17. done.boyer christine- aviation and the aerial view le corbusier's spatial transformations

8/3/2019 17. DONE.boyer Christine- Aviation and the Aerial View Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations

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Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940sAuthor(s): M. Christine BoyerSource: Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories(Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 93-116Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805806Accessed: 17/05/2010 08:15

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AVIATION AND THE

AERIAL VIEWLE CORBUSIER'S SPATIALTRANSFORMATIONS IN THE1930s AND 1940s

M. CHRISTINE BOYER

Part One: The Aerial ViewAviation and Equipment. A London publishing house, The Studio, Ltd, sent Le Cor?busier a letter in January 1935, inquiring whether he would be interested in collaborat-ing on a new series of books to be titled The New Vision. The promoters explained thateach book in the series would be devoted to a unique event in industrial design, withspecific attention paid to the designers, their aims, and the potential these designs heldfor social and human development. They would begin the series with a volume on theairplane. Le Corbusier was asked to write an introductory essay, supply captions forthe images they had already collected, and offer a few suggestions for additional il-lustrations.1

Accepting the invitation, Le Corbusier in his reply, however, transformed the proj?ect: instead of the word "airplane" he preferred "aviation," by which he meant all theprodigious phenomena opening vast new horizons in space and influencing the futureof "equipment" in the broadest sense of the word.2 Already in Precisions (1930) hehad written, "I replace the word 'urbanism' by the term 'equipment.' I have alreadyreplaced the term 'furniture' by that of 'equipment.' Such stubbornness shows well thatwe are purely and simply claiming tools for work, for we do not want to die of hungerfacing the embroidered flowerbeds of aesthetic urbanism" [143]. To his bag of equip?ment, Le Corbusier now adds "aviation," a tool of modern communication forging newmodes of exchange and new links between nations.3The material subsequently sent by the publishing house to Le Corbusier also metwith lukewarm reception: he favored more lively documentation such as the view froman airplane as it flew over cities?vast open terrain, the sea, and the forests. And hewanted more picturesque treatment of the lives of aviators, their psychological and so?cial attitudes including analysis of the great aerial routes being drawn between Europeand America, Africa, or Asia. The publishing house was unable to fulfill Le Corbusier's

1. Fondation Le Corbusier (FLC) B3-14-1, B3-14-4.2. FLC, B3-14-3. On 22 January 1935 Le Corbursier answers: "Par aeroplane,je veux biencomprendreplutot 'aviation, 'c'est-d-dire tout lephenomene siprodigieux qui ouvre des horizonsentierement neufs et qui comporte deja des equipements de laplus haute signification" [B3-14-3]. 3. Note that in 1928 Le Corbusier had participated in the design of a table called "tabletube d'avion," and that the word "equipage" in French means "the crew."

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expectations, reminding him that their focus was limited to "the airplane" and that theyexpected to receive all his material by May.4What did Le Corbusier mean by "aviation" and the "epic of the air," a phrase heused in the preface of the subsequent book Aircraft (1935)? What new horizons didaviation open and how did this affect the perception of space and the process of read?ing the terrain as a two-dimensional map or a plan? And what did aviation have todo with "equipment"? Just the year before Le Corbusier had seen the Exposition del'Aeronautique in Milan for which Mussolini offered the maxim: "Aviation is grand,small, or nothing at all, depending on whether public awareness of aviation is grand,small, or nothing at all."5 Le Corbusier, ever the great publicist, accepted the challengeto spread the meaning of "aviation" in the inclusive sense of the word entailing adven-ture and service, organization, and machinery.The rapid growth of aviation during the interwar period was mercurial, dramati-cally reshaping perception of the world and of space. There were daring flights ofaviators challenging the breath of oceans and deserts, the heights of Everest, the lengthof Africa, the uncharted terrain of the North and South Poles. The airplane not onlyinternationalized cartography; it was a tool for exploring and controlling the colonies.While aerial photography, which recorded in precise detail the realistic shape of land-masses, coastlines, seas, deserts, and mountains, perfected the process of mapmakingand enriched the documentary archive of the planet.Yet even more stunning, aviation continually shrunk the size of the globe after theinitial KLM flight between Amsterdam and Jakarta took off in 1924. Then the timeneeded to navigate the 9000 miles was 55 days; within five years it had been reducedto a mere 12 days. A world map criss-crossed with national air routes came into view.In the 1930s civil airlines began to offer passenger and mail service between Londonand the Middle East, then on to India and Australia; or between Toulouse and Dakar,and even shorter flights between Paris and Brussels.6 Although the air was technicallyindivisible, still each nationality was intent on assuring that their aerial routes servedtheir own national interests. To fly across Europe it was necessary to change apparatusseveral times and zigzag through trunk routes to arrive at a destination. There was nodirect aerial route between England and Egypt, for example, because various Europeannations prohibited English flights over their territory. Hence English passengers boundfor the Middle East had to take a train to Geneva and then a hydrofoil to Alexandria.By 1937 six different intercontinental routes crossed the Mediterranean. Germany, Bel-gium, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Holland all drew their own national lines acrossthe sea?a mirror reflection of the anarchic state of international relations during the1930s. Added to this global network was an almost invisible event: two thirds of all airroutes until the late 1930s were modest routes in certain parts of the globe, developedin response to local needs for commercial exchange and serving remote areas such asSiberia, Canada, Central Africa, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina [see Crochet-Damais and Martonne].

"Aviation" destroyed an old order while simultaneously giving birth to temps nou-veaux. Perhaps this is why Le Corbusier repeats a hypothetical story in Aircraft and TheFour Routes about an "aerial locomotion show" organized in Juvisy by the Lathamsand Voisins about 1910 [Aircraft 7; Routes 97]. Le Corbusier left Paris at noon travel-

4. FLC, B3-14-21, B3-14-23.5. FLC, C3-12-6-23. Letter from Le Corbusier to Vogel director ofVU. See also Le Cor?busier, Aircraft 8.6. Telecommunications were also on the rise: the BBC's Empire Services crackled overshortwave receivers for the first time in 1932, and motorized vehicles began to make their way

along modern road networks wherever they spread.

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ing by train the fifteen kilometers to Juvisy. But so did 300,000 other enthusiasts. Therailroad company was not prepared for such a crush, and so Le Corbusier arrived in thepitch dark long after the air show had finished. But he remembered that they amusedthemselves on the delayed journey by pelting returning trains with stones and smashingeverything in sight?the furniture, the signal boxes, and even the station. Le Corbusierwondered "[w]as it a symbolic assault by the neophytes of the air against that blacktyranny of the railroad? Or was it a demonstration by the forces of optimism who feltthat in our country laziness was systematically blocking the way? Or was it anarchy?"He concluded that "[s]ignificant portents must have been in the air to have upset to sucha point of frenzy a quiet, springtime Sunday afternoon" [Routes 98-99].If Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau articles on "Eyes That Do Not See" were in?tended to increase awareness in the 1920s about the prodigious new world that moderntechnology and science had created, as evidenced in the marvels of the steamship, theautomobile, and the airplane, in the 1930s it was the "bird's-eye view" from the air?plane that he wanted to explore and the third dimension it added to architecture. Theaerial view touched Le Corbusier profoundly, for he was a man who "lived to see." Theview from the airplane was decidedly visual: it enabled Le Corbusier to develop a newawareness of the way the entire landscape in its natural setting was configured, of thenegative effect man had on the land, and of the dependency of the earth on its fragilebiosphere. This reading engendered a new mode of thought about natural laws visual-izing these as organic chains of events. The sun became a dictator and the meander ofrivers a law. Flying through the air, immersed in clouds, buffeted about by the wind andnoise, was an "ecstatic" experience for Le Corbusier. He called the exploration of spacetruly cosmic. Both the visual spectacle as well as the heroics and camaraderie of thedaring pilots leading the crusade filled him with poetic passion.7 At the same moment,however, the new eagle eye of the airplane gave evidence of the "spectacle of collapse"for the "airplane indicts" telling the truth about unruly expanses of urban space andplacing the blame on the authorities responsible for controlling the land [Aircraft 5,11].

