy government under the leadership of Marshal Ptain, the World War
I hero of Verdun, made its compromise with the German invaders in the summer of
1940. Ptain promised a new order, a National Revolution. His revolution embodied
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much of what the neosyndicalists had promoted: regional decentralization, corporate
syndicates, agrarian reform, elite leadership, and youth programs. Both Petain and the
syndicalists sought a new unity, an organic wholeness to cure a fragmented nation. Le
Corbusier wrote in The Home of Man (1942), [n]ow is the hour to consider the whole
country in its days of unity. Under Vichy an elite body of men would become the law-
givers and as they had done throughout history, these elites would
state the relationship between man and the universe, between the great and
the small nations, between the soil and its boundary.
It is they who must assure the hierarchy of things in the art of building.
Roads, houses, urban equilibrium, rural tracts, geographic boundaries, such
are the elements of their plastic game. [132]
These new lawgivers will become the modelers of towns and the creators of order in
the countryside. At the threshold of the house they will install a vigilant guardian: the
conditions of nature. On their coming, the revolution will be accomplished [132].
Le Corbusier turned to the past for help in achieving this revolution. He recounted
that on the Acropolis of Athens, the lawgiver knew how to place the temples as sound-
ing boards of the surrounding mountains. It was the lawgivers art that enabled him to
discern the spirit of those lines which can fuse the human creation and the natural cre-
ation into one whole [134]. And so it will be with the modeler of contemporary towns,
who gathers within himself the entire countryside and the whole topography. He will
determine the built volumes. / He will distribute them upon the ground of the town. He
will set upon the terrain a statue by which his spirit, through the course of years, will
express itself in architectural manifestations [135].
The airplane with its aerial view has given man a new understanding of geography,
of the importance of the land which has preceded, existed, and remained while many a
civilization has passed with time. Geography speaks, proclaiming certain fundamental
truths. Where men have made contact with each other, established a ow of informa-
tion, and explored new territories, there the discourse of geography has penetrated as
well. The lawgivers will bring the fruits of modern work to everyone.
So that the body of our civilization becomes work itself: the fact work
will be reconsidered, discussed; some new propositions submitted; some re-
straints imposed; some arrangement taken nally to equilibrate the forces of
the world, to make the sap circulate, to expand life, to make it regenerate, to
have the springtime bloom of this second cycle of machine civilization. [Trois
tablissements 132]
Le Corbusier again turns to history to buttress this claim. He notes that ancient Rome,
installed within the heart of the Mediterranean with its empire and its caravans coming
from faraway horizons bearing with them rare and exotic products, has ceased to be
the center of the world. Population has spread over the entire surface of the earth along
with its gigantic powers of production, and means of circulation and transport [Trois
tablissements 132]. When the world returns to peace, new places of production will
be created where primary and secondary materials will be transformed into consumer
products. In the rst machine age, these places were dispersed but in the second ma-
chine age they will be distributed according to the law of the three establishments.
Geography speaks. Here is the rst discourse, a map of the redistribution of in-
dustries on French territory. Traditionally geography has determined that industries
be located close to primary materials, next to sources of power, along transportation
110
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routes, near labor markets and markets for consumption. And yet there are exceptions
to this rule of geography: it can be overturned by individual will, and new transporta-
tion routes can determine the relocation of industries into new linear cities. A map of
the redistribution of industries in France clearly showed the presence of some industrial
regions situated in the east along a line drawn from Caen to Marseille, and a series of
small industrial centers spread across the territorial ensemble [Trois tablissements
134].
Part Three: Geomorphic Structures on the Land
Aerial Warfare. While considering plans for the future development of Moscow in
1930, Le Corbusier commented on a formidable menace threatening all urban exis-
tence: that of aerial warfare. Lieutenant Colonel Vauthier had just given Le Corbusier
a copy of his book titled The Aerial Danger and the Future of the Country.16 Now Le
Corbusier understood that the air would be the new theater of military operations and
that threat of aerial warfare emanated not only from explosive projectiles that would de-
stroy a citys built structures but also from poison gas and chemical warfare that would
asphyxiate its inhabitants, and from ammable liquids that would spread a restorm
beyond imagination. A city could be destroyed all at once. But it just so happened, quite
without realizing it, that Le Corbusier had already provided a necessary defense against
this new danger of aerial warfare in his studies for Urbanisme (1925) and in his book
Precisions (1930). He had proposed the construction of housing in reinforced con-
crete, a material strong enough to withstand the impact of bombs and to be reproof.
He had also proposed these structures be isolated in great open spaces, that housing,
commerce, and industry be located in separate zones, and that the entire built surface
of the city be reduced. These were essential conditions needed to lessen the exposure
of built structures to aerial attack but also to contain the spread of any conagration.
To avoid the disaster of poisonous gas, his proposal for suppressing meager courtyards
and narrow corridor streets, along with the provision of wide open spaces and housing
raised on piloti, would allow sufcient wind and water from protected hydrants or large
open-air swimming pools to cleanse the air. Le Corbusier admitted that his housing and
planning schemes had been offered as solutions for the problem of work and leisure in
the rst machine age, but, recently, the French military having studied different plans
for the development of Paris discovered that only Le Corbusiers earlier schemes pro-
vided adequate resistance to the dangers of aerial warfare.17
With Paris under German occupation since July 1940, the question of how to evac-
uate in case of air raids and carpet bombing was raised more and more frequently in the
1940s. Le Corbusier knew what could be expected: bottlenecks at every street corner
and road jams along the routes of exodus. He wrote in Four Routes (1941) that it would
be a stampede, and, in case of machine-gunning, a massacre [44]. Noxious gases
[would] pour into our trench-like streets and into those wells which our courtyards
provide; one cant get rid of them; they achieve a maximum result: the population
is asphyxiated [48]. If only Le Corbusiers scheme, advocated in The Radiant City,
16. Precisions 192. Communication Observations of Colonel Vauthier, 5th Congress

