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  • what if the idea of being a modern person and leading a modern life still has an exciting ring to it?

  • It's at least in part down to the influence of an extraordinary Swiss architect, Luca Pusey, who in the first half of the 20th century wrote books, put up buildings on design bits of furniture.

  • They're all conveyed the excitement, sleekness and glamour of the modern technological world.

  • Le Corbusier began his career by attacking the architectural off the Victorian age, on contrast, ing it with what he saw as the beauty and intelligence of modern engineering.

  • Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work, he exclaimed in his famous polemical book towards a new architecture written in 1923.

  • Meanwhile, the Corbusier added.

  • Our architect's of disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish.

  • This is because they will soon be nothing for them to do.

  • We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs.

  • At the same time, everyone needs toe wash.

  • Our engineers provide for these things and they will be our builders.

  • Look, obviously a recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.

  • His hatred of any kind of decoration extended to a pity of the British royal family and the ornate golden carriage in which they travelled to open Parliament in every year.

  • He suggested that they pushed the car monstrosity off the cliffs of Dover and instead learn to travel around the kingdom.

  • In Hispano Suiza in 1911 racing car.

  • He even mocked, roam the traditional destination for the education of young architects and renamed it the City of Horrors.

  • The damnation of the half educated and the cancer off French architecture on account of its violation of modern principles of architecture through all its baroque detail ing elaborate wall painting and statuary for low copies year.

  • True great architecture, meaning architecture motivated by the quest for modern efficiency, was more likely to be found in a electricity turbine or low pressure ventilating fan.

  • It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs, which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

  • Once asked by a magazine editor to name his favorite chair, Mkapa's year cited the seat of a cockpit on describe the first time he ever saw an airplane.

  • In the spring of 1909 in the sky above Paris, It was the Aviator, the quarter lar bear, taking a turn around the Eiffel Tower as the most significant moment of his life.

  • He observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all the superfluous decoration of buildings and so unwittingly transforms them into successful pieces of modern architecture.

  • To place a classical statue on top of the house was full Akapusi as silly as to add one toe a plane.

  • But at least by crashing In response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering the absurdity starkly manifest.

  • Love your accuse, he concluded.

  • But if the function of a plane was to fly, what wants the function off house look or busy?

  • It arrived at a simple list of requirements beyond which all other ambitions were no more than a Z put it romantic cobwebs.

  • The function of a house was to provide one a shelter against heat called rain thieves and the inquisitive to a receptacle for light and sun.

  • Three.

  • A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking work and personal life.

  • What modern man wants is a monk sell well lit and heated with a corner from which he can look at the stars right like copies.

  • His private houses, which he built in and around Paris in the 19 twenties and thirties, were unlike anything that people had ever witnessed.

  • Both inside and out of Corpus Year took an interest in their smallest details.

  • Always with an eye to increasing efficiency, he built much of the furniture himself and was often to earn more money from it than from his architecture.

  • Le Corbusier was evidently one of the world's greatest architects, but he was also one of the world's most disastrous urban designers.

  • His manifesto on how to make cities contained in two books, The City of Tomorrow and It's Planning, written in 1995 and the radiant city of 1933 called for a dramatic break from the past.

  • The existing city centres must all come down to save itself.

  • Every great city must rebuild its center Look, obviously you wanted ever taller towers, some housing as many as 40,000 people.

  • When he visited New York for the first time, he came away disappointed by the relatively small scale of the buildings.

  • Your skyscrapers are too low, he told a surprise journalist by building upwards to problems would be resolved.

  • It a stroke.

  • Overcrowding on urban sprawl.

  • Maccabees Year Plan To abolish city streets In his vision of the future, people would have foot parts all to themselves, while cars would enjoy massive, dedicated motorways with smooth, curving interchanges.

  • Even more than Paris, New York was full of copies here.

  • Theo Epitome oven Illogical City because it had managed to graft skyscrapers the buildings of the future, onto a tight street plan better suited to a medieval settlement.

  • On his trip around the United States, he advises increasingly bemused American hosts that Manhattan ought to be demolished to make way for a fresh and more counties.

  • Ian attempted urban design Ironically, what look obviously has dreams help to generate with a dystopian housing estates that now ring historic Paris The wastelands from which tourists avert their eyes in confused horror and disbelief on their way into the historic city.

  • To taken Overland train to the most violent and degraded of thes places is to realize all that Maccabees.

  • You forgot about architecture and in the wider sense about human nature.

  • For example, he forgot how tricky it is when just a few of one's 2699 neighbors decide to throw a party or buy a handgun, he forgot how drab, reinforced concrete consume under a gray sky.

  • He forgot how awkward it is when someone like to fire in the lift shaft on home is on the 44th floor.

  • When Luke opposite died in 1965 having had a heart attack in the south of France, where he'd gone for a swim, he was responsible for having built some of the most beautiful private houses of all time.

  • But his ideas had also destroyed some of the great cities of Europe in the United States.

  • For a man whose ambition was to change the world, weaken revere him, paradoxically, for the most modest things about him.

  • His beautiful whitewashed villas, his door handles and his arm chairs.

  • Our book, What is Culture for?

what if the idea of being a modern person and leading a modern life still has an exciting ring to it?

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