In the painstaking pursuit of building ideal cities against the infrastructural chaos and hierarchical imbalances as a result of laissez-faire urbanization, the urban plans of Broadacre City (1932) by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ville Contemporaine (1922) and Ville Radieuse (1930) by Le Corbusier illustrate the different spatial methods and socioeconomic philosophies of each designer in achieving a new societal harmony between Man, nature and technology. Both desire to maximize and challenge the potential of modern industrial cities by rational geometric planning, by leveraging on the new possibilities of the Machine Age, especially the automobile and highways, and also by preserving the unity of the family. Yet Wright and Le Corbusier hold opposite attitudes towards the same goal of “individual liberty” (Fishman 164) in the new world. Wright intends for the architectural components that constitute Broadacre City to grow organically like a plant and to “be rooted in the ground” (White and White 194), subject to and shaped by climate and function. Le Corbusier, however, resembles a “scientist in his laboratory…constructing a rigorous theoretical structure [to formulate] the fundamental principles of urbanism” (Fishman 190) as he envisions Ville Contemporaine and Villa Radieuse to be like “well-run factories” (Fishman 191). Finally, Wright advocates decentralization to break the distinction between rural and urban so as to reconcile individualism and organic order in a ‘suburban city’ whereas Le Corbusier argues for centralization to integrate the pleasures of collective cooperation and personal satisfaction.
Both Wright and Le Corbusier express order through geometry that accommodates the necessary linearity for the automobile, but while the former aims at general mobilization as a primary mode of regional transportation in the countryside-city, the latter emphasizes speed as an imperative for a successful modern metropolis. With the celebration of individuality as the overarching theme at Broadacre City, Wright scatters small-scaled public institutions such as factories, stores, professional buildings, schools and cultural centers (Fishman 92) across a four-mile square plan of spacious farmland and amidst forestry to prevent clusters of power in a population of only five thousand. Comprising of grids, out of which “the family acre [is] the smallest grid” (Johnson 120), major arterial roads that combine the rural farms and public spaces define a cruciform as a tool of spatial geometry (Johnson 112). Like Broadacres, the “right angle reigns supreme” (Fishman 190) at Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse where Le Corbusier segregates sectors of buildings by function. Symmetry in all three plans “symbolize victory of reason over chance, of planning over anarchic individualism, and of social order over discord” (Fishman 191) such that geometry becomes the devise that allows man to “put things in order” (Fishman 203).
For Wright to imagine a community where car ownership becomes a prerequisite to live may come across as perhaps paradoxical given that dependence on the automobile contradicts his ultimate objective of self-sustenance and self-reliance at Broadacres. In their plans, Wright, as well as Le Corbusier, both fail to address and consider the environmental and cost implications of gas prices and vehicular pollution. Nevertheless, the main regional arterial route on the left edge of the Broadacre cruciform becomes the “great architectural highway” (Johnson 122) that “unites the citizens with the many points of community exchange that provide the urban experience” (Fishman 128). While the absences of grade crossings, curbs, and ditches allow safety and comfort for travel, multiple-lane highways permit local trucks to commute between warehouse and market on lower levels and long-distance monorails to continuously run above. Similarly, Le Corbusier not only believes that the “transportation system preserves the very life of the city”, but more significantly, he sees “the city that achieves speed achieves success” (Fishman 191) – a manifestation of freedom. Like Wright, he implements multiple grade levels for circulation: in addition to access roads, bicycle paths, and pedestrian walkways, the city center at Ville Contemporaine features a grand multilevel interchange encompassing two great superhighways, subways below, automobile highways above supported by steel pillars, and even an airplane runway on the roof. The abolishment of traditional civic and religious monuments at the city center, replaced by the magnificent invention of the Machine Age, epitomizes the coming of a new modern era of not just the interchange of technology and mobility, but also of ideas, experiences, information and talents (Fishman 191).