Le Corbusier first gained insight into this synoptic aerial view when he flew toMoscow in 1928, a view reinforced by flights over South America the following yearand over the desert of North Africa in 1933. The living tableau of the lay of the landseen from on high completely transformed his visual imagery, concepts of geography,and procedures of mapmaking. He witnessed not only the vast open terrain of spacebut the mosaic pattern of land ownership and the curvature of the earth's horizon aswell. The multidirectional flow of rivers, the freedom ofthe airplane's mobility throughspace, and the great speeds of travel transfigured his thought. Sitting in an airplane withsketchbook in hand, he forged a hybrid system of analysis varying his angles of obser-vation: the vast expanse of the landscape was read as a new planned text, its contoursand masses reduced to so many lines traced out on a grid, while flows and meanders

7. Le Corbusier proclaimed that architectural creation concerns both utility and passion.The creation ofan object as an extension ofour body answers utilitarian needs. "Itcan be called'living' if it moves, hence we approach biology. Such an object involves mechanical functions:the airplane, the submarine, the dirigible. Ourjoys are shared among these living beings, whichwe can caress with the hand and the eye (the airplane, the race ear, the boat) and spiritual crys-tallizations, which are products ofour intellect and our thought. Weare proud of andfeel affec-tionfor these objects touched by both utility and passion.... That is when the word 'architecture'can be applied, when the spectator reads clearly the intentions and is moved. Even though theword 'architecture' also involves bidets, central heating and the 'machine for living in', it mustalways understand that its focus is man who has both a head and a heart, and who lives in orderto act" /Une Maison-Un Palais 4-5].

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coursed through the space. Lyrical intuition now joined his bent for Cartesian rational?ity.

Le Corbusier, while sketching Rio de Janeiro during a flight in 1929, confessedthat "the conception of a vast programme of organic town-planning came like a revela-tion" [Aircraft caption 114, n.p.]. This double vision of reason and poetry, analysis andrevelation, for the next two decades not only modeled his urban images but sustainedtheir geopolitical afterimage as well. The adventure of aviation had a decided impacton the future of global relationships as it seemed to destroy old concepts of spheresof influence and the balance of powers and to conjure up instead a new world orderand transnational organizations for peace. Le Corbusier was well aware of Antoine deSaint-Exupery, the writer of aviation novels, who proclaimed: "The aeroplane is notan end in itself: it is a tool, like a plough" [in Ory 13]. Delighting in the metaphor, thistool would enable Le Corbusier to conceive of great geomorphic structures stretchingacross space, rendering obsolete existing parcels of land, forms ofthe city, and regionaland national boundaries. In the temps nouveaux, those of the second industrial revolu-tion, the concentric city of the first industrial age was rejected and new geopoliticalalignments drawing the north and the south together imagined instead.During the 1930s Le Corbusier plunged into the study and design of over 20 differ?ent city plans in which architecture and urbanism forged a new unity. He spoke of thisin Precisions (1930):

Moscow with its steppes, at the pampa and in Buenos Aires, in the rain forest,and in Rio, have deeply rooted me in the soil of architecture. Architecture actsby intellectual construction. It is the mobility ofthe mind that leads to the farhorizons of great solutions. When the solutions are great and when naturecomes to join them happily, or better still, when nature integrates itself inthem, it is then that one approaches unity. And I believe that unity is that stageto which the unceasing and penetrating work ofmind leads. [245]

Le Corbusier is being deliberately paradoxical. "The soil of architecture" envisionsboth natural transformations of the land, such as the advance of forests or the dryingup of riverbeds, and such human interventions as the construction of huge dams andtunnels, the clearance of land, and urbanization spreading beyond control. It drawstogether both natural forces and man-made constructions. It is as if Le Corbusier werestanding on a balcony gazing on the marvels of sunsets, cloud formations, mountainranges, forests, and valleys deeply attentive to the message nature directed to his soul,to the ideas that turned in his mind. But simultaneously it is as if he were studying amap or aerial view on a flatbed where nature lay exposed to be exploited for the benefitof mankind. To draw up a plan is to make an abstraction, a projection onto the land thatimplies action and transformation. Thus a plan becomes a working drawing: first usedas a tool of description and then to manage the surface development. Consequently therepresentational map or plan and the living tableau embody two different aspects ofnature. To contemplate a landscape is to establish a cosmic bond with nature or drawfrom it a metaphysical meaning. Such enthrallment is the antithesis of the cartographicview [see Corboz]. Yet Le Corbusier intentionally deposits both of these notions in the"soil of architecture."Heroics and myth-making. Le Corbusier was spiritually aroused by the feats of theaviator who was sent out to challenge unchartered realms, to fly above the icecaps ofthe Poles and across oceans and deserts, and over the highest of mountain ranges. Dur?ing the 1920s and 1930s, the aviator was laden with dreams of grandeur soaring beyond

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mundane reality into the heavens beyond. Yet returning to earth, he was expected to bean exemplar and leader of men. Aviation provided new standards for worldly reformand spiritual regeneration: it enriched the world by the challenges it posed, the auda-cious bravery it required, and the elite leadership it demanded [see Fritzsche]. Heroeswere teamed together, exemplars of the virtues of service and perseverance, overcom?ing dangers and risking death: Nungesser-and-Coli or Costes-and-Bellonte were dailyreminders that the aviator's feats relied on a crew and a network of support from theground, be it hangars, fuel stops, weather stations, or radio signals and flags.8

"Equipment" stood for all of these new organizational methods that aviation en-gendered, including the precisioning of time and the collapsing of space. Le Corbusiertold a story in The Radiant City (1935) about a visit to the Amsterdam airport wherehe met the head of the East Indies airline. Only those who have had the experience offlying high over vast stretches of territory and mountain chains could understand theemotions Le Corbusier felt while gazing on the vast mural map of Europe, Africa, andAsia marked with red and blue lines representing eight different legs flown by this line.He shook with excitement as he realized that airplanes were at that very moment fly?ing along those lines but at different times of the day. There were amazing figures tocontemplate as well: the weekly mail to the East Indies amounted to 1200 kilogramsor one-fifth of what went by sea. Imagine that when the airline carries two-fifths of theload it will have paid for itself! Soon the problem of night flying would be solved, thehead of the airline proclaimed, then days of flight time will be cut from each journey.Already the relays of this journey, really a spiritual Odyssey, have established the linksin a global chain that stretched from Greece to Egypt, Arabia, India, and Indochina.In twenty short years what breathtaking solutions have been accomplished since thefirst flights of Voisin, Santos-Dumont, Wright, or Latham. To arrive at such collectiveaction, personal participation must be felt every step of the way, and the materiality oflabor enlightened by a spirit of cooperation?all of this informed Le Corbusier's ex-tended meaning of "equipment" and underlined his political alignments [Radiant City179; see also Routes 102].

During the 1930s, the aviator became increasingly free of his former reliance onthe ground. His instruments and equipment enabled him to fly without having to rec?ognize landmarks or the slope of the terrain in order to stay on course. Now he couldfly through the day and the night, through sun or fog, keeping to a rigorous scheduleand arriving on time. So Le Corbusier exclaimed: "The airplane no longer pays atten?tion to the millennial fact of the route on the lands; it passes above, across, no longerconcerned with gradients determined by slopes or distances. At assigned ends ... the'steamship ofthe air' with its merchandise and people land" [Trois etablissements 130].To misunderstand this new globalism was to misunderstand the marvels of aviation.The Americas, Europe, Eurasia, and Eurafrica were no longer continents but direct tra?jectories of communication flowing between dots on the map. Life could now developin rare points on the globe, while other dots would be disqualified, even extinguished,because they did not lie on an aerial route. Already in 1945 the Congress of FrenchAviation had begun a planning initiative based on this modern concept to guide urban-ists in their new task of postwar reconstruction. Le Corbusier offered the congress hisschemes outlined in Urbanisme des trois etablissements (Urbanism ofthe Three Estab-lishments) (1945), for certainly the impact ofthe airplane?or so he believed?wouldbring life or death to the radiocentric city. Some cities would be qualified while otherswere disqualified, and in their place new linear industrial cities and radiant farms woulddevelop instead [138-41].