CIAM, FLC D2 (11).
17. In 1937, Colonel Vauthier was asked to speak to CIAM 5 gathering in Paris to dis-
cuss the problems of housing and leisure. From the triple viewpoint of explosive projectiles,
rebombs, and poisonous gases, he explained, it was necessary to reconsider architecture and
urbanism [FLC A3-1-65; Commentaires relatifs Moscow et a la Ville Verte (12 March
1930)].
boyer.indd 111 2/13/06 9:13:00 AM

Silent Account 101
Rachel Harrison
boyer.indd 112 2/13/06 9:13:03 AM

could be built, it would dramatically reduce the vulnerability of the city. In collabora-
tion with the Air Defense Staff, Le Corbusiers housing projects could be equipped
with bomb- and torpedo-proof roong, and provided with antiexplosion chambers and
oor plates able to resist any projectiles not already exploded. Instead of underground
shelters becoming the collective tomb of all who gathered there, Le Corbusier advised,
bomb shelters could be located in the highest stories of apartment houses, where pure
air provided by air conditioners would allow the residents to breathe air in safety. Such
defense measures, decreed for the safety of Parisians, would ensure the realization of
rational town-planning schemes. Or, vice versa, in rationalizing a plan for the city of
Paris, to save her from the shameful chaos into which she is now plunged, we shall
automatically satisfy the need for aerial defense [51].
At the end of World War II, drawing sustenance from the past as he looked into the
future, Le Corbusier reconsidered the reasons for the walled medieval city and why the
wall had been abandoned:
In French this [wall] is called une enceinte, and enceinte means both that
which encloses and the pregnant woman who carries an infant in her womb.
From these images we take the principle of a form deliberately shaped with
the intention of being the vessel containing a city. Within it, a circulation net-
work feeds the soil protected by the walls. Gates are opened in the enclosing
walls from which roads lead away into the countryside. [Looking 83]
Then came a day when offensive weapons made mock of military enclosures,
when the advent of the airplane meant that fortresses no longer had ceilings
a recent event, since it dates from the First World War. [Looking 43]
With aerial warfare, new considerations replaced the old set of tools, and new urban
forms, the linear radiant city, developed for the entire nation.
The Three Establishments. The basic elements of the postwar planning problem in
Le Corbusiers list were the use of machines, new communication devices, information
ows, and administrative requirements. These were the elements in the equation that
would determine the form and location of future settlement patterns around the globe.
Yet productionor work for Le Corbusier was the activating force: it propelled men,
materials, and goods over the four routes of the world, those established on the land and
sea, the railroads, and through the air [Concerning 1112]. The rst two routes had de-
veloped a rational network of roads and ship lanes, while the railroad, followed by the
automobile, sowed disruption and chaos in its wake. Now the fourth route, or aviation,
was a catalyst for great mutations taking place throughout the world. Having taken to
the air, the destiny of man was truly revolutionary.18
Le Corbusier designed three different settlement patterns to shelter this new aerial
civilization: units of agricultural production (food), linear industrial cities (manufactur-
ing), and radio-concentric social cities (government, knowledge, commerce, and distri-
bution). Due to the airplane, population could now be rationally redistributed and land
more efciently utilized. After a general territorial stocktaking, areas beyond the reach
of the four routes would be allowed to sink into an indeterminate state, or possibly
extinction.
18. FLC C3-19-71-2note from Le Corbusier on sec. 6 Infrastructure Congrs National

de lAviation Franaise . . . Realisation and Technique . . . signalisation and telecommunity.
boyer.indd 113 2/13/06 9:13:04 AM

