History of City Planning
Prompt 1: Center and Region I: Compare the urban plans and philosophies of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. What are the spatial, social and economic factors of each plan?
“Wright and Le Corbusier seem predestined for comparison. Their ideal cities confront each other as two opposing variations on the same utopian theme” (Fishman, 163). Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, more commonly known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, and writer. Throughout his life, he was a pioneer of modern architecture and city planning (Frampton, 12). One of Le Corbusier’s contemporaries was also hugely influential but with a competing plan Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959), an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator. Wright is known as one of the most important individuals in American Architecture of all time (Riley, 2). Both Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright were reacting to the density and overcrowding of cities in their urban plans and philosophies. Le Corbusier’s urbanism was consistent throughout many of his plans including La Ville Contemporaine (the Contemporary City), Plan Voisin and La Ville Radieuse (the Radiant City). Wright’s organic architectural style was apparent in his Broadacre City plan, which he consistently proposed throughout most of his life. Both of these influential men were raised outside of big cities and neither had formal training in the fields that the forever altered (Fishman 164). This essay aims to analyze the spatial, social and economic factors of these two influential contemporaries by laying out both plans and then laying out the comparison.
Part I- Le Corbusie...
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...lanning. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T., 1971. Print.
Corbusier, Le. La Ville Radieuse Boulogne-Seine, 1935. Print.
Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. New York: Basic, 1977. Print.
Frampton, Kenneth. Le Corbusier. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Print.
Harrod, Tanya. "Le Corbusier." Crafts (London, England) May/June No 176 (2002): 26-27. EBSCOhost. Web. 21 Apr. 2014. .
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Horizon, 1977. Print.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1970. Print.
Terence Riley, Peter Reed, and Anthony Alofsin. Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. Print.
The design principles that Wright and Olmsted lived by helped to create a standard for following generations. Using Nature as an inspiration and a employing a consistent programmatic style have been characteristics that designers have picked up on from Wright, and plan to continue using. Juxtaposing nature and thick urban life, and finding innovative ways to mix the two, has become a signature characteristic that points to Olmsted. Both, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frederik Law Olmsted have had a heavy influence on designers today when it comes to including nature in design, but in very contrasting ways.
Many of Frank Gehry’s early works reflect a refined manipulation of shapes and structures, whereby many of his buildings present distorted shapes or apparent structures. From the Guggenheim museum to the Walt Disney concert hall, Frank Gehry’s architecture is close to none. He cleverly plays with shapes and geometries. In this essay, I shall start with a brief analysis of Gehry’s house and the influences in the design of the house. I shall then analyze the extent to which Frank Lloyd Wright has inspired and influenced Gehry in the design of his house through a comparison with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Jacob’s house.
William H. Pierson, Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: Technology and the Picturesque, (Doubleday & Company, Inc.), 167.
Burnham is a well-known architect around the world who previously completed work in “Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Manila, and many other cities” (Pg. 3). He was offered the job to design and build the buildings that would be a part of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), after Chicago won the bid for the fair in 1890, and eventually took the offer with his assistant, John Root. The construction of the fair began in 1891 and did not completely finish until the fair was already halfway over in the summer of 1893. During those two and a half years, the success and reputatio...
Dell Upton is a historian and renowned professor of architecture and Urbanism at the University of California. He has published several books on architecture; one of them is “Architecture in the United States”, published in 1998. In this book, Upton analyzes the architecture of the United States in different aspects, such as nature, money and art, thus depicting the great variety in architectural forms, and how throughout the decades, different interests have lead communities to different ways of building, different purposes and materials, thus reflecting their way of thinking and their relationship with the environment. By exploring so many different architectural styles, Upton reveals the great diversity and richness that has always, and continues to characterize American architecture.
During the last half of the 1800’s and the early part of the 1900’s urban population in western Europe made enormous increases. During this period France’s overall population living in cities increased twenty percent, and in Germany the increase was almost thirty percent. This great flow of people into cities created many problems in resource demands and patterns of urban life. These demands created a revolution in sanitation and medicine. Part of this revolution was the redesigning of cities. G.E. Baron Von Haussmann was the genius behind the new plans for the city of Paris.
