THE RADIANT CITY

CONCEPT
“The city of today is a dying thing because its planning is not in the proportion
of geometrical one fourth. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is
repetition, The result of repetition is a standard. The perfect form.”
- Le Corbusier
LE CORBUSIER
• Le Corbusier was born in 1887
• In the Swiss watchmaking town of
La Chaux de Fonds.
• Corbusier was at first ambivalent,
preferring a career as a painter, but
later he came to embrace the
architecture profession.
• Under Perret’s guidance, Corbusier
learned the aesthetics of
functionalism (the beauty of a
carefully calculated structure sans
ornament) and the positivism of the
modern age.
 The Evolution of Urban Planning
1. THE GARDEN CITY CONCEPT BY EBENEZER HOWARD
(1903)
• Howard wanted to design an alternative to the overcrowded and polluted industrial cities of the
turn of the century, and his solution centered on creating smaller “garden cities” (with 32,000
people each) in the country .
• Linked by canals and transit and set in a permanent greenbelt. His scheme included vast open
space, with the aim of giving urban slum-dwellers the best of both city and country living.
• He captioned the design as “A Group of smokeless, Slumless Cities.” After this, the concept of
radiant city was introduced.

2. THE RADIANT CITY CONCEPT BY LE CORBUSIER (1924)

• Le Corbusier was trying to find a fix for the same problems of urban pollution and
overcrowding, but unlike Howard, he envisioned building up, not out.
• His plan, also known as “Towers in the Park,” proposed exactly that: numerous high-rise
buildings each surrounded by green space. Each building was set on “superblocks,” and space
was clearly delineated between different uses .
• Le Corbusier’s ideas later reappeared in the design of massive public housing projects in the
U.S. in the era of “urban renewal.”
THE IDEAL / CONCENTRIC CITY CONCEPT
LA VILLE CONTEMPORAINE
• No matter how open and green, cities should be frankly urban, urban surroundings
are to be definitely contrasting with rural surroundings
• Densities are in themselves not a problem. Congestion and slum conditions in the
cities are due to excessive coverage, persistence of old street patterns and
unrestricted land speculation
• Slums exist because of the failure to provide the proper surrounding for high density
living
• He protests against strict functionalism : “Human creations that survive are those
which produce emotions, and not those which are only useful”
City for 3 million people was proposed by Le corbusier in 1922, which was based on
four principles :
• Decongestion of the centre of the cities
• Augmentation of the density
• Enlargement of the means of circulation
• Increase in the number of parks and open spaces
THEORIES OF PLANNING
• THREE ZONES:
-CENTRAL CITY
-PROTECTED GREEN BELT
-FACTORIES & SATELLITE TOWNS

• CENTRAL CITY Rectangle containing

two cross axial highways
• At its heart was a six-level transport
interchange – centre for motor, rail
lines (underground and main-line
railways) and roof of which is air-
field
• 24 cruciform skyscrapers - 60
storeyed office building with
density 1200 ppa and covers 5% of
the ground
• Surrounding skyscrapers was
apartment district – 8 storey
buildings arranged in zigzag rows
with broad openspaces.
 CONCEPT

CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES AND PAINTINGS

“La Ville Radieuse”(1924 ) represented an utopian dream to reunite man within a well-
ordered environment. Unlike the radial design of the Ville Contemporaine, the Ville
Radieuse was a linear city based upon the abstract shape of the human body with head,
spine, arms and legs. The design maintained the idea of high-rise housing blocks, free
circulation and abundant green spaces proposed in his earlier work. The blocks of housing
were laid out in long lines stepping in and 0ut. and were raised up on pilotis. They had roof
terraces and running tracks on their roofs.
 LA VILLE RADIEUSE
• Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) is an unrealized urban masterplan by Le Corbusier, first
presented in 1924 and published in a book of the same name in 1933.

• Designed to contain effective means of transportation, as well as an abundance of green

space and sunlight

• Le Corbusier’s city of the future would not only provide residents with a better lifestyle, but
would contribute to creating a better society.

• Though radical, strict in its order, symmetry and standardization, Le Corbusier’s proposed
principles had an extensive influence on modern urban planning and led to the
development of new high-density housing typologies.

• In accordance with modernist ideals of progress The Radiant City was to emerge from a
tabula rasa: it was to be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular
European cities.

• The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread
across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a
“living machine.”
 PLANNING
• At the core of Le Corbusier’s plan stood the
notion of zoning: a strict division of the city
into segregated commercial, business,
entertainment and residential areas.

• The business district was located in the

center, and contained monolithic mega-
skyscrapers, each reaching a height of 200
meters and accommodating five to eight
hundred thousand people.

• At the center of the planned city was a

transportation hub which housed depots
for buses and trains as well as highway
intersections and at the top, an airport.

• Located in the center of this civic district

was the main transportation deck, from
which a vast underground system of trains
would transport citizens to and from the
surrounding housing districts.
• The centerpiece of this plan was a group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames
and encased in curtain walls of glass. The skyscrapers housed both offices and the flats of the
most wealthy inhabitants. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green
spaces.

• Le Corbusier segregated the pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways, and glorified the use
of the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers,
smaller multi-story zigzag blocks set in green space and set far back from the street housed the
proletarian workers.
 HOUSING TOWERS

• The housing districts would contain pre-fabricated apartment buildings, known as

“Unités.”
• Reaching a height of fifty meters, a single Unité could accommodate 2,700
inhabitants and function as a vertical village: catering and laundry facilities would
be on the ground floor, a kindergarden and a pool on the roof.
• Parks would exist between the Unités, allowing residents with a maximum of
natural daylight, a minimum of noise and recreational facilities at their doorsteps.
 HOUSING TOWERS
• Inside Les Unites were the vertical
streets, i.e. the elevators, and the
pedestrian interior streets that connected
one building to another.
• Automobile traffic was to circulate on
pilotis supported roadways five meters
above the earth.
• Other transportation modes, like subways
and trucks, had their own roadways
separate from automobiles.
• Transportation systems were also
formulated to save the individual time.
• Corbusier bitterly reproaches advocates
of the horizontal garden city for the time
wasted commuting to the city.
• Because of its compact and separated
nature, transportation in the Radiant City
was to move quickly and efficiently.
• Corbusier called it the vertical garden
city.
 RECTANGULAR GARDENS WITH CRUCIFFORM HOUSING TOWERS

• The idea of proposing order through careful planning is as relevant now as when Le
Corbusier first published The Radiant City. Issues of healthy living, traffic, noise, public
space and transportation, which Le Corbusier - unlike any architect before him -
addressed holistically, continue to be a major concern of city planners today.

• The sources of inspiration for the designing of the new “vertical city” by today’s
architects and planners is “La Ville Radieuse” – “The Radiant City“ by Le Corbusier.
 SPREADING THE IDEA
• Between 1931 and 1940 Corbusier undertook a series of town planning proposals for
Algiers which was the administrative capital of French North Africa.

• On his 1935 trip to the United States, Corbusier criticised the skyscrapers of Manhattan
for being too small and too close together. He proposed replacing all the existing
buildings with one huge Cartesian Skyscraper equipped with living and working units.
This would have cleared the way for more parkland, thus conforming to the ideals of the
Ville Radieuse.

• These radical ideas were further developed by Le Corbusier in his drafts for various
schemes for cities such as Paris, Antwerp, Moscow and Morocco.

• Le Corbusiers best opportunity for the realisation of his plans was when he was provided
with a “free hand” were the designs for Chandigarh, India, which he developed in 1949.

• From 1945 to 1952 he undertook the design and construction of the Unité d'Habitation
in Marseilles. The Unité embodied the ideas of the Ville Radieuse that he had developed
in Nemours and Algiers.

• When designing the layout for Brasilia, architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were
influenced by the plans for the Ville Radieuse.
 ALGIERS
• The plan had to incorporate the existing casbah
whilst allowing for the linear growth of the
increasing population.
• The resulting Plan was a variation on the Ville
Radieuse, adapted for a very specific culture and
landscape
• It comprised four main elements: an
administration area by the water in two slab blocks,
convex and concave apartment blocks for the
middle classes up on the slopes above the city, an
elevated roadway on a north-south axis above the
casbah and a meandering viaduct with a road on
top meandering down the coast.
• French architects based their designs for domestic
space on the concept of the “traditional house,”
itself an interdisciplinary colonial concept
intertwined with the discourse on Algerian women.
• Housing also offered the French colonizers a
powerful presence in a country where periodic
resistance to the occupation eventually culminated
in a seven-year war of liberation and an end to
French rule.
 PARIS
• In the 1925 “plan voisin de paris”
finnanced in part by the voisin motor
company. Le Corbusier for the first
time applied certain principles of his
“contemporary city” to an existing
situation : a partial renovation of
Paris. The plan was, and still is,
severely criticized
• The plan voisin does not claim to
offer a detailed solution of the
problems confronting this central
district of Paris.
• The plan covers an area of about two
miles long, of the Rue de Rivoli and
is divided into a business district in
the east and a residential district in
the west. Plan of Paris
PLANNING CONCEPT

• Street system
• Heavy traffic would proceed at
basement level , lighter traffic at ground
level , fast traffic should flow along
limited-access arterial roads that
supplied rapid and unobstructed cross-
city movement ,pedestrianised streets,
wholly separate from vehicular traffic
and placed at a raised level. The
• Critics attacked its focus on the central
number of existing streets would be
city, where land values were highest
diminished by two-thirds due to the
and dislocations most difficult
new arrangements of housing, leisure
facilities and workplaces, with same- • the creation of vast empty spaces in
level crossing points eliminated place of close-knit streets with their
wherever possible. varied civic life
 Radiant City, Chandigarh:
• The city of Chandigarh is the most puritanical
representation of Le Corbusier’s ideals as it was •
designed and implemented by the master himself.
• Chandigarh represents an explosion in urban
scale, which has yet to be replicated, a possible
sign of its consequences.
• The city is laid out in a near perfect grid of
superblocks, or sectors, as they are known locally.
• The majority of the sectors are a 1350 x 850
meter rectangle. Each rectangle is a sanctuary
area, and neighbourhood unit as designed.
The 3 sectors closest to the monumental
government buildings are significantly smaller and
have the only segments in the city shorter than
800 meters in length.
• Including these altered sectors the average for
the detail area (and the city as a whole) is a
segment length of 921 meters.
 BASIC PLANNING CONCEPTS
• The city plan was conceived as post war
‘Garden City’ wherein vertical and high
rise buildings were ruled out, keeping in
view the living habits of the people. Le
Corbusier conceived the master plan of
Chandigarh as analogous to human
body, with a clearly defined
• Head (the Capitol Complex, Sector 1),
• Heart (the City Centre Sector-17),
• Lungs (the leisure valley, innumerable
• open spaces and sector greens),
• Intellect (the cultural and educational
institutions),
• Circulatory system (the network of
roads, the 7Vs)
• Viscera (the Industrial Area).
Planning Of Chandigarh City
UNITé D'HABITATION IN MARSEILLES
• In 1947, Europe was still feeling the effects
of the Second World War, when Le
Corbusier was commissioned to design a
multi-family residential housing project for
the people of Marseille that were dislocated
after the bombings on France.
• The Radiant City’s influence was not
exclusive to the world of urban planning.
• In 1947, Le Corbusier designed the Unité
d'Habitation in Marseille, which - inspired
by The Radiant City’s Unités.
• Contained 337 apartments in a single
building, along with public facilities on the
roof and ground floor.
• Due to the costs of steel production in the
post-War economy, the Unité d'Habitation
was constructed of exposed concrete and
heralded the arrival of brutalist
architecture.
• In the years that followed similar buildings
were erected in France and Germany and
around the world in countless housing
projects.
• This typology, which provided an answer to
the Post-War housing shortage.
• Le Corbusier’s idea of the “vertical garden
city” was based on bringing the villa within
a larger volume that allowed for the
inhabitants to have their own private
spaces, but outside of that private sector
they would shop, eat, exercise, and gather
together.
• With nearly 1,600 residents divided among
eighteen floors, the design requires an
innovative approach toward spatial
organization to accommodate the living
spaces, as well as the public, communal
spaces.
• Interestingly enough, the majority of the
communal aspects do not occur within the
building; rather they are placed on the
roof.
• The roof becomes a garden terrace that
has a running track, a club, a kindergarten,
a gym, and a shallow pool.
• Beside the roof, there are shops, medical
facilities, and even a small hotel distributed
throughout the interior of the building. The
Unite d’Habitation is essentially a “city
within a city” that is spatially, as well as,
functionally optimized for the residents.
 CRITICS
• Corbusier’s designs for the city are
grounded in the desire to escape the earth
• The vertical street, the skyscraper, the
death of the street, the destruction of the
sensuality of city life are all proof positive
that he was terrified of the earth and
others.
• In the Contemporary City, Corbusier
describes the view from the skyscraper as
not of this earth; it is placid, serene, and
harmonious.
• The landscape of Corbusier, regardless of its
evocation of nature, is unsensual,
ahistorical--not of this world. Sustainable
cities offer a better worldview, one that
connects humans, nature, history, and place
with a viable LeCorbusier vision for the
future.