Le Corbusier and Monasteries as Cities
Also in the April issue of Metropolis Magazine1, Tess Taylor writes about a fourteenth-century Italian monastery that seems to have been a great inspiration for Le Corbusier. According to Taylor, Le Corbusier has written that the image of the monastery in Galluzzo, southwest of Florence, “decided the rest of his life.” Taylor writes:
As the young architect began to articulate his vision of modern life, the urban apartment complexes he drew bore marked similarities to the monks’ dormitories at Galluzzo. “I saw, in the harmonious countryside of Tuscany, a modern city crowning the top of a hill,” he wrote.
Now, Le Corbusier’s idea of a modern city, labeled “Radiant City,” was heavily criticized by Jane Jacobs in her The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and she convinces me. Here’s how she describes it:
[Le Corbusier] devised in the 1920’s a dream city which he called the Radiant City, composed not of the low buildings beloved of the Decentrists [supporters of the Garden City], but instead mainly of skyscrapers within a park. “Suppose we are entering the city by way of the Great Park,” Le Corbusier wrote. “Our fast car takes the special elevated motor track between the majestic skyscrapers [...]. The whole city is a Park.” In Le Corbusier’s vertical city the common run of mankind was to be housed at 1,200 inhabitants to the acre, a fantastically high city density indeed, but because of building up so high, 95 percent of the ground could remain open. The skyscrapers would occupy only 5 percent of the ground. The high-income people would be in lower, luxury housing around courts, with 85 percent of their ground left open. Here and there would be restaurants and theaters.
The step seems big from fourteenth-century monastery to a park with skyscrapers, but the concept of monastery as self-contained city is interesting; from the article in Metropolis:
“Medieval monasteries were not so unlike what cities were later to become,” [professor emeritus of architecture at Northeastern University Peter] Serenyi told me. “They were complexes containing residences, libraries, and economic centers.” Monasteries, like cities, gathered men from different places and walks of life to live side by side. They were separate, deracinated, but also joined to common purpose. “In this way,” he added, “they were templates for modern man.”
In a way this doesn’t sound far from Jacobs, who advocates neighborhoods with high diversity, rather than specialized zones for either living, working, or consuming. Tess Taylor refers to Jacobs’s notion that houses should face the streets in order for neighborhoods to be safe (as well as have a “constant succession of eyes” on the sidewalk), and writes that Le Corbusier’s projects envision “a need for absolute privacy. [...] When one enters, one is inside, inhabiting a completely private zone.” But the Radiant City is at a completely different scale. It’s hard to see how he could come up with that after having been so inspired by a medieval monastery.
1 See also my posts “Ildefons Cerdá, Urban Planner,” and “Andrés Duany on Rem Koolhaas,” both from the April issue of Metropolis.