All Intensive Purposes

In the wake of the riots outside Paris and across France, some people have been blaming the sterile high-rises of the banlieues, and in particular Le Corbusier, whom they finger for having gotten the whole high-rise thing going. At TNR Online, Clay Risen says it's not his fault:

Like many architects of his generation, Le Corbusier believed that revolutionary changes in modern society required a revolutionary architecture. Modern buildings had to respond to rapid social change and to incorporate new modes of living and interaction. Booming cities required denser housing, hence the high-rise apartment building. Vertical density, however, entailed vertical integration of social spaces, hence Le Corbusier's concept of the "interior street," in which alternating floors were filled with shops and services. Increasingly dense cities meant disappearing green space, hence his "tower in a park" design, in which a building's vertical density enabled open land around it. Fragmented family units needed flexible living spaces, hence his open-plan apartment designs. Such adaptability is what Le Corbusier meant by the "machine for living"--pace his literal-minded critics, he certainly did not believe that buildings should be merely functionalist edifices.

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The public housing authorities who copied Le Corbusier's work in the late 1950s and early '60s saw a model for cheap, high-density housing. They tore down vast swaths of urban and (in Europe) suburban neighborhoods and threw up massive, poorly built, and banally designed projects separated from the rest of the city. They rejected Le Corbusier's insistence on mixed-use development, so that residents became isolated from their jobs and social lives as well. And rather than use the buildings' densities to improve the efficiency of public services, housing authorities in Europe and North America used their anonymity and physical isolation to ignore the needs of their residents--especially when, by the late '60s, the welfare state model began to implode. Poorly maintained and understaffed, within a generation these monstrosities became havens of crime and poverty; the notorious Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was dynamited a mere 20 years after its construction, and today Chicago is systematically tearing down such mega-projects as the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green.

In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann suggests that part of the attraction of building high-rises like the Robert Taylor Homes was that a greater proportion of the government's spending would go to (politically-connected) construction firms. If so, the governments that built awful housing on the South Side of Chicago and outside Paris did not spend as much time as Le Corbusier did thinking about how to make those projects work.