Despite their mutual agreement that “the state should distribute land and own public utilities” (Johnson 149-51), Wright disregards the existing city fabric and looks forward to establishing a series of small towns in nature whereas Le Corbusier adopts the approach of urban renewal by “demolishing old buildings and [replacing] with high-rise towers” (Johnson 152) amid oases of greenery in the city center. As such, Wright decentralizes the city to bring industry within walking distance from the home while Le Corbusier disperses industry to the outskirts to make way for glass-and-steel skyscrapers around the central terminal at Ville Contemporaine, and later on, for the high-rise apartments at Ville Radieuse. Accompanying the impressive terminal in the central business district of Ville Contemporaine, twenty-four office-skyscrapers, each sixty stories high and all covering less than fifteen-percent of the ground (Fishman 192), serve 400,000 to 600,000 elite cadres such as industrialists, scientists, and artists (Hall 223). With at least eight-five percent of the remaining land dedicated to gardens, parks, sports and recreational facilities at the core of the plan, Le Corbusier uses nature to merge the intensely dense administrative center with the cultural and entertainment center into a coherent whole: amidst the skyscrapers, shops, cafes, restaurants and art galleries form “sweeping terraces at treetop level”, adjacent to theaters and concert halls (Fishman 198) for the elite. Le Corbusier creatively transforms the flat roofs of administrative buildings and revitalizes their idleness into spectacular “hanging gardens” in the day and “elegant nightclubs as salons of the new society” after dark (Fishman 198). Later on at Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier shifts from the centralized model to employing a zoning principle of parallel bands according to function, like the design of a human body, so that “‘hierarchic’ Ville Contemporaine becomes ‘classless’ Ville Radieuse”: for example, the “isolated ‘head’ [or brain] of sixteen skyscrapers [sit] above the ‘heart’ of the cultural center, [which is] located between two halves or [the] ‘lungs’ of the residential zones” (Frampton 180). The anthropomorphic metaphor in the linear city model at Ville Radieuse restricts the independent expansion of any particular zone so as to avoid the “clearly differentiated spatial structure” (Hall 224) at Ville Contemporaine that reflects the social hierarchy in which housing depended on job roles, Beyond the Ville Contemporaine core lie residential areas of two types – the six-storey luxury apartments for urban elites and the “more modest accommodation for the workers built around courtyards on uniform gridiron of streets” (Hall 223). Yet like Ville Contemporaine, all the glass-and-steel structures in Ville Radieuse rise on pilotis above the site to maximize open public spaces beneath the tall shafts via a continuous park and the “essential joys of [the] sun, space, and [the] green” (Frampton 180) – not just on the ground-level but also on the roofs of the redent block.
To Wright, the family represents “the central bond of the community” (Johnson 112), so, unlike Le Corbusier, he communicates the significance of the family unit into the Broadacres plan by arranging for suburban residences to occupy the central major grid – “the very heart and soul of his concept” (Johnson 112). The school carries the primary focus at the very center of the cruciform, which conveniently allows children to commute safely without having to cross traffic (Wright 254). Concentrating on individual wellbeing, Wright “isolates the city, [and] isolates the recreational or community or administrative buildings one from another, and then surrounds them in a relatively natural landscape” (Wright 120) in order to achieve the autonomy and privacy of the single-family house on its own acre of land. Here, a “series of villages approximately twenty miles apart” (Wright 122) replaces the dense commercial cores at Ville Contemporaine, while smaller villages scatter along or between roads and freeways with rectilinear areas of farmland spreading beyond. Even though both architect-planners favor agriculture, Wright integrates the farmland more generously and effectually into his countryside-city than does Le Corbusier by dispersing “single towers, isolated in green areas on the periphery [of Broadacres] for governmental and commercial business” (White and White 151). While Le Corbusier envisions the greenbelt to encircle his cities, Wright brings the rural into the urban, for “the city was to be within a natural forested garden” (Wright 149).
In the design and expression of living spaces, Le Corbusier strives for concretized uniformity and conformity through scientific reasoning and technology whereas Wright aspires to harmonize individuality and pluralism (White and White 151) in an organic manner that “responds to [the architectural] site and need” (White and White 152). For Le Corbusier in Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse, a man in a city is analogous to a cell in an organism, so people must live in mass-produced reinforced concrete apartment units called cells that “contain the same standard furniture [as a representation of the] “‘house-machine’, which must be both practical and emotionally satisfying for a succession of tenants” (Hall 223). The two-storey apartment into two individual cells, each with a large terrace, provides privacy and silence within the convenience of a collective apartment block that offers a shared facilities like a gym in the top storey and a 300-yard running track on the roof, as well as a variety of communal services from twenty-four hour housekeeping and childcare to personal dining and waiting services. At Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier shifts away from luxury housing and exclusivity of the elite by producing human-scale housing at the city center that could be “right in proportions for everyone, neither cramped nor wasteful [so that] no one would want anything larger or smaller” (Fishman 231). He introduces the Unites house for Ville Radieuse, grand high-rise apartment blocks that each accommodates a neighborhood of 2,700 residents, representing his mastery of “scale, complexity and sophisticated” since his Dom-ino model (Fishman 231). Unlike the cells at Ville Contemporaine that focused on individualism, however, the apartment units of Unite at Ville Radieuse supply homes and collective services to everyone regardless of job position and socioeconomic hierarchy, but housing allotment depends on family size and corresponding needs. In his second plan, Le Corbusier sees through the division between rich and poor and directly into the concept of Man. Unlike Wright, his method of addressing the needs of Man and the family as the key social unit lies in imparting the “cooperative sharing of leisure facilities [that] could give to each family a far more varied and beautiful environment than even the richest individual could afford in a single-family house” (Fishman 231) within the apartment block.
As “a city of individuals” (White and White 314), Broadacre City, on the other hand, must be composed of architecture that demonstrates a new society, a symbol of “the future city [that] will be everywhere and nowhere”, which will be so unique “that we will probably fail to recognize its coming as the city at all” (Frampton 190). Each family at Broadacres owns their own acre of land to cultivate and adorn as they wish for work, leisure and pleasure. Under the encouragement of individual expression and design creativity in meeting functional needs, “no two homes, no two gardens, none of the farm units…, no two farmsteads or factory buildings need be alike” (White and White 314). For Wright, his Usonian House, unlike the Unites apartments, would be small and modest with customized furniture, such as the continuous wall seating, “designed for convenience, economy and comfort” in an open plan to maximize space and optimize circulation (Frampton 191). All built forms use pragmatic, cost-effective materials that produce “strong but light and appropriate houses [and] spacious, convenient workplaces” (White and White 314). Like the mass-produced cells of Le Corbusier, mass production and prefabrication “simplify construction and reduce building costs to a certainty” (Wright 253) for household utilities in the Usonian house. Similarly, residential roofs take on a more active purpose of becoming a trellis or garden. At Broadacres, architecture and plan celebrate harmony with site surroundings, nature, in addition to diversity and uniqueness of the life and spirit of the individual (family). The entire countryside-city with its architectural substance grow together organically like a garden of flowers, each flower blossoming into its distinct character. Unlike the formulaic apartment designs of Le Corbusier and the spatial hierarchy at Ville Contemporaine, “what differs is only individuality and extent [for] there is nothing poor or mean in Broadacres [because] the ground itself predetermines all [architectural] features; the climate modifies them, available means limit them, and function shapes them” (Wright 246).
Le Corbusier, who originally favors capitalism at Ville Contemporaine, later steers towards libertarian syndicalism at Ville Radieuse to build a human city without classes (Fishman 229) whereas Wright eliminates the evils of capitalism, such as unemployment, through a more egalitarian system at Broadacres that allows for interesting and diverse lives to be led in a self-sustaining economy. Relative to the spatial and architectural considerations, both architect-planners fail to deliver a comprehensive analysis of the economic conditions and implications for each of their plans, save a shallow account. At Ville Contemporaine, Le Corbusier believes that whether capitalistic or communistic, “any industrial society must be hierarchically organized, administered from above, with the best qualified people in the most responsible positions”, like leaders of business, finance, politics, science, artists and musicians (Fishman 193), because they have the power, vision, ambition and means to “bring prosperity, order, and beauty to society” (Fishman 195). Thus the city center at Ville Contemporaine comprises of business headquarters of headquarters that allow for the most efficient coordination required for economic advancement (Fishman 193). At Ville Radieuse, however, Le Corbusier substitutes the business center with a residential center that “no longer simply mirrors inequalities in the realm of production but…to make Ville Radieuse a city of organization and freedom” (Fishman 230) against the rigid class hierarchy of supremacy and segregation. Instead he opts for a “pyramid of natural hierarchies” (Fishman 229) in which experts coordinate to achieve clarity and order with authority and plan to establish a structural organization where leisure, self-fulfillment, cooperation and freedom coexist. For both cities, Le Corbusier argues against the long hours of industrial work but recognizes its necessity in order to sustain modern living standards in the city. His solution to the “dehumanizing effects of nine hours of work would be overcome by eight hours of productive leisure” (Fishman 201) for both elites and workers. Satellite towns serve the working class as comfortable and relaxing leisure cities that offer abundant opportunities for recreation, dance, crafts and cafes to “restore to the worker his creative independence” (Fishman 201).
At Broadacres, Wright “sets up a new ideal of success…[directed towards] a new freedom for living in America” (Wright 245): he introduces the single tax and social credit with perishable money, and calls for the autonomous ownership of land and property, so that no worker would ever be “unemployed or a slave to anyone” or have to “submit to exploitative wages or poor working conditions” (Fishman 130). Le Corbusier creates leisure cities to counterbalance hard labor but Wright seeks to strengthen the family as the basic economic unit by providing for it “its own world of stability, prosperity and love [as] its members are expected to spend the bulk of their time living and working together” (Fishman 130). The Usonian house belongs to its tenants but the Unite apartment cells function merely as machine-dwellings where the “individual’s privilege exist only as part of a collective order” (Fishman 199). Moreover, in contrast to the formulaic design of apartment units at Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse, the Broadacre citizen “sets up his own factory-made house, part by part, according to his means” (Frampton 191) and adding on to it from his earnings in either part-time farming on his own land or factory work (Fishman 130). Factories can be privately or collectively owned but are to be small and conveniently situated to allow for only a short driving distance between home and workplace. In an egalitarian, democratic system, Wright ambiguously tolerates “a limited measure of inequality…from “one-car houses” to “five-car houses” [but maintains that] “quality is in all, for all, alike” (Fishman 131) without further exposition. Regardless, with the home as the primary unit, factories and other institutions become “support units” for the family (Fishman 131) so that the entire Broadacre community composed of many families may remain strong and united. With the same goal of attaining harmony between economic and psychological wellbeing, Le Corbusier segregates labor and leisure whereas Wright integrates the two, but their proposals remain theoretical at best due to the lack of application and depth required in the complexities of real-life urban economics.
While Le Corbusier, who despises rural dwelling where workers become “‘reattached to the soil’ and lose those rebellious qualities…associated with the urban proletariat” (Fishman 201), sharpens the gulf between labor and leisure in cities, Wright blurs the line between the two until both realms merge into one in the countryside-city of Broadacres. Le Corbusier perceives “the city as one great organization” (Fishman 204) under authority and hierarchy in the workplace, but he provides the apartment cell as an oasis for privacy, “abundance and love”, and designs outdoor spaces into a “Green City [that combines] art and play” (Fishman 204). The segregation of function, emotions and purpose between workplace, home and public places imitates the disposition of a grand machine, which conveys the creative but scientific rationality of the architect-planner. At Broadacres, though, Wright believes that the “natural economic order” minimizes disorder under the conditions of a planned environment and so permits a larger extent of individual freedom than Le Corbusier. For Le Corbusier by the time of Ville Radieuse, “only discipline could create the order he sought so ardently…in a world threatened by chaos and collapse” (Fishman 227), hence the absence of a single regulatory power at Ville Contemporaine contrasts against the “more authoritarian and more libertarian… authority” (Fishman 226) at Ville Radieuse. Men and women work full-time for wages in both cities: made possible by design, technology and mass production, the architectural program of the Unite house and apartment cells takes care of the banal household chores to optimize the time for employed citizens to enjoy the presence of each other. As such, the family “no longer has an economic function to perform [but] exists as an end in itself” (Fishman 232) for individual and collective pleasure.
Wright, however, interweaves the dynamic of social life within the economic fabric at Broadacres, generating a seamless whole between individualism and order, but always keeping the home as the single focus for community life. Deeming coordination as “a kind of self-betrayal” (White and White 196), he emphasizes on small scales of farms, homes, factories, schools, universities, laboratories, markets, and transactions, with only the county government to deal with basic administration. To avoid congestion and (over)crowding, the Roadside Market is the one and only “most attractive, educational and entertaining…modern unit” (Fishman 133) at the intersection of two highways in Broadacres City, which encompasses small stalls for fresh groceries, machine manufacture and handicraft as well as “cabarets, cafes and good restaurants” (Fishman 133) nearby. Absent at Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse, face-to-face transactions at the Roadside Market makes “buying and selling…a form of entertainment, a game of mutual enjoyment, and a ritual of social solidarity” (Fishman 133). While Le Corbusier idolizes businesses and profit to sustain the successful metropolis, Wright values “education as salvation [and states that] the whole life of Broadacre City was dependent on education” (Fishman 136) in order to cultivate the individuality of people based on the “mastery of technology and [an] understanding of the wisdom of the past” (Fishman 137). Expecting the years between elementary school and high school to be mandatory, each academic institution is small in student population of at most forty with a flexible and customizable curriculum for students to learn according to their own skills and interests, whether handwork or brainwork (Fishman 137). Higher education takes place between apprentice and master in the Community Center, smaller research institutions, or the Design Center. Even the Community Center offers unconventionally stimulating and hands-on activities like “a golf course, a racetrack, a zoo, an aquarium, a planetarium [and] an art gallery” on top of theaters and restaurants (Fishman 135). The Design Center develops the next generation of artists who can maintain the organic character of Broadacres and “thus protect the balance between man and nature on which the whole society rests” (Fishman 138). To strengthen the Broadacre spirit, Wright even creates a religion drawn from the four natural elements of earth, water, fire and air (Fishman 141). Citizens gather around a central courtyard at Broadacre Cathedral in shared worship and celebration of the arts with the collective “in harmony with the ‘Organic Whole’” (Fishman 141) that is nature. The ‘universal religion’ here encapsulates the vision and philosophies of Wright for Broadacres and becomes aptly revered at Broadacre Cathedral. Compared to Le Corbusier, Wright delves into the details of various institutions beyond merely the dwelling and physical plans, covering a wider breadth of the aspects of society in his city, and consequently, giving a clearer picture of the day-to-day life at Broadacres.
Both Wright and Le Corbusier see the architect-planner as “the natural leader of society” (Fishman 211) above bureaucracy, desiring to reorganize the city in order to achieve an ideal harmony and beauty in all aspects of urban life for a given population. However, their plans approach the same goal through very distinct ideologies in attempt to reconcile juxtaposing elements: Wright yearns for freedom through individuality and pluralism but contradicts himself by implying the dependence on the Usonian house, the land, the automobile, education, and even the architect-planner of Broadacres. Likewise, Le Corbusier finds happiness in the work of mass production and the pleasure of community, and seeks to combine both by distinguishing labor and leisure, so that labor can sustain leisure while leisure can promote labor. Yet the issues of social hierarchy and economic inequality present at Ville Contemporaine remain to threaten his evolved classless vision for Ville Radieuse. Questions and loopholes persist. In the pursuit of freedom and happiness in the urban society, perhaps one should return to the definition of freedom, or perhaps there is no one universal solution to the planning of the (ideal) city? Nonetheless, both Wright and Le Corbusier have accomplished an incredible feat in distilling all the philosophical and socioeconomic complexities to establish their theoretical models, whether the method is decentralization followed by reintegration in a countryside-city for the former, or centralization at the city center for the latter.
