Utopias urbanas le corbusier biography

At the Fondation Le Corbusier, brigades of tourists take pictures of empty corners as they shuffle through unfurnished rooms, with blue plastic bags covering their shoes so as not to scratch the floor.

Nestled within the heart of the 16th arrondissement in Paris, one of the city’s safest and most affluent neighbourhoods, the foundation honours the legacy of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, nicknamed “apostle of reinforced concrete”: a legacy at once celebrated and reviled.

At the foundation, you can look, but are forbidden from touching, and the whitewashed walls are notably free from information plaques. The innovator of the movement of Modernity, with his love of order, rhetoric of hygiene and contempt for complexity, would surely have been proud.

Le Corbusier’s most ambitious conceptions may never fully have been realised, but his very specific vision of utopia has nevertheless been hugely influential.

In his Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City—1922) and Ville Radieuse (Radi