8. Thefirst successful aviation novel in France was Joseph Kessel's 1920s book Equipage(The Crew). It was quickly adaptedfor the cinema three times within ten years [Ory 5].



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The airplane made every place accessible, nothing of nature?not mountains,oceans, icecaps, nor deserts?stood in its way [Fritzsche 172-75, 185]. Its bird's-eyeaerial view surveyed every nook and cranny throwing a net of surveillance over theworld. The aerial view appeared to make national boundaries obsolete: it was easierto understand the natural formation of regions, the unity of river valleys, the expanseof farmlands, and the location of mineral deposits. Did the aviator's humility in frontof nature's forces, and the awareness of the cultural diversity of the world, hold outthe ideal of a new peaceful community of nations as Saint-Exupery and Le Corbusierhoped? Aviation with its stress on technical mastery, elite leadership, organizationaldiscipline, and a new world order created an array of geopolitical consequences bothutopian and reactionary. It seemed to prove that nature (and thus capital, as reified na?ture) could be overcome, that a revolution of perception and visual interpretation wasat hand, that a new world order was imminent. "Aviation" was truly transformative!A Geopolitical View: Or the Science of the State as a Realm in Space. It is impos?sible to read Le Corbusier's enthusiastic account about the "epic of aviation" and therevolution of equipment without considering his politics during the 1930s and 1940s.From 1931 to 1936 he contributed to and joined the editorial board of two neosyndical-ist periodicals, Plans (1931-32) and Prelude (1933-35), and some ofhis articles ap?peared as well in L'homme reel, an extension of Prelude [see McLeod]. Standing underthe motto "ni droite ni gauche" (neither right not left), the editors of these reviews wereagainst the abstract man of democracy and the materialist man of communism. Theyopted instead for "l'homme reel" based on man's interest and his natural relationshipswith the machine and with work [see Golan and Lagardelle]. Utilizing the terms "order"and "revolution," they sought a third way which they believed only the young woulddiscover and open up. They sought a route toward the second industrial era bringingpeace and harmony in its wake?peace that was necessary for reconstruction.During the years ofthe depression, when building projects were few, Le Corbusierturned his attention toward urban planning, echoing many refrains the neosyndicalistsdetailed in their reviews. He asked in the concluding chapter of The Radiant City whatauthority would recognize that the country needed "total planning"?

Waste, that snickering and drunken tyrant, at present claims all our labor, allour sweat. Waste is strangling us, bewitching us, bogging us down, sucking usdry ofall our substance. . . . Authority, it is up to you to see the truth of things,to contradict thisfolly, to stop this insane race into chaos once and for all.

The "Plan" will kill waste. . . . But at the moment we have the drama offighting for subsistence added to our usual ration of emotional drama, andthat is why there are revolutions rumbling underground or exploding all overthe place.

The "Plan " is revolutionary. We must accept the Plan and make it a real?ity: city, village, form. [342]

All of these words appear innocent enough until they are relocated within the neosyn-dicalist paradigm and its apolitical stance. Neosyndicalism, a loosely defined doctrinewithout a coherent ideology, was nevertheless anticapitalist, antistatist, and antidemo-cratic. In the midst of world depression, not capitalism, nor fascism, nor communismoffered answers. The first editorial of Plans in January 1931 declared that during thesepressing times, man had been left without a clear set of directives, a precise set of aims,or a plan. It was the review's intent to aid in the creation of a new order and to offer mana general direction.9 Believing that the individual joined collective society through so-

9. "La ligne generale," Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 7-9.


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cial groups found naturally in regional or professional units, the editors placed rural andindustrial syndicates at the base of their societal reorganization. Industrial syndicateswould regulate output with the best interests of the nation held firmly in mind so thatoverproduction and underconsumption, strikes and economic anarchy were avoided.At the same time, rural syndicates would reach downward to preserve family values,vernacular traditions, and organic rootedness in the soil in order to stabilize agriculturalproduction. Arranged in hierarchical groups, and led by elite technocrats from the top,these collective institutions would replace the anarchy of individual pursuits, class war-fare, and war between nations. Le Corbusier declares that the regional plan considersthe geographical situation, climatic conditions, ethnographic makeup, the nature ofthesoil and subsoil. It assures that production will harmonize with the needs of the region,adjacent regions, and federations of regions at both the national and international level[Des canons 118].

The state, the neosyndicalists argued, was the natural inverse of individualism; itwas strong only because the individual was weak; he might participate in democracy,but the state never reciprocated by listening to his interests or needs or the things thatconcerned his region or profession. Democracy and capitalism merely exploited hisweaknesses to their advantage. If individuals were organized into natural groups, how?ever, then they would achieve a new freedom and a new culture more suitable to thesecond machine age. In a revolutionized society, Vhomme reel would be offered ratio?nal tools to enhance his functioning: housing, health, sports, reform of values, money,and property. To engender this new order, the neosyndicalist's "revolution" neededplans, led by a particular category of decision makers. And the authorities had to un?derstand that a plan was "total machinery" [see Lamour and Lagardelle, "De l'hommeabstrait"]. Le Corbusier expounded on the transformations about to be achieved in thefirst issue of Plans:

The world is not coming to an end?but coming back to life. . . . A greatadventure is beginning; great changes offortune are imminent; the surge ofchange will be both wide and deep. We are about to see new things. . . . Thereis a new perspective in the world... our minds, already learning to cope withthe new dimensions ahead, have already freed themselves, have already tornthemselves away from the table cluttered with the remains ofa centuries-oldmeal: those rotting cities, those infinitely subdivided fields, that incoherentdistribution of population, that morality now becoming asfragile as a bubble.Our minds are insisting on a clean tablecloth. ["Invite a 1'Action" 00]The neosyndicalists placed their faith in a planned economy, a revitalized culture,and a new European federation. The basis for this new world order was the abolishment

of capital, since money was the true evil leading to rivalry, exploitation, and war. Toovercome the three crises of industry, agriculture, and confidence [spirit], three criseswhich affected the le monde blanc (the white world) in the 1930s and produced aninhuman civilization where man was no longer the master of his destiny, his machines,or his work. Plans proposed the rational reorganization of collective civilization by as-sembling five major unions out of the nations of Europe: the Baltic and Scandinavianstates, the Mediterranean states, the West European states, the Danube states, and Ger?many.10 Eventually the orienting axes of latitude, for so long a dominant paradigm forthe Western world, was replaced with a longitudinal axes along "natural" north-southalignments. France now formed a Latin federation with other nations associated with

10. "La ligne generale," Plans 4 (Apr. 1931): 5-6; "La ligne generale," Plans 6 (June1931): 5-8; "Premiere etape," Plans 7 (My 1931): 4-8.



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the Mediterranean basin: Spain, Italy, and those of North Africa. In addition there wasa Central European Federation, an Oriental Federation (the USSR), and the BritishEmpire. This network of federations, it was hoped, would produce economic stabilityand peace.

