[HN Gopher] Athens Charter
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Athens Charter
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 24 points
Date : 2023-04-21 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| RC_ITR wrote:
| A lot of people (in this thread and elsewhere) try to defend
| corbu as a visionary whose ideas were ruined by cheap
| construction of whatever, but it's simply not the case.
|
| Humans need nature and green space, that's an easy thing to agree
| with.
|
| But putting small amounts of green space in between everything
| (rather than centralizing it) is an awful idea.
|
| Not only does it make everyone travel (probably drive) past the
| green space to get anywhere, it makes the green space worse by
| making it a pseudo space where it's not nature (you still see
| buildings), but it's also not useful civic space for the city.
|
| He made cool buildings and his are some of the few brutalist
| buildings people think look cool, but he was just dead wrong on
| urban design.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Le Corbusier is a cautionary tale of human hubris and the worst
| part of 20th century modernity.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| [flagged]
| glompers wrote:
| > should be more widely understood and, IMHO, criticized. I
| think this is almost as bad as the Nazis.
|
| Cultivating too exalted a view of our human potential/destiny
| -- Modernism and some postmodernisms both following in a long
| line of philosophical aspirations to transcend internal issues
| as well as exterior ones -- and having too low a view of human
| potential/destiny each lend themselves to evil, for sure.
|
| Immoderate moderation in all things, on the other hand, can be
| no less proud of its profound public-spiritedness though.
| burlesona wrote:
| Corbusier and his acolytes were almost singly responsible for the
| many urban planning (and related social justice) atrocities of
| the mid century, especially in the US.
|
| If you're interested in the more recent counter-movement trying
| to roll back some of these mistakes, see the Charter for the New
| Urbanism: https://www.cnu.org/who-we-are/charter-new-urbanism
| rahen wrote:
| He's also responsible for a lot of urban atrocities in the
| former soviet countries, with endless rows of commieblocks
| lined up on extremely wide avenues / urban highways.
|
| At least it can accommodate some form of mass transit, but it's
| even more anti-individualistic, soulless, and dehumanized than
| the US sprawl.
|
| In both cases, those mistakes were the result of central
| planning. Most of them were fixed with the Aalborg charter,
| which reverted from central planning to a more organic,
| spontaneous growth with a bit of regulatory oversight.
| betaby wrote:
| Atrocities are those plywood 'houses' and whole urban sprawl in
| USA and Canada. They have enormous environmental cost, in
| contrast of those ideas of Corbusier. And even then, you
| suburban cardboard bungalow inside is Corbusier, just think a
| second about that.
| glompers wrote:
| I suppose I see the axes differently. If a city is going to
| be there, there are going to be a bunch of costs; but I don't
| want built space to be constrained and crummy for people by
| being either A) favela/bidonville/slum decrepit and pest-
| riddled
|
| B) manicured like a plywood subdivision to maximize resale
| value, at the expense of freedom to add on and be playful, cf
| Daniel Pinkwater's classic book "The Big Orange Splot"
|
| C) homogenized by high design prefabricators "because people
| don't mind having identical phones if the phones are cheap
| but good, so, people won't mind having identical homes on
| that basis either"
|
| D) unwalkably sited
|
| E) arrayed in vertical cul-de-sac residential stalks with no
| personal private life at ground level or F) mass-customized
| for them by AR/VR&cement-extrusion-robot-rental
| prefabricators and perhaps well-meaning building code
| officials who will find it much safer to pre-warranty the
| strength of such homes than try to verify the safety of
| people's own manually cobbled-together creations
|
| I'd rather suggest that the downsides of B thru F can be
| avoided if A were pursued in the absence of economically
| marginal conditions that usually are its raison d'etre.
|
| A neighborhood where everyone is well-housed but often
| inclined to iterate their physical surroundings and
| contribute to greater building skills and greater building
| beauty would be a pretty interesting environment in which to
| raise a family...
| twelvechairs wrote:
| People love to dump on Corbusier for all the ills of 20th C city
| planning. Worth noting
|
| - These congresses were groups of architects (generally of
| private houses) struggling to come to terms with how to plan
| massive cities. At a time of population explosions, new ways of
| living, modern construction technology etc. City planning really
| didn't exist as a discipline. No hard science or social science
| around cities. Etc. You cant really blame them for not getting
| things right.
|
| - Much of this work led to postwar quickly and cheaply built
| social housing. Which was much needed in the postwar world
| however turned worse later especially when public housing became
| segregationist ghettos for lower classes in the late 20th C. You
| cant really blame these early modernists for that.
|
| - Corbusier in fact had many of the ideas that did stick (as
| opposed to many of the other attendees) - the unitee d'habitation
| was an incredible system. He obviously didn't understand streets
| or social interaction in a way that Jane Jacobs did much later
| but he did understand mass production, concrete and internal
| apartment planning in ways that led the world.
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