Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier proposed solving the industrial city with towers set apart in large green spaces, traffic segregated by level and strictly divided uses: dwelling, working, circulating and recreation, each in its place. The Athens Charter turned that scheme into international doctrine.

The built result is the main source of criticism of modern urbanism: isolated blocks with no street, no local shops and no life between buildings. He is still worth reading in full, because his diagnosis of the unhealthy nineteenth-century city was right; what failed was the solution.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, born in Switzerland in 1887 and later a French citizen, took the name Le Corbusier in the 1920s and became the most influential architect of the twentieth century. Vers une architecture (1923) proclaimed the house as a machine for living in; the Plan Voisin (1925) proposed demolishing central Paris to raise cruciform towers among motorways and parks, and the Ville Radieuse (1935) generalised that model: separate functions, raise density in towers, free the ground for greenery and the car. The Athens Charter, drafted after the 1933 CIAM congress and published in 1943, turned those ideas into the doctrine of postwar planning.

The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952) and the capital of Chandigarh, in India, were his great built works, and the tower estates of Europe and Latin America their impoverished heirs. Jane Jacobs named him the origin of the city without streets, and James C. Scott took him as the example of the high modernism that imposes the scheme on life; the critique is fair and also incomplete, because mass postwar social housing would not have existed without his model. He died in 1965 swimming in the Mediterranean.