There are no unmediated maps: whether it is the regional redistribution of Franceor north-south realignments, these geographical illusions constitute the production ofspace. The neosyndicalists projected their ideas of a new world order onto the maps ofFrance, Europe, and the colonial empire, forcing incompatibles together and overridingestablished boundaries. It was not an innocent remark to write of the "white world ofthe west," of regionalism, ethnography, and race, of north-south axes?each statementdrew boundaries and distinctions at the very moment when aviation eradicated thesemarkers of space. The neosyndicalists converted the chaos of the economic depressionand the political chaos ofthe 1930s into a pictorial atlas of space according to the sameschema as that achieved in an aerial view. It is not farfetched to draw parallels with thediscipline, organizational management, and perceptual revolution engendered by theword "aviation" and the "general line" that the neosyndicalists sought. As Le Corbusierwrote in 1937,

The world is coming back to life! This is the slogan before the eyes of thevisitor to the Pavilion as he exits from the demonstration of urbanism of thetemps nouveaux. It is necessary to know how to extend contingent miseries, tobe transported above local events, in order to acquire this special view?thisbird's-eye view?from on high, which grasps the DIRECTION of masses inmovement. [Des canons 137]

The Airplane Indicts. Every technological invention opens up new routes of discov?ery?such was the case of the airplane and the aerial view in the twentieth century.The polar opposite to the microscope, which visually explored the realm of the infi-nitely small, the aerial view revealed space so vast that its comprehension could notbe absorbed in a single glance. It revealed the constant struggle man had made againstnature until he had finally subdued the space of the world and turned it into a giganticgeometric representation. From the air a new geometry rearranged the image into newrepresentational forms: boundary lines of fields slashed zigzags across the terrain, lin-ear traces of canals, roads, and railways left their sharp clear marks; elevated plateausand depression stood out in relief, windswept deserts and ice fields appeared as serratedexpanses while mountains turned into heavily creased folds.

Take an airplane. [Le Corbusier commanded in Radiant City./ Fly over our19th century cities, over those immense sites encrusted with row after row ofhouses without hearts, furrowed with their canyons of soulless streets. Lookdown and judge for your self. 1 say that these things are the signs ofa tragicdenaturing of human labor. They are the proof that men, subjugated by thetitanic growth ofthe machine, have succumbed to the machinations ofa worldpowered by money. The architects ofthe past hundred years did not buildformen: they built for money. [341]

Flying across the wild stretches of South America, on his way back to BuenosAires in 1929, Le Corbusier observed the settler's farms, then hamlets, villages, smalltowns, and finally the capital city [Radiant City 81]. His reactions were guided by avisual framework he saw from the sky: all South American towns since the conquesthad developed according to a living unit, the cuadra (square) with sides 110 meters in

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length. It was a simple geometrical unit determined by the length of a man's stride andthe distance he was able to see and thus was suitable for the control and exploitation ofthe land itself. But the aerial view revealed an appalling disease on the land, the wastingof an organism drained of its vital energy by a lack of vigilance. At the end of the jour?ney appeared the immense scab of Buenos Aires: a skin disease spreading beyond allproportion. Where nature would have provided the requisite structure of viscera, lungs,bones, and limbs, human heedlessness had allowed an organic form of life to exceedthe dimensions of its cellular structure. Now the city was nothing more than a mass ofprotoplasm [Radiant City 81].

In Aircraft (1935), a book that he repeats word for word in sections of The EourRoutes (1941), Le Corbusier continued the same theme: the plane accuses! We can nolonger escape its truth and ignore the horror of a city's physical dirt or the failure ofmoral integrity in those responsible for such disorder.

The plane has enlightened us. The plane has seen. The plane had indicted.We now have a record, aero-photographic plates, which proves that at all

costs we must save our cities. [Routes 81]With the eye of an eagle, the plane examines cities: London, Paris, Berlin,New York, Algiers, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo. Sinister balance sheets! [Routes81]

The plane exposes the raw fact: cities have been built solely to make money at man-kind's expense.

And the plane observes, works quickly, sees quickly, never tires. In addition,the plane plunges deep into realism. Its implacable eye penetrates the miseryof cities and brings back the photographic record for those who lack the cour-age to go and see for themselves?from the air.

Such are the great cities of the nineteenth century, unfinished, cruel,greedy.

The plane inaugurates in a superlative degree a new stage of conscious?ness, a modern conscience. The cities must be rescued from disaster; theirrotten sections must be destroyed; new cities must be built. [Routes 81]

The aerial photograph tells the spectator exactly and with realistic detail what was thestate of urban existence. From on high, Le Corbusier continued in Des canons, des mu-nitionsl Merci! Des logis ... s.v.p. (1937), each city appears to have a precise face andenables the eye of the mind to see clearly, exactly, and completely. Yet town authoritieskeep these aerial photographs in their file drawers, not on the walls of their offices.They never learn to interpret these views. Faced daily with such scandalous records, orso Le Corbusier believed, these men would no doubt quickly decide not to tolerate suchleprous and fatal disarticulation and start immediately to work for the transformation ofcities and life [Des canons 7; Home ofMan 59].The Bird's-eye View. In Precisions, Le Corbusier began to outline the difference be?tween the aerial view and that seen by the eyes of man placed one meter, sixty centime-ters above the ground. He reiterates this position in The Home ofMan (1942), a smallbook he wrote with Francois de Pierrefeu. Utilizing the eye as a tool of registration, theman on the ground understands that walking creates diversity in the spectacle beforehis eyes. But he has left the ground and flown in an airplane. The aerial view offers a



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different reading resolved without ambiguity. Nevertheless, he must learn to interpretthis view:At 500 to 1,000 meters altitude, and at 180 to 200 kilometers an hour, the viewfrom a plane is not rushed but slow, unbroken, the most precise one can wish:one can recognize the red or black spots on a cowskin. Everything takes onthe precision ofa tracing; the spectacle is not rushed but very slow, unbroken;along with the plane, it is only the steamer on sea or thefeet ofthe pedestrianon a road that can give what may be called sight at human scale: one sees, theeye transmits calmly. Whereas what I call inhuman and hellish are the sightsofferedfrom trains and automobiles, even bicycles. I exist in life only ifl can

The airplane flies over estuaries, along great rivers, high above the savannah, andit looks down at virgin forests. It presents a new eye: "the eye of a bird transplantedinto the head of a man." It enables the eye to perceive immense deltas, the reed bedsof atolls, the slender groups of palm trees, and it reveals the movement of water in thesubsoil and the patterned progression of green veins across the yellow plain [RadiantCity 78-79]. This aerial view constitutes a new way of looking and interpreting the im?ages of space. To rational analysis, comparison, and deduction is added this firsthandexperience of the eye. Perception?or the interpreted view?Le Corbusier believed,was more forceful than mere conception. It led to synthesis and action.The bird's-eye view offers a unique observation: it enables the eye to discern thecharacteristics of various regions of the world and gauge their diversity. The differentvalues the eye observes as "characters" of nature become guides to human creations.These varied elements combine into clear symphonies: counterpoint and fugue, con?struction and nature.12 "Nature is a thing of mathematical characters and inevitable con?sequences of purposes. / And the purposes are determined by the characters" [RadiantCity 79].

Returning to this theme in the 1940s, Le Corbusier claimed the aerial view enabledman to see "that which hitherto was only seen by the spirit." "The whole spirit of ourplans will be illuminated and amplified by this new point of view" [Home ofMan 125].The bird's eye view has determined that "[p]lans are no longer simply a game of themind; henceforth they see themselves./ And the spirit proclaims their order and theirgrandeur" [Home ofMan 154]. The bird's-eye view, he continued, is an important in-novation; it enables the mind to see clearly and allows for the development ofthe thirddimension of height. A great part of the confusion that exists in the reading of plans hascome about because the eyes of man are only one meter, sixty centimeters above theground. The aerial view resolves this confusion by allowing a different reflexive read?ing without ambiguity [Trois etablissements 138-41].

