The Lay of the Landscape.(International Edition; THE ARTS)(Le Corbusier: the Art of Architecture art exhibition)

Byline: Christopher Werth

Le Corbusier was a better architect than urban planner. Yet his blueprint for city life still reigns.

In a short film that opens the new exhibit "Le Corbusier: the Art of Architecture" at the Barbican Centre in London, the dapper, bespectacled Swiss-born architect stands before a grand plan of Paris and draws a thick black line across the map, blocking out a vast, rectangular swath of the city. His "Plan Voisin"--conceived with the belief that modern man required modern cities in which to live--involved razing part of the capital's Right Bank to make way for nearly 20 high-rise residential towers neatly arranged on an expansive grid of wide avenues and green lawns, in stark contrast to Paris's dense warren of charming medieval lanes. Thankfully, Le Corbusier's plan was considered as preposterous then as it sounds now, and the city's Marais district, where the monolithic development would have stood, remains largely intact.

For better and worse, Le Corbusier certainly had vision. The Barbican exhibit, neatly arrayed in photos, films and architectural models (through May 24), illustrates how he has earned his place as both the most revered and most reviled figure in modern architecture. His sensational proposals--like the plan for central Paris--helped him win the attention he wanted and guided the principles of urban design for decades to come. But he was a better architect than urban planner; Le Corbusier produced some of the most important buildings of the 20th century--including the pilgrimage chapel he designed at Ronchamp in western France and the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels--inspiring generations of future designers. His detractors, however, blame him for many of the ills of contemporary urban life: crime-ridden social housing projects and an overreliance on the automobile--an invention Le Corbusier was infatuated with, which his designs always took into account. Although the grandest of his schemes were never realized, his ideas for concentrating urban living in high-rise towers to make way for open green space below has ultimately shaped the look of nearly every city today.

Like many urbanists before him, Le Corbusier seemed not to like cities. He came of age in an era when Europe and America were captivated by their own slums, and regarded cities as crowded, dirty places. He sought a solution in the kind of order and efficiency he saw in the industrial assembly line. The city of the future, he thought, should have clearly defined places for work, commerce and living. Unlike his contemporaries, who favored far more suburban ideals, his manifesto for the "Radiant City" pushed for dense urban populations and modern transport systems. He envisioned airplanes landing amid soaring skyscrapers connected by elevated highways where automobile traffic could flow unimpeded. But his visions were often just fantasies. In a proposal for Algiers, even the French colonial government noted it would need ...