4 April 2009
Took the bus to the City and ended up at the Le Corbusier exhibit at the Barbican.
It was the perfect place to host the exhibit as the Barbican seems to me to be apotheosis of the entire modernist utopia movement - it's a remarkable and compelling idea, and yet still it just doesn't quite work. Too much concrete, too inorganic. The Barbican is London's version of Boston's City Hall Plaza.
Can't say as I much share Le Corbusier's taste, although I appreciate the clean lines of the furniture and even of the individual buildings. It's his master urban planning visions that sent shivers down my spine. I actually gasped when viewing his 'map' of Paris, which envisioned mowing down the Right Bank and replacing the existing arcades and already-Hausmann'd Boulevards with a giant council estate of twenty identical high rise buildings. On his modified map of Paris, he had drawn this overhead view and the buildings looked like the hulking metal jacks that served as WWI anti-tank barriers (I'm sure there's a proper name for this). In Algiers, his plan was for a miles-long apartment building that would hug the entire crescent of the seafront - completely cutting off public access and the relationship between the sea and the rest of the city. What was he thinking?
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