77. Precisions 7; Home ofMan 725. He recounts in The Radiant City that, "[sjtanding onour own twofeet, with our eyes a little more than five feet from the earth, a distance that hasbecome the basis (the geometrician 's tool) ofall our mesuration, ofall the sensations, that affectus, ofall the perceptions that unleash thepoetic tide in us, with this human height as a foundation(feet on the ground, eye such a short distance above it) we have established our accepted scale ofdimensions: all our notions of height and ofextent. . . . And on this basis we have observed andnoted the characteristics ofthe reed, ofthe tree, ofthe mountain" [79].12. "The music of our constructions [and by music Le Corbusier means thepoetic emana-tions these constructions create] will be produced by the interplay of the characters we havecreated. Isn't that how it works in Aeschylus too? " /Radiant City 797-

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Part Two: A New CartographyThe Cartographic View. Aviation, the herald of a new age, forged an indissolublebond linking the vast subject of architecture to city planning. From the airplane, theearth looked different and so must architecture, city plans, and geographical maps.Maps colonize space by extracting from the ground specific geographical facts andsilencing others. Maps are surfaces on which selected facts are exhibited or as Michelde Certeau described, they "form tables of legible results" [121]. Yet maps also enablea spatial imaginary to play over their surface: one can trace out routes to follow, dreamabout places to inhabit, or project specific visions onto the lay of the land.

During his trip to South America in 1929, Le Corbusier poured over the maps ofArgentina blending together regional facts with exotic adventures, a form of erotopog-raphy.

/ . . . measured the lines of the rivers, the great stretches ofplains and pla-teaus, the barrier of the Andes, studied the network of railroads that alreadyirrigate your country. I knew for the first time that Argentina is immense, thatit begins at the latitude ofthe Chaco whose Indians are naked and that it goesall the way to the icebergs, to the Tierra del Fuego. . . . I flew far over yourcountry by plane. I saw that it was empty, that there was enormous room for afantastic expansion. [Precisions 202]

Sensing that people came to Argentina from all over the world bringing with them anexplosive energy, he imagined that Buenos Aires was predestined for greatness andconsequently Le Corbusier confessed that, like these immigrants, he too was "chargedas full of energy as a dynamo" [Precisions 202]. Returning to Buenos Aires, this timeon a hydroplane, he saw the city from 500 meters up in the air. It was a bristling tumul-tuous city, a "sign of a prodigious vitality, but also of improvisation, of incoherence."Against this painful sight his cartographic eye juxtaposed an ordered arrangement ofglass skyscraper prisms on an enormous platform of reinforced concrete jutting outinto the sea. As he imagined, the simple horizontal line where the pampa met the oceanwould be punctuated with crystalline cubes lit up at night.13His travels took him onward to Rio de Janeiro, a remarkable city that clear?ly enchanted him. He began his account with a refrain "when one is in Rio deJaneiro . . ." and proceeded to describe the blue bays, sky and water, the white quaysand pink beaches, and the successive promontories failing into the sea. Taking on themantle of a conquistador, he labeled the terrain "a geography map of the time of theConquest, with its gulfs, its mountains, its boats; the inscriptions are the lights at night,on the cliffs. . . ." He embellished the site by bestowing metaphors and tropes on theland. The high plateau and the mountains coming down to meet the sea were like theback of a hand spread open. A second metaphor found the promontories to be like "asort of disorderly green flame above the city always, everywhere, and which changesappearance at one's every step" [Precisions 234].

13. Le Corbusier believed the destiny of Buenos Aires lay toward the east. He crossed thecity and arrived at the sea, actually in the Rio, at the very point where the reasonsfor the city'sexistence were crystallized. Where the ground of the pampa met the Rio a steep slope, the Bar-ranca, fell away, keeping the city behind it. To overcome this shift of levels, Le Corbusier pro?jected an enormous platform of reinforced concrete over the customs warehouses and the docks,over the railway lines, out into the sea, sinking great concrete piles into its estuary. Here he laidthefoundations for his skyscraper business district /Precisions 205, 208].



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He was ecstatic with the site and returned to his refrain: "when one has climbed thefavelas of the blacks" high up on the steep hills where they have painted their houses ofwood and wattle in many bright colors. Placed almost on the edge ofthe cliffs, the frontof the house is raised on piloti, while the door is on the back toward the hillside. Thereis pride in the eye of the black, for he has a view of the sea, the harbors, the islands, themountains, the estuaries and "the eye of the man who sees wide horizons is prouder,wide horizons confer dignity; that is the thought of a planner" [235]. He was itching toproject his own imaginary cartography onto this space.When one has gone up in an airplane, glided like a bird over its bays and peaks,and torn away in a single glance all the secrets it hides from the man on the ground,then Le Corbusier confessed, one understands the lay of the land. By plane, everythingbecomes clear to the cartographic eye and "you have felt ideas being born, you haveentered into the body and the heart of the city, you have understood part of its destiny .. . a violent desire comes to you, crazy perhaps, to try a human enterprise here too, thedesire to play a match for two, a match of the 'affirmation of mankind' against or withthe 'presence of nature"' [Precisions 235-36].

when one has taken a longflight over the city like a bird gliding, ideas attackyou.

Ideas attack you when, for three months, one has been under pressure,when one has descended into the depths of architecture and planning, whenone is on the way to deductions, when everywhere one envisages, one feels,one sees consequences.

In the plane I had my sketchbook and as everything became clear to me Isketched. I expressed the ideas of modern planning. [Precisions 236]

In this sketch of Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier drew an immense expressway joiningat mid-height the fingers of the promontories and connecting the city with the highhinterlands of its plateau [Precisions 242]. This viaduct architecture had a highway ontop and housing below, and each apartment was equipped with hanging gardens andwindow walls raised high above the ground. "It is almost the nest of a gliding bird" asif his airplane had touched down on this ephemeral land [Precisions 244]. Out at sea, hetook up his sketchbook again and drew the mountainous peaks and the great faultlesshorizontal beltline he had conceived suspended above the city.

The whole site began to speak, on the water, on earth, in the air; it spoke ofarchitecture. This discourse was a poem of human geometry and of immensenatural fantasy. The eye saw something, two things: nature and the product ofthe work ofmen. The city announced itself by the only line that can harmonizewith the vehement caprice ofthe mountains; the horizontal. [Precisions 243]Next he took a flight over Sao Paulo where he commanded the pilot to fly low overthe ground toward the center of the city so he could see its outline, where rises occurredin the land, and where the business district pushed upward toward the sky, an indisput-able sign of disease. By automobile, he measured the time it took to travel from point to

point over valleys, contours, and slopes. He grew to understand the general topographyof hills and hollows, and the inadequate network of streets that tried to go straight in ahilly terrain. And then suddenly he was seized with the solution: he drew a horizontalline 45 kilometers in length from hill to hill, and then a second line at right angles."These straight horizontals are the expressways coming into the city, in reality cross-ing it. You won't fly over the city with your autos, but you will drive over it. Do not

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build expensive arches to hold up your viaducts, but carry your viaducts on reinforcedconcrete structures that will make up offices in the center of the city and homes in theoutskirts." He called these horizontal expressways "earthscrapers" and wondered, "isthere anything more elegant than the pure line of a viaduct in an undulating site andmore varied than its substructures sinking into the valleys to meet the ground?" [Preci?sions 241-42].

From hindsight, Le Corbusier would write in 1935 that '"[I]deas' can be expressedthrough diagrams," proclaiming that his South American trip was a stimulant for clear-cut "energy ideas" [Radiant City 221]. Reflecting back over his failure to implementany ofhis many urban schemes beginning with the "City Mondiale" at Geneva in 1929and ending with his various proposals for Algiers throughout the 1930s, Le Corbusiervaliantly declared the more difficult the adventure, the more barred by obstacles mak?ing his plans unrealizable, the more his enthusiasm grew. He recalled the grand lyricalexercises he planned for the cities of South America and the airplane flights over thepampas, the savannahs, and the virgin forests, along the great rivers where future citiesof colonization began to appear, farms of the pioneers, towns on the bend of rivers, theimmense and disarticulated cities on the delta. And suddenly he realized that the "Radi?ant City" was born at that moment, a modern doctrine of urbanization replacing the un-speakable misery of existing conditions [Le Corbusier, "L'urbanisme et le lyrisme"].

