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Banlieues Ballardiens
Author: Chris Nakashima-Brown • Nov 28th, 2005 •Category: Ballardosphere, architecture, urban revolt
An essay in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine suggests that the recent troubles in Paris were High-Rise meets Super-Cannes — anger and aggression inculcated by architecture. But you already knew that.
Revolting High Rises (registration required)
‘The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.
‘Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.’
The full article is here. (registration required)
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