Concrete Visions of Algiers: Le Corbusier’s Unrealised Urban Utopia [extract]
May 2016 | History of Architecture: Ornament, Structure and Space 1815–2016 (Bologna)
Introduction
‘A new scale of grandeur will animate the architecture of the city and the scope of its undertakings’.
Flying over the Algerian town of M’Zab with his pilot-friend, Durafour, a megalomaniacal vision came to Le Corbusier: to ‘restore’ urban landscapes for the needs of the modern-day, and in doing so, ‘rescue’ their past.
During the 1930s, Le Corbusier conceived radical masterplans for cities from Barcelona and Stockholm to Bogota and Algiers. Not the product of competitions or direct commissions, this lesser-known portion of his work manifested an obsession; to sanitise the city by redistributing homes into high-rises, and to liberate corridors between them for cars.
The architect’s ambitions for Algiers were inevitably shaped by his experience in Paris earlier in his career. Less than a century before Le Corbusier’s time, Georges-Eugene Haussman had overseen the transformation of medieval Paris into high-density apartment blocks scored by boulevards and parks. He admired this urban intervention, but ‘cities die every 50 years or more… they are demolished, they are rebuilt’. In 1922, Le Corbusier sought to trump the legacy of his predecessor with ‘Ville Contemporaine pour trois millions d’habitants’. Sparing a constellation of historic monuments, it is a tabula rasa, punctuated by cruciform skyscrapers and dissected by highways raised above continuous open parkland.
This became Le Corbusier’s blueprint for the ideal modern city. Lamenting that ‘the cathedrals of our time have not yet been built’, he repeatedly remodelled the Parisian prototype for further historical subjects. Between 1931 and 1942, the territory of the moment was Algiers. The colonial capital was calling for some ‘cathedrals’ of its own. ‘Plan Obus’, his proposal for its reconstruction and extension, was rejected by unanimous vote on the 12th June 1942. Clearly dramatic in scale, the case against it can be carried further: his designs on Algiers embodied a colonial urban policy of surveillance and supremacy.
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