By the early 1940s, in The Home of Man (1942), Le Corbusier's voice becamemore commanding. He believed, under the authoritarian rule of the Vichy government,the hour had struck to put his plans into action. "The plane flying over forest, rivers,mountains and seas reveals some fundamental laws, simple principles which prevail innature, and as a result we may hope that dignity, strength and a proper sense of valueswill become apparent in the aspect of our new cities" [Routes 110]. Now a pact canbe made with nature, it can enter into the lease. Before magnificent palm and bananatrees, and tropical splendors that animate a site, such as Rio de Janeiro, one can installan armchair. Suddenly the four obliques of a perspective are formed.

Your room is installed before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters ourroom.

The pact with nature has been sealedl By means available to town plan-ning it is possible to enter nature into the lease.

Rio de Janeiro is a celebrated site. But Algiers, Marseilles, Oran, Niceand all the Cote d'Azur, Barcelona and many maritime and inland towns canboast of admirable landscapes. [Home ofMan 87]The calculator and the poet united in the townplanner unravelfrom the tanglean unexpected solution.

The tracery they create becomes integral with the country side. The townlies like a garment upon the body ofthe site. Architecture attains majesty andthe citizens partake of "essential joys."

Apact is signed with nature. [Home ofMan 89]The Lesson of the Desert. In both books Aircraft and The Four Routes, Le Corbusierdescribed another lesson in town planning that he learned from the aerial view. He tellsa story about a flight from Algiers, south over the Atlas mountains toward the cities ofthe M'zab in the desert. This was a land of thirst and death?to which the Mozabiteshad been banished a thousand years before when they built seven cities ofthe M'zab forwinter and laid out seven oases in the desert for summer. These latter cities were filledwith date and apricot trees, the lush foliage of peach or pomegranate trees; they were



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dazzling spectacles of water and verdure, offering security and coolness. Their mudhouses were molded by hand, built by "touching regard." The plans of these housesshould be preserved, Le Corbusier warned, lest some accident erases them from sight.On the other hand, the winter cities, bathed in the light of the pitiless sun, gained

the appearance of "a hell of broken stones, narrow and steep declining streets, silentwalls, stagnation. . . ." But from the airplane, as they circled above one of these cit?ies, spiraling downward, plunging toward the ground and just clearing the roofs, LeCorbusier was seized with a new awareness. "The plane had shown us everything, andwhat it had revealed carried an important lesson" [Routes 109]. It revealed the entirelayout of the city, enabling the eye to penetrate behind the blind street wall that kept thepedestrian at bay. The aerial view enabled his interpretive eye to see that

each of the gay little houses opened by means of three ample arcades ontoan exquisite garden. . . . Every house ofthe M'zab, yes, every house withoutexception, is a centre ofhappiness, serenity, isfounded upon the solid rock offundamental truth. This city exists to serve mankind, to serve both body andsoul. In the M'zab, no single family was allowed to go without its arcade andits garden. [Routes 110]

Here was the interpretive lesson: a gulf separated these desert tribes from the cruel,"inhuman white civilization." In the latter, a relentless thirst for money destroyed thesacred rule of nature.

The plane fly ing over forest, rivers, mountains and seas reveals some funda?mental laws, simple principles which prevail in nature, and as a result we mayhope that dignity, strength and a proper sense of values will become apparentin the aspect of our new cities. [Routes 110]

The airplane is the mark of a new age, it is the peak of a huge pyramid of mechanicalprogress that rushes forward into a new era on widespread wings. "The aeroplane, inthe sky, carries our hearts above the humdrum of daily living. The plane has given usa 'bird's-eye' view. / And when the eye sees clearly, the mind makes wise decisions"[Routes 111].The Law of the Meander. Le Corbusier noted that "[f]rom the plane I saw sights thatone may call cosmic. What an invitation to meditation, what a reminder of the funda?mental truths of our earth!" [Precisions 4]. One of these truths he baptized the law ofthe meander. Fly ing over the great rivers of South America?the Parana, the Uruguay,and the Paraguay Rivers?he was struck with a revelation. Studying their courses, heunderstood how they followed the law of physics on the steepest gradient, but whenthey flowed across flat terrain, erosion caused a meander to appear. Something haddisturbed the law of nature. He found there were parallels between this theorem andthat of creative thinking and human invention. "Following the outlines of a meanderfrom above, I understood the difficulties met in human affairs, the dead ends in whichthey get stuck and the apparently miraculous solutions that suddenly resolve appar?ently inextricable situations." The law ofthe meander quickly became for Le Corbusiera personal "symbol" under which he introduced his propositions for reforms in botharchitecture and urbanism. He mused, "[f|rom the plane, one understands many otherthings" [Precisions 4].

As the worldwide economic crisis ofthe 1930s deepened and as Le Corbusier metconstant opposition to his great works of urbanism, he expanded on his theorem of the

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meander. Now he posited that water is a fluid and thus mobile, it flows according to thelaw of gravity. From then on it is a matter of simple arithmetic. A rivulet meets anotherrivulet and width is added. These rivulets form a stream, which meets another streamand together their widths form a great river. The river flows toward the sea and reachesa delta where its powerful flow is subdivided before flowing gently through the estuaryand out into the open sea.14

From the airplane, the eye can observe, however, where water as it follows itsinevitable course to the sea, meets an obstacle, a rock. This obstacle causes a meanderto be formed, a tiny break in the water's relentless forward flow. Erosion begins aswater is forced to eat away at the opposite bank, causing it to crumble. Forced back tothe opposite side, the same erosion takes place lower down on the stream. Because ofthis erosion, water deserts the straight line of gravity and begins to zigzag. Its flow tothe sea having been obstructed by an abnormality, it is forced to form a meander. Andso too, the grand works of urbanism were forced to zigzag when they met the rock ofopposition.

In South America, the bird's-eye view from the airplane revealed meanders withinmeanders. In terms of human achievements this was a demoralizing view to see ev?erything sink into silt, where civilizations disappear and great works are engulfed, un-less a miraculous energy is able to break through the entanglement. Yet Le Corbusierobserved that nature does not stop before such obstacles; it finds a solution even forperilous maladies.

When the time comes, the meander is dispensed with; the river breaks throughand returns to a straight course once more. Though, even so, this new routewill still be encumbered for a long while with parasites, with evil vapors, withfevers and rotting decadence.

And so it is also in architecture and city planning; in sociology and eco?nomies; in politics}5All ofthe many city plans that Le Corbusier designed during the 1930s and 1940s

came to naught, blocked by forces standing in the stream of their energetic flow. In1945 Le Corbusier returned to the law of the meander but with a twist of meaning, fornow he believed the aerial route had definitively surpassed all terrestrial routes and thishad major political consequences. He explained:

The earth is born without political frontiers: it is round and continuous; thehuman species has multiplied across the four quarters ofthe world, followinglaws of climate, of water-shed, ofwinds. . . . Roads follow the shortest routescompatible with the slopes in their path. Obstacles assert their pressure onthis tracery: rivers, mountains, and the routes establish themselves through?out millenniums. They are relatively predetermined. . . . The three routes em-14. Radiant City 79. Theflow of water is a function oftwo constants: size and speed. Thislesson must guide the city planner when he establishes bedsfor the modern fluid ofthe automo-bile. Water circulates in an unbrokenfashion except where it finds a hole. There itforms a lakeand is stationary. This too must guide the planner: parking is a lake of traffic [80].15. Radiant City 80. He compares the parable ofthe meander to man's life and to genera-tions that follow. Long years of fruitfulness can be followed by decadence and collapse. The

world's seasons and man's have different scales and do not always coincide. Was he born toosoon or too late or at the right conjunction? I Life pursues a natural impulse toward organiza-tion. Cells reproduce themselves; they divide, multiply and form amorphous agglomeration. Anintention appears, a direction is apparent and an organism is born andfurther ramifications takeplace.