2 Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks by Bruce B. Pfeiffer, David Larkin, Paul Rocheleau, and Michael Freeman -Rizzoli International Publications (September 15, 1993)
It appears that from the very beginning, Frank Lloyd Wright was destined by fate or determination to be one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century. Not only did Wright possess genius skills in the spatial cognition, his approach to architecture through geometric manipulation demonstrates one aspect of his creativeness. Forever a great businessman, Wright seemed to know how to please his clients and still produce some of the most innovative and ridiculed buildings of the early century. While the United States appeared to be caught up in the Victorian style, Frank Lloyd Wright stepped out in front to face the challenge of creating "American architecture" which would reflect the lives of the rapidly growing population of the Midwest United States. Howard Gardner in his book "Creating Minds" does not make any mention of Frank Lloyd Wright, an innovator who drastically influenced architecture of the twentieth century around the world.
In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.
Many researchers have theorized why the wealthy desire to move back into the city. Schwirian believes that many wealthy people are drawn to the architectural design of some of these old houses in urban areas (Schwirian 96). Harvey believes in a number of theories, and ...
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect, who was a pioneer in the modern style, is considered one of the greatest figures in 20th-century architecture. Wright was born June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin. When he entered the University of Wisconsin in 1884 his interest in architecture had already acknowledged itself. The university offered no courses in his chosen field; however, he enrolled in civil engineering and gained some practical experience by working part time on a construction project at the university. In 1887 he left school and went to Chicago where he became a designer for the firm of Adler and Sullivan with a pay of twenty-five dollars a week. Soon Wright became Louis Sullivan’s chief assistant. Louis Sullivan, Chicago based architect, one of America’s advanced designers. Louis had a profound influence on Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was assigned most of the firm’s home projects, but to pay his many debts he designed ‘Bootlegged Houses’ for private clients in his spare time. Sullivan disapproved, resulting in Wright leaving the firm in 1893 to establish his own office in Chicago.
Frank Lloyd Wright has been called “one of the greatest American architect as well as an Art dealer that produced a numerous buildings, including houses, resorts, gardens, office buildings, churches, banks and museums. Wright was the first architect that pursues a philosophy of truly organic architecture that responds to the symphonies and harmonies in human habitats to their natural world. He was the apprentice of “father of Modernism” Louis Sullivan, and he was also one of the most influential architects on 20th century in America, Wright is idealist with the use of elemental theme and nature materials (stone, wood, and water), the use of sky and prairie, as well as the use of geometrical lines in his buildings planning. He also defined a building as ‘being appropriate to place’ if it is in harmony with its natural environment, with the landscape (Larkin and Brooks, 1993).
Frank Lloyd Wright was perhaps the most influential American architect of the 20th century and one of the greatest to ever live. What was well known about Wright was that he was deeply ambivalent about cities and metropolis centers. His key criticism of large cities was that the advancing technologies had rendered the cities, which were created industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th Century, completely obsolete. He famously quoted that, “ The present city…has nothing to give the citizen…because centralization have no forces of regeneration”. Instead, Wright envisioned decentralized settlements (otherwise known as suburban neighborhoods) that would take advantage of the mobility offered by the automobile, telephones, and telegraphic communication. Because of the rise of the suburban complexes in the post WW2 era, this is where Wright first got the reputation has being a prophet for the architecture world.
In 1516 Thomas More published Utopia, thereby kindling for the Renaissance as well as four our own times a literary ritual designating an idyllic future society and by outcome evaluating the society already in existence. Throughout history, humans have obsessed with projected Utopias of the world that revealed their perception of it. These multidimensional projections can be viewed as naiveties that leaked to the peripheral world nothing more than subjective thoughts. Half a century after More, Leon Battista Alberti promoted a parallel Utopian tradition of designing the Utopian city, one dedicated to Francesco Sforza. This utopian urban planning initiated a multitude of efforts to install a desirable geometrical pattern for future living without narrating how to achieve it. Another few centuries into the future and we view how this obsession with planning for a Utopia still lives through Le Corbusier’s Villa Radieuse master plan. A master plan proposed as the resolution to the enigma of human existence in an industrialized world. Nonetheless with the acknowledgment of the concept of Utopia and the designing for this we come to ponder even more on whether a Utopia can truly exist aside from within ones mind and whether it turns to dystopia when physically established. Can one collective Utopian vision exist or does a Utopic city stem from the coexistence of a variety of utopian thoughts and ideas.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are two very prominent names in the field of architecture. Both architects had different ideas concerning the relationship between humans and the environment. Their architectural styles were a reflection of how each could facilitate the person and the physical environment. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, is considered one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture and Le Corbusier s Villa Savoye helped define the progression that modern architecture was to take in the 20th Century. Both men are very fascinating and have strongly influenced my personal taste for modern architecture. Although Wright and Corbusier each had different views on how to design a house, they also had similar beliefs. This paper is a comparison of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s and Le Corbusier ‘s viewpoints exhibited through their two prominent houses, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.