The City Of To Morrow And Its Planning

In this 1929 classic, the great architect Le Corbusier turned from the design of houses to the planning of cities, surveying urban problems and venturing bold new solutions. The book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age. Today it is revered as a work that, quite literally, helped to shape our world. Le Corbusier articulates concepts and ideas he would put to work in his city planning schemes for Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp, as well as schemes for a variety of structures from a museum in Tokyo to the United Nations buildings. The influence it exerted on a new generation of architects is now legendary. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning characterizes European cities as a chaos of poor design, inadequate housing, and inefficient transportation that grew out of the unplanned jumble of medieval cities. Developing his thesis that a great modern city can only function on a basis of strict order, Le Corbusier presents two imposing schemes for urban reconstruction — the "Voisin" scheme for the center of Paris, and his more developed plans for the "City of Three Million Inhabitants," which envisioned, among other things, 60-story skyscrapers, set well apart, to house commercial activities, and residential housing grouped in great blocks of "villas." For those who live in cities as well as anyone interested in their planning, here is a probing survey of the problems of modern urban life and a master architect's stimulating vision of how they might be solved, enlivened by the innovative spirit and passionate creativity that distinguished all of Le Corbusier's work.

This is a translation of the eighth edition of Urbanisme, a landmark work in the development of modern city planning. It was so recognized when it first appeared in English in 1929. A review in the Nation stated that "Le Corbusier ranks with Freud, Picasso, and Einstein as a leading genius of our time. The only great architect alive, he has turned his attention from the individual house to town-planning. And the result is 'The City of Tomorrow', a book not for the aesthetes but for statesmen." At the same time, Edgar Johnson wrote in the New York Evening Post that "M. Le Corbusier's extremely important book is an analysis of the problem of the city and a solution. It sidesteps none of the issues, admits the inevitable growth in population, the need for speed and centralization, and provides a reasoned and thorough overcoming of the difficulties. This book is, both practically and artistically, a work of vision." The book was one of the first to recognize an approaching "urban crisis," and its main thesis is that such a vast and complicated machine as the modern great city can only be made to function adequately on the basis of strict order, that we must aim first of all at efficiency but that it must lead us on to a fine and noble architecture. Le Corbusier raises questions in this work that are still being raised today. He concludes from his study that the whole urban scene is one of wasted opportunities and inefficiency. He proposes an alternative course which is a bold and drastic reconstruction of the entire machine. Le Corbusier presents in this work two schemes for the reconstruction of a modern city. One is the "Voisin" plan for the center of Paris and the other is his more developed plans for the "City of Three Million Inhabitants." In both these schemes he adopts skyscrapers as his most important units, but they are set at immense distances from one another and are surrounded by large open spaces or parks. They are allocated to commercial, not residential purpose; the greater tenement houses and other buildings will remain relatively low in height. The plans included in the book demonstrate clearly the scope and general appearance of the reconstruction that Corbusier proposes.

Originally published in 1898 as To-Morrow: A peaceful path to reform, "the book", writes F.J. Osborn "holds a unique place in town planning literature, is cited in all planning bibliographies, stands on the shelves of the more important libraries, and is alluded to in most books on planning; yet most of the popular writers on planning do not seem to have read it - or if they have read it, to remember what it says." The book led directly to two experiments in town-founding that by imitation, and imitation of imitation, have had a profound influence on practical urban development throughout the world. The book was responsible for the introduction of the term Garden City in numbers of languages - Cite-Jardin, Gartenstadt, Ciudad-jardin, Tuinstad - and set into motion ideas that have helped transform the scientific and political outlook on town structure and town growth. With urban renewal and the development of suburban communities as features of the contemoprary American scene, Garden cities of To-Morrow becomes "must" reading. In the words of Lewis Mumford: "This is not merely a book for Technicians: above all it is a book for citizens, for the people whose actively expressed needs, desires and interests should guide the planner and administrator at every turn." This book was first published in it's current form in 1965.

The two authors complement each other beautifully, one a visionary and gutsy politician, the other a gifted academic with a deep rooted social conscience. With the benefit of a century of post Letchworth Garden City knowledge and the lessons of two World Wars, their timely released book re-brands the Garden City from a social as well as a technical point of view. It says it's a manifesto for 21st Century Garden Cities of To-Morrow, but it could equally be a manifesto for decent human urban survival on our cherished Planet. It concentrates on the role of each citizen - his or her responsibilities and opportunities. It advocates restoring basic human values back to ordinary people, away from the `I'm doing you a favour' private pro-bono benefaction and/or cash-starved governmental institutions that seem to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.

The founder of the Garden City Association outlines his radical new approach to urban planning. First published in 1898.

The metropolis of the future — as perceived by architect Hugh Ferriss in 1929 — was both generous and prophetic in vision. This illustrated essay on the modern city and its future features 59 illustrations.

People live in cities and experience them firsthand, while urban designers explain cities conceptually. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann takes on the challenging question of how designers can communicate the changes they envision in order that "the rest of us" adequately understand how those changes will affect our lives. New modes of imaging technology—from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models—allow professionals to explain their designs more clearly than ever before. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe. Yet decisions on what gets built are significantly influenced by these very representations. A portion of Bosselmann's book is based on innovative experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley's Visual Simulation Laboratory. In a section titled "The City in the Laboratory," he discusses how visual simulation was applied to projects in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. The concerns that Bosselmann addresses have an impact on large segments of society, and lay readers as well as professionals will find much that is useful in his timely, accessibly written book.