UNDERSTANDING LE CORBUSIER’S UTOPIA: URBANISME AND ITS CURRENT EXTENTIONS

One of the most important names in the modern city planning discipline is Le Corbusier, author of the book Urbanisme. Urbanisme is his utopia and one of the most important texts of utopian history. Le Corbusier thinks that a rational design, in accordance with modernism, has universal validity. Paris was always in his mind and he has started to design his utopia from the deficiencies of Paris and the anger he felt toward the city. However, he thought that the city he had designed in this utopia, had to be a model for all cities of the world. The main arguments of Le Corbusier’s utopian design are: there is only one common truth for humanity, and the human mind is able to find it. In 1925, Le Corbusier elaborated on this design of his textually and compiled his proposals, creating a corner stone, a cult study that reflected many influences today. For Le Corbusier, cities should be designed according to an ideal model; this is a city utopia. The homogenous city he planned to go into circulation all around the world and produced with the same standards in every point of the earth, is a giant machine. It is possible to feel this feeling in every corner of the city, even on its plan. Everything that is nonfunctional is excluded from this city and expelled. For the sake of optimization of productivity, all the texture belonging to the past has been discarded. This radical disengagement in the design of the city is not just about its design, it is all about the past at the same time as well. Le Corbusier's suggestion is an uprooting operation. What lies behind externalizing everything that is unique to the human beings such houses, streets and the city from all living areas, is the monopolistic radical rationality and the unconditional glorification of the bureaucratic power? The design of Le Corbusier is, over time - ironically- the projection of political authoritativeness in the scale of urbanism of modernism which initially emerged as a liberating paradigm. Cities, as Le Corbusier suggests, cannot be continuously destroyed totally and rebuilt from scratch each time with the evolving technology. The world has been rapidly urbanizing since the nineteenth century and urbanism is now ascending to metropolitan dimensions. Metropolitanism is driving cities to the domination of pluralism and destruction of homogeneity. This paper discusses Le Corbusier’s utopian city design by analyzing different architectural characteristics of the project and concludes with some arguments of this utopia for today’s cities