#33

From Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia:

“Absorb that multiplicity, reconcile the improbable through the certainty of the plan, offset organic and disorganic qualities by accentuating their interrelationship, demonstrate that the maximum level of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the productivity of the spirit: these are the objectives delineated by Le Corbusier with a lucidity that has no comparison in progressive European culture.”

“If architecture is now synonymous with the organization of production, it is also true that, beyond production itself, distribution and consumption are the determining factors of the cycle. The architect is an organizer, not a designer of objects. This assertion of Le Corbusier’s is not a slogan but an obligatory directive that connects intellectual initiative and the civilisation machiniste. As a member of the vanguard of that civilization, in pointing the way and determining its plans (even if only in a partial area) the architect must proceed in several different ways. What he offers directly is the appel aux industriels and the building types. The search for an authority capable of mediating the planning of building production and urbanism with programs of civil reorganization is pursued on the political level with the institution of the CIAM. The maximum articulation of form is the means of rendering the public an active and participant consumer of the architectural product.”

“…for Le Corbusier it is the whole anthropogeographic landscape that becomes the subject on which the reorganization of the cycle of building production must insist.”

“At Algiers the old Casbah, the hills of Fort-l’Empereur, and the indentation of the coastline are taken up as material to be reutilized, actual ready-made objects on a gigantic scale. … The fact is that the industrial object does not presuppose any single given location in the space of the city. Serial production here basically implies a radical overcoming of any spatial hierarchy. The technological universe is impervious to the here and the there. Rather, the natural place for its operations is the entire human environment—a pure topological field, as Cubism, Futurism, and Elementarism well understood. Thus in the reorganization of the city it is the entire three-dimensional space that must become available.”

“… Le Corbusier even foresees the possibility of inserting eccentric and eclectic elements into the network of fixed structures [in the Obus plan]. The liberty allowed the public must be pushed to the point of permitting the public—the proletariat in the case of the serpentine that winds along the seaside, and the upper middle class on the hills of Fort-l’Empereur—to express its own bad taste. Architecture thus becomes a pedagogical act and a means of collective integration.”