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The Wedding of Jane Jacobs & Le Corbusier
Figure 3. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, 1925.
one another; they are surrounded by large open spaces or parks, and they are allocated to commercial, not residential, purposes; the great tenement houses and other building being relatively low in height.”12 Le Corbusier planned for his residents of the Radiant City to live in blocks of ‘villas’, that were located in a separate quarter than that of the high-rises. The residential quarters would be at a density of 1,000 persons per hectare, about 2,500 persons per acre.13 The low-rise housing would occupy only 15 percent of ground coverage with the rest as open space in the form of parks and recreation spaces. It is important to note that a critique is being placed on how Le Corbusier’s contentions have been used in practice and exploited in regards to the tower-in-the-park typology. The high-rise was misused from its original meaning in Le Corbusier’s doctrine. The foundations for the argument of the Cartesian skyscraper were valid. However, its execution in the form of urban high-rise residential developments have not always proven so.
12. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow And Its Planning, (London: John Rodker Publisher, 1929), xi. 13. Le Corbusier, The radiant city: elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization, (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 131.