Plan Voisin 1925

Le corbusier reworked
certain elements of the
Ville Contemporaine &
The
sky is atoremote
hopeof
far,
applied
a section
far above it. The street is no
paris
more than a trench, a deep
18adouble
60
cleft,
narrow cruciform
passage. And
storey
although
we skyscrapers,
have been
accustomed
it for
more
placed intoan
orthogonal
than
a thousand
years,
our
street
grid and
parkhearts
always
oppressed
like are
green
space
by the constriction of its
three clusters
enclosing
walls. of luxury
apartments

Street system

Heavy traffic would proceed at basement level

lighter traffic at ground level
fast traffic should flow along limited-access arterial roads that
supplied rapid and unobstructed cross city movement
pedestrianized streets, wholly separate from vehicular traffic
and placed at a raised level.
The number of existing streets would be diminished by twothirds due to the new arrangements of housing, leisure
facilities and workplaces, with same-level crossing points
eliminated wherever possible.
So I shall ask my readers to imagine they are walking in this new
city, and have begun to acclimatize themselves to its
untraditional advantages. You are under the shade of trees, vast
lawns spread all round you. The air is clear and pure; there is

A sheet of glass and three partition-walls make an ideal

office : this type of construction holds good when a
Critics attacked
on theSo
central
city,towhere
land
thousand
have toits
befocus
provided.
from top
bottom
the
values
were
highest
and
dislocations
most
difficult
facades of the new city's office-buildings form unbroken
the creation
of vastThese
empty
spacesstructures
in place ofevince
close-knit
expanses
of glass.
colossal
no
streets of
with
their varied
civic
life
vestige
masonry.
All that
remains
visible is glass ... and
proportion. The architect has discarded brick and stone.

The immensely deep foundations of these office-buildings will entail the removal of
enormous quantities of spoil.. we shall let what has to be taken out of these
excavations accumulate by the side of them, and diversify the packs by planting
the mounds with trees and sowing them with grass. Go and look at the little
artificial hillock beside the Museum in the Jardin des Plantes, and see what a
nucleus of unexpected views it has created.