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bodied in the earth's surface, the roadway, the waterway, the iron way, allhave their destinies fixed by the nature of the terrain: Geography. The newroute ofthe air goes straight, cuts straight, goes everywhere, above all indif-ferent to geographical obstacles. [Concerning 45]

Plans for reconstruction took on great urgency during World War II, consequently LeCorbusier decided "to play the game of the day" and "to scout out the pathways totomorrow" [Looking 77]. He intuitively knew that an equation was a tool in nature, al-lowing diverse elements to be brought together, and that a meander accumulated theseelements, cascading forward and accelerating in speed, until they broke free and flowedin a straight line. On Descartes's coordinate space he could visualize these moving ele?ments across geometricized space [see Latour].

With one line, one sketch, it is possible to lay down on a sheet of paper thefigurative representation ofa thought, a cycle, an era, even one still in thefuture. The figures form an equation; this graphic algebra has its rules; thevelocity of it lets the explorer take giant steps over the undergrowth and barethe principle. And so emerge the guidelines ofa state already begun but whosemeaning had not been apparent to all. [Looking 11]Ifa serious attempt to ponder the problems of aviation had been madefifty, oreven just twenty or thirty years ago, couldn 't it have guided a whole swarm ofdecisions which had, instead to be taken amidst the perilous improvisation ofsentiment or interest or panic? [Looking 78]

But now the hour was striking, the time had come when the world must absolutely lookahead. The cascade of elements accumulated in the meander's flow must eventuallybreak free and flow forward in a straight line. Le Corbusier drew a wedge of territorycontaining the diversified features of a continent: suggestive of Europe with a sea to thenorth and south, an ocean to the west, and another sea to the east. This watershed? itsslopes, valleys, and plains?clearly depicted in an aerial view and created natural path?ways for streams, brooks, and rivers that led man and things down to the sea [Looking78,81].

The purpose of our exploration is to discern, from amidst the present confu?sion, the efficient, economic and elegant process governing the regular acts ofa society extending over a territory. A measuring instrument should be desig-nated by which to appraise the value ofthe solutions that are found. . . .

Efficiency considered, not in relation to money but in relation to man,man being installed in his environment, the environment specific to his action,his existence.

What is actually involved is the occupation ofthe ground for various pur?poses: to produce and to trade in order to consume (feed, clothe and amuse).[Looking 83]

A Global View?the Compression of Space and Time. Le Corbusier was aware as hetraveled across South America, that communication technology?be it the locomotive,the newspaper, photography, or the cinema?was a conquistador, crushing before itsadvance regional customs and habits, ways of acting and dressing. Through these newcommunication devices anyone could know, hear, and feel any other part of the world.All landscapes became familiar, all songs known. The archive of knowledge about the

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world had increased, but with its accumulations a sense of mystery about the worldhad disappeared. Now the last white spaces of the map were filled out: one had seenthe blocks of ice of the South Pole and the ripples of desert sand formations up close."And the locomotive has brought you the suits of London and the fashions of Paris.You are wearing bowlers!" [Precisions 27]. "Airplanes go everywhere; their eagle eyeshave searched the deserts and penetrated the rain forest. Hastening interpenetration,the railway, the telephone unceasingly runs the country into the city, the city into thecountry" [Precisions 26].Furthermore, the airplane abetted this globalization for the spherical mass of theearth was without borders. Only the state depended on the notion of boundaries: a ter?ritorial unit with frontiers that need to be defended. Yet the telegraph, the airplane, andthe camera have eradicated these boundary lines. Le Corbusier explained that a frontieris built up in stages: first the family, then the tribe, and later the region. A centripetalcenter of attraction emerges and another one elsewhere and in between these two fieldsof attraction a frontier occurs. When two regions conflict with each other, the normalvoid at their frontiers is filled and the two rise up in arms. That frontier of dissension,Le Corbusier was well aware had risen once again in the 1930s [Radiant City 193].Because the beginning of any machine age with its new forms of transportation

always creates disorder and economic chaos, this troublesome situation abets the build?ing up of a frontier of dissension. Yet a new scale of national administration needed tobe reorganized on economic and spiritual terms. New regional administrative centerscould engender new social aggregations determined by climate, topography, geographyand race. These would be natural regions, spontaneously formed, and they would insome cases overlap and replace existing political frontiers, or so the neosyndicalistsbelieved.

Next Le Corbusier considered different means of communication?railroads,ships, and airplanes, mail, telegraph, and radio?finding that they too did not workin harmony. How then could it be possible to contemplate the development of a newworld unity? He laid out the facts: there are different natural features of geography,climate, races, and even those tyrannical interior barriers within mankind, the variousnatural languages. Yet Le Corbusier commanded, open the atlas, consider the world asa whole, and base your thinking on the cosmic reality that controls everything?thesun. The map ofthe world reveals that the machine-age civilization is restricted to areaswhere the sun is not too hot or excessively cold [Radiant City 194]:

The sun's kisses are savage at the equator (where they are perpendicular), in-operative at the poles (where they are tangential) and in between as we movealong every possible variation of temperature and therefore of climate andtopography (customs, races, pigments, temperature, education, industries,products, morality, etc). [Radiant City 109]

Consequently Le Corbusier began to reorder this map: the true line of trade must belongitudinal, not latitudinal as is the common practice. The spread of commerce east-ward and westward had caused territories to get in each other's way, to compete witheach other, and it consequently had ignored all the space of the globe to the north andsouth. The world needed new axes of expansion for peoples pressing against politicalfrontiers, allowing them to leave the frontiers empty, and protect the world from warbetween nations [Radiant City 194].

The Vichy government under the leadership of Marshal Petain, the World WarI hero of Verdun, made its compromise with the German invaders in the summer of1940. Petain promised a new order, a National Revolution. His revolution embodied



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much of what the neosyndicalists had promoted: regional decentralization, corporatesyndicates, agrarian reform, elite leadership, and youth programs. Both Petain and thesyndicalists sought a new unity, an organic wholeness to cure a fragmented nation. LeCorbusier wrote in The Home ofMan (1942), "[n]ow is the hour to consider the wholecountry in its days of unity." Under Vichy an elite body of men would become the law-givers and as they had done throughout history, these elites would

state the relationship between man and the universe, between the great andthe small nations, between the soil and its boundary.

It is they who must assure the hierarchy of things in the art of building.Roads, houses, urban equilibrium, rural tracts, geographic boundaries, suchare the elements of their plastic game. [132]

These new lawgivers will become the modelers of towns and the creators of order inthe countryside. "At the threshold of the house they will install a vigilant guardian: theconditions of nature. On their coming, the revolution will be accomplished" [132].Le Corbusier turned to the past for help in achieving this revolution. He recountedthat on the Acropolis of Athens, the lawgiver knew how to place the temples as sound-ing boards of the surrounding mountains. It was the lawgiver's art that enabled him to"discern the spirit of those lines which can fuse the human creation and the natural cre?ation into one whole" [134]. And so it will be with the modeler of contemporary towns,who gathers within himself the entire countryside and the whole topography. "He willdetermine the built volumes. / He will distribute them upon the ground ofthe town. Hewill set upon the terrain a statue by which his spirit, through the course of years, willexpress itself in architectural manifestations" [135].

The airplane with its aerial view has given man a new understanding of geography,of the importance of the land which has preceded, existed, and remained while many acivilization has passed with time. "Geography speaks, proclaiming certain fundamentaltruths." Where men have made contact with each other, established a flow of informa-tion, and explored new territories, there the discourse of geography has penetrated aswell. The lawgivers will bring the fruits of modern work to everyone.

So that the body of our civilization becomes work itself: the fact "work"will be reconsidered, discussed; some new propositions submitted; some re-straints imposed; some arrangement taken finally to equilibrate the forces ofthe world, to make the sap circulate, to expand life, to make it regenerate, tohave the springtime bloom ofthis second cycle of machine civilization. [Troisetablissements 132]

Le Corbusier again turns to history to buttress this claim. He notes that ancient Rome,installed within the heart of the Mediterranean with its empire and its caravans comingfrom faraway horizons bearing with them rare and exotic products, has ceased to bethe center of the world. Population has spread over the entire surface of the earth alongwith its gigantic powers of production, and means of circulation and transport [Troisetablissements 132]. When the world returns to peace, new places of production willbe created where primary and secondary materials will be transformed into consumerproducts. In the first machine age, these places were dispersed but in the second ma?chine age they will be distributed according to the law ofthe "three establishments."

"Geography speaks. Here is the first discourse, a map of the redistribution of in-dustries on French territory." Traditionally geography has determined that industriesbe located close to primary materials, next to sources of power, along transportation

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routes, near labor markets and markets for consumption. And yet there are exceptionsto this rule of geography: it can be overturned by individual will, and new transporta-tion routes can determine the relocation of industries into new linear cities. "A map ofthe redistribution of industries in France clearly showed the presence of some industrialregions situated in the east along a line drawn from Caen to Marseille, and a series ofsmall industrial centers spread across the territorial ensemble" [Trois etablissements134].

Part Three: Geomorphic Structures on the LandAerial Warfare. While considering plans for the future development of Moscow in1930, Le Corbusier commented on a formidable menace threatening all urban exis?tence: that of aerial warfare. Lieutenant Colonel Vauthier had just given Le Corbusiera copy of his book titled The Aerial Danger and the Future ofthe Country}6 Now LeCorbusier understood that the air would be the new theater of military operations andthat threat of aerial warfare emanated not only from explosive projectiles that would de-stroy a city's built structures but also from poison gas and chemical warfare that wouldasphyxiate its inhabitants, and from flammable liquids that would spread a firestormbeyond imagination. A city could be destroyed all at once. But it just so happened, quitewithout realizing it, that Le Corbusier had already provided a necessary defense againstthis new danger of aerial warfare in his studies for Urbanisme (1925) and in his bookPrecisions (1930). He had proposed the construction of housing in reinforced con?crete, a material strong enough to withstand the impact of bombs and to be fireproof.He had also proposed these structures be isolated in great open spaces, that housing,commerce, and industry be located in separate zones, and that the entire built surfaceof the city be reduced. These were essential conditions needed to lessen the exposureof built structures to aerial attack but also to contain the spread of any conflagration.To avoid the disaster of poisonous gas, his proposal for suppressing meager courtyardsand narrow corridor streets, along with the provision of wide open spaces and housingraised on piloti, would allow sufficient wind and water from protected hydrants or largeopen-air swimming pools to cleanse the air. Le Corbusier admitted that his housing andplanning schemes had been offered as solutions for the problem of work and leisure inthe first machine age, but, recently, the French military having studied different plansfor the development of Paris discovered that only Le Corbusier's earlier schemes pro?vided adequate resistance to the dangers of aerial warfare.17With Paris under German occupation since July 1940, the question of how to evac-uate in case of air raids and carpet bombing was raised more and more frequently in the1940s. Le Corbusier knew what could be expected: bottlenecks at every street cornerand road jams along the routes of exodus. He wrote in Four Routes (1941) that it wouldbe "a stampede, and, in case of machine-gunning, a massacre" [44]. "Noxious gases[would] pour into our trench-like streets and into those wells which our courtyardsprovide; one can't get rid of them; they achieve a maximum result: the populationis asphyxiated" [48]. If only Le Corbusier's scheme, advocated in The Radiant City,

16. Precisions 192. "Communication Observations of Colonel Vauthier, 5th CongressCIAM," FLCD2(11).17. In 1937, Colonel Vauthier was asked to speak to CIAM 5 gathering in Paris to dis?cuss the problems of housing and leisure. From the triple viewpoint of explosive projectiles,firebombs, and poisonous gases, he explained, it was necessary to reconsider architecture andurbanism [FLC A3-1-65; "Commentaires relatifs a Moscow et a la 'Ville Verte'" (12 March1930)].



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could be built, it would dramatically reduce the vulnerability of the city. In collabora-tion with the Air Defense Staff, Le Corbusier's housing projects could be equippedwith bomb- and torpedo-proof roofing, and provided with antiexplosion chambers andfloor plates able to resist any projectiles not already exploded. Instead of undergroundshelters becoming the collective tomb of all who gathered there, Le Corbusier advised,bomb shelters could be located in the highest stories of apartment houses, where pureair provided by air conditioners would allow the residents to breathe air in safety. Suchdefense measures, decreed for the safety of Parisians, would ensure the realization ofrational town-planning schemes. "Or, vice versa, in rationalizing a plan for the city ofParis, to save her from the shameful chaos into which she is now plunged, we shallautomatically satisfy the need for aerial defense" [51].

At the end of World War II, drawing sustenance from the past as he looked into thefuture, Le Corbusier reconsidered the reasons for the walled medieval city and why thewall had been abandoned:

In French this [wall] is called une enceinte, and enceinte means both thatwhich encloses and the pregnant woman who carries an infant in her womb.From these images we take the principle of a form deliberately shaped withthe intention of being the vessel containing a city. Within it, a circulation net?work feeds the soil protected by the walls. Gates are opened in the enclosingwallsfrom which roads lead away into the countryside. [Looking 83]Then came a day when qffensive weapons made mock ofmilitary enclosures,when the advent ofthe airplane meant that for tresses no longer had ceilings?a recent event, since it datesfrom the First World War. [Looking 43]

With aerial warfare, new considerations replaced the old set of tools, and new urbanforms, the linear radiant city, developed for the entire nation.The Three Establishments. The basic elements of the postwar planning problem inLe Corbusier's list were the use of machines, new communication devices, informationflows, and administrative requirements. These were the elements in the equation thatwould determine the form and location of future settlement patterns around the globe.Yet production?or work? for Le Corbusier was the activating force: it propelled men,materials, and goods over the four routes ofthe world, those established on the land andsea, the railroads, and through the air [Concerning 11-12]. The first two routes had de?veloped a rational network of roads and ship lanes, while the railroad, followed by theautomobile, sowed disruption and chaos in its wake. Now the fourth route, or aviation,was a catalyst for great mutations taking place throughout the world. Having taken tothe air, the destiny of man was truly revolutionary.18Le Corbusier designed three different settlement patterns to shelter this new aerialcivilization: units of agricultural production (food), linear industrial cities (manufactur-ing), and radio-concentric social cities (government, knowledge, commerce, and distri?bution). Due to the airplane, population could now be rationally redistributed and landmore efficiently utilized. After a general territorial stocktaking, areas beyond the reachof the four routes would be allowed to sink into an indeterminate state, or possiblyextinction.

18. FLC C3-19-71-2?note from Le Corbusier on see. 6 "Infrastructure Congres Nationalde l Aviation Frangaise . . . Realisation and Technique . . . signalisation and telecommunity."



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Replying to a question addressed to him in 1945 concerning the mission and doc?trine of contemporary architecture, he replied: "Let us read the vital currents whichflow through our land." Along the crucial meridian line that crosses the breadth ofFrance, new volumes for housing, work, and leisure must be built from Le Havre toAlgiers. The Allies understood that airlines were the lifeline of defense and their relent-less precision bombing of the cities of Germany eventually won the war. They under?stand the same lifeline will be necessary when the war ends:

For the time ofpeace, they are preparing vast aerial fleets, which will producean unimagined upheaval in the transport ofmen and goods. We need not loseour heads. The skies ofour towns will be full ofthe war and the whistling ofaircraft. And if one day the physicists and the mechanics succeed in annullingthe racket the skies ofour towns will remain no less encumbered with engines,far and near, like the monstrous white mice that fill the skies of the fantasticpaintings of Hieronymus Bosch. [Concerning 118, 121]Since the first National Congress of French Aviation, in April 1945, aircrafthave been banned from the skies of French towns.l The war has turned anew page, that of the aircraft, with its extraordinary speeds and its routes asstraight as the trajectories of missiles. Enthusiasm and ingenuity join handsto prepare splendid berthsfor these machines: airports. Each town will claimone, according to its needs and rights./ It is dangerous to prophesy so soon af?ter the event [ofwar]. But at least we must try to see whether the three humanestablishments of our technical civilization, hitherto founded upon the threