Astral Codex Ten

Le Corbusier

6 min read

Le Corbusier

Article

Le Corbusier is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between January 29, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “weird aesthetic choices by Le Corbusier and follow them off a cliff”; “the mandatory section on Le Corbusier”; “comparable with the wackiest plans of Le Corbusier”. It most often appears alongside Seeing Like A State, England, France.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: December 04, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
(I'm not saying it would necessarily have gone well if he did - maybe the principles don't scale, or maybe he would have chosen the wrong metrics, or maybe any of a thousand other things could have gone wrong. But it would have been better than what he actually tried, which was to take some weird aesthetic choices by Le Corbusier and follow them off a cliff. Weyl takes exactly the thing Niemeyer didn't do, then uses the failure of his project to argue that doing it is bad!)
Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
Some sections seemed straight out of Scott. There's the mandatory section on Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs. Taleb's picture of the fragilista prediction-loving intellectual-yet-idiot with his formal system and no willingness to think outside of it matches Scott's complaints about High Modernism. Taleb's ode to tinkering and skin-in-the-game matches Scott's conception of metis. Taleb is much more ambitious (some would say less careful and scholarly) than Scott, so instead of focusing on a few studies of historical farmers, he relates this to almost every part of today's society. But it's the same argument.
Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
This is a shame, since the mass destruction of books and newspapers by libraries in the post-war era deserves to be better known as one of the most egregious failures of High Modernism, comparable with the wackiest plans of Le Corbusier. The story combines an excessive reliance on simplistic mathematical models, wilful ignorance to the desires of actual library-users and scholars, embracement of miniaturization and modernization as terminal values, and an almost complete disregard of 19th century books as historical artefacts. Unlike industrial farms, which can be broken up, and Brasília-style skyscrapers, which can be torn down and replaced with something else, the losses caused by the mass deaccessioning of books and newspapers from libraries were often irreplaceable.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
Second, the first crop of European modern architects were incredibly charismatic and persuasive people. Gropius’ nickname was “The Silver Prince”; Wolfe describes him as “irresistibly handsome to women, correct and urbane in a classic German manner, a lieutenant of cavalry during [World War I], decorated for valor, a figure of calm, certitude, and conviction at the center of the maelstrom … [he] seemed to be an aristocrat who through a miracle of sensitivity had retained every virtue of the breed and cast off all the snobberies and dead weight of the past”. Meanwhile, his colleague, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, demanded that everyone refer to him as “Le Corbusier” (French for “The Crow-Like One”)1 as some sort of combination artistic pseudonym / branding / flex. How are normal humans supposed to compete with people like these?
Inline links: 1
Yamasaki designed it classically Corbu [ie Le Corbusier], fulfilling the master’s vision of highrise hives of steel, glass, and concrete separated by open spaces of green lawn…On each floor there were covered walkways, in keeping with Corbu’s idea of “streets in the air”. Since there was no other place in the project in which to sin in public, whatever might ordinarily have taken place in bars, brothels, social clubs . . . now took place in the streets in the air. Corbu’s boulevards made Hogarth’s Gin Lane look like the oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York. Respectable folk pulled out, even if it meant living in cracks in the sidewalks. Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately. “Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up!”
Translation: I, like you, am working here within these walls. I am still a member of the compound. Don’t worry, the complexities and contradictions I am going to show you, with their “messy vitality”, are not going to be drawn from the stupidities of the world outside (exception, occasionally, for playful effects) but from our own experience as progeny of the Silver Prince, from that experience which is inherent in art: namely, the esoteric lessons of Mies, [Le Corbusier], and Gropius concerning modern architecture itself. I am going to show you how to make architecture that will amuse, delight, enthrall other architects. This, then was the genius of Venturi. He brought modernism into its Scholastic age. Scholasticism in the Dark Ages was theology to test the subtlety of other theologians. Scholasticism in the twentieth century was architecture to test the sublimity of other architects.