Replying to a question addressed to him in 1945 concerning the mission and doc-
trine of contemporary architecture, he replied: Let us read the vital currents which
ow through our land. Along the crucial meridian line that crosses the breadth of
France, new volumes for housing, work, and leisure must be built from Le Havre to
Algiers. The Allies understood that airlines were the lifeline of defense and their relent-
less precision bombing of the cities of Germany eventually won the war. They under-
stand the same lifeline will be necessary when the war ends:
For the time of peace, they are preparing vast aerial eets, which will produce
an unimagined upheaval in the transport of men and goods. We need not lose
our heads. The skies of our towns will be full of the roar and the whistling of
aircraft. And if one day the physicists and the mechanics succeed in annulling
the racket the skies of our towns will remain no less encumbered with engines,
far and near, like the monstrous white mice that ll the skies of the fantastic
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. [Concerning 118, 121]
Since the rst National Congress of French Aviation, in April 1945, aircraft
have been banned from the skies of French towns./ The war has turned a
new page, that of the aircraft, with its extraordinary speeds and its routes as
straight as the trajectories of missiles. Enthusiasm and ingenuity join hands
to prepare splendid berths for these machines: airports. Each town will claim
one, according to its needs and rights./ It is dangerous to prophesy so soon af-
ter the event [of war]. But at least we must try to see whether the three human
establishments of our technical civilization, hitherto founded upon the three
routes of earth, water, and iron, will nd their futures foreclosed or fostered by
the fourth route, that of the air. [Concerning 121]
If civilization is so fostered, Le Corbusier continues, then the map of Europe will be

rearranged: there will be a linear industrial city extending from the Atlantic coast to
the Urals, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Within this network, industries
will be transformed; they will house all sorts of specialists and manufacture a range
of useful goods. They will embrace the radio-concentric cities already established by
geography.
Measures must be taken within the geography of Europe the effect of which
will be to join and to unite, and not to multiply the gun muzzles along frontiers
which are ready for dissolution before the sap which is thrusting from the
future./ This is the message that France can carry, if need be, to the inter-
national conference tables to assist in the emergence of a harmonious world
from the chaos into which a foolhardy inattention has plunged us. Our snails
shell has become too small, we are left without any real shelter. It is time to
leave it and build another. [Concerning 122]
Conclusion. For thousands of years man lived within a ten- to twelve-mile radius of
his shelter, but now, Le Corbusier noted, man can read about or view the entire world
in dramatic new atlases of aerial photographs or documental lms of innite detail. The
ow of information has exploded, revealing a variety of forms of nature, cultures, and
climates. Sitting in his armchair man has access to
geography (sites, ora and fauna, harvest and industrial products);

human races, as tallied by the illustrated document, the documentary lm.
114
boyer.indd 114 2/13/06 9:13:04 AM

They are revealed to us in detail, their appearance, their customs, what they
build;
climates from one pole to the other, by way of the tropics and the equator,
and from sea level to the highest altitudes.
Such an abundance of information means so many inducements to greed,
and also so much encouragement of self-centered withdrawal. [Looking 12]
The rst reaction to any expansion of horizons, as it has been throughout the his-
tory of mankind, is anxiety, or fear of the new. To nd some assurance, man retreats to
investigate the past. Archaeology [after 1870] was supreme, reigning over all teach-
ing. It was an invitation to a refusal to create, to loss of the taste for creatingtaste for,
joy in the risk of, creating [Looking 12]. Then specialized schools developed to train
engineers in the new sciences; they experimented, followed their curiosity, made pro-
digious leaps forward in the applied sciences. They designed automobiles and airplanes
that realized new speeds; they invented radios that wrapped the earth in countless waves,
picked up and relayed by receiving sets. These became the new vehicles that spread
every kind of thought or slogan around the globe, snowballing to gigantic proportions
as they gathered momentum [Looking 14]. Man was overwhelmed, crushed under all
these new discoveries; as a consequence society was divided into hostile classes, and
individuals were bruised and restricted in their daily endeavors. The human viewpoint
was lost, and the rightful place of machines was denied. If a serious attempt to ponder
the problems of aviation had been made fty, or even just twenty or thirty years ago,
couldnt it have guided a whole swarm of decisions which had, instead, to be taken
amidst the perilous improvisation of sentiment or interest or panic? [Looking 78].
In conclusion, Le Corbusier resorted to his famous refrain the hour is striking:
the time is favorable; now we absolutely must look ahead and plan for a world in which
the aerial route will lie supreme.
WORKS CITED
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
Corboz, Andr. The Land as Palimpsest. Diogenes (Jan-Mar. 1982): 1234.
Crochet-Damais, Pierre. Lexploration arienne La dcouverte arienne du monde.
Ed. Paul Chombart de Lauwe. Paris: Horizons de France, 1948. 5796.
Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Lagardelle, Hubert. De lhomme abstrait lhomme rel. Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 24
32.
________
. La n dune culture. Plans 5 (May 1931): 9-16.
Lamour, Philippe. Notions claires pour une civilization occidentale. Plans 1 (Jan.
1931): 1223.
Latour, Bruno. Centers of Calculation. Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1987. 21557.
Le Corbusier (Charles-douard Jeanneret). Aircraft. London: Studio Publications,
1935.
________
. Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. Paris: LA. A. et Le
Corbusier, 1938).
________
. The City of Tomorrow. 1929. Trans. Frederick Etchell. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.
Trans. of Urbanisme. Paris: Crs, 1925.
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________
. The Four Routes. Trans. Dorothy Todd. London: Dennis Dobston, 1947. Trans.
of Sur les 4 routes. Paris: Gallimard, 1941.
________
. Invite laction. Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 5164. Rpt. in Radiant City 9297.
________
. La ligne gnrale. Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 7-9.
________
. La ligne gnrale. Plans 4 (Apr. 1931): 5-6.
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. La ligne gnrale. Plans 6 (June 1931): 58.
________
. Une maison-un palais. Paris: G. Crs, 1928.
________
. Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning. 1930. Trans.
Edith Schreiber Aujame. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
________
. Premire tape. Plans 7 (July 1931): 48.
________
. The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis
of Our Machine-Age Civilization. Trans. Pamela Knight (pt. 1), Eleanor Levieux
(pts. 2, 6), Derek Coltman (pts. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8). New York: Orion, 1967. Trans. of La
ville radieuse. Boulogne-sur-Seine: LArchitecture daujourdhui, 1935.
________
. Urbanisme des trois tablissements humains. 1945. Paris: Forces Vives aux
ditions de Minuit. 1959.
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. Lurbanisme et le lyrisme des temps nouveaux. Le Point (Jan. 1939): n.p.
________
, and Franois de Pierrefeu. The Home of Man. Trans. Eleanor Levieux. London:
Architectural Press, 1948. Trans. of La maison des hommes. Paris: Plon, 1942.
de Martonne, Emmanuel. Gographie arienne. Paris: Albin Michel: 1948.
McLeod, Mary M. Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to
Vichy. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1985.
Ory, Pascal. The Legend of the Skies. Trans. Barry Tulett. Paris: Hobeke, 1991.
116
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Aviation and Aerial View

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Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations

in the 1930s and 1940s

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Part One: The Aerial View

1. Fondation Le Corbusier (FLC) B3-14-1, B3-14-4.

diacritics / fallwinter 2003 diacritics 33.34: 93116 93

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4. FLC, B3-14-21, B3-14-23.

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 95

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Le Corbusier is being deliberately paradoxical. The soil of architecture envisions

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 97

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A Geopolitical View: Or the Science of the State as a Realm in Space. It is impos-

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The world is not coming to an endbut coming back to life. . . . A great

The neosyndicalists placed their faith in a planned economy, a revitalized culture,

diacritics / fallwinter 2003 99

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 101

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 103

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In this sketch of Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier drew an immense expressway joining

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 105

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 107

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A Global Viewthe Compression of Space and Time. Le Corbusier was aware as he

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 109

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Part Three: Geomorphic Structures on the Land

16. Precisions 192. Communication Observations of Colonel Vauthier, 5th Congress

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18. FLC C3-19-71-2note from Le Corbusier on sec. 6 Infrastructure Congrs National

diacritics / fallwinter 2003 113

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If civilization is so fostered, Le Corbusier continues, then the map of Europe will be

geography (sites, ora and fauna, harvest and industrial products);

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diacritics / fallwinter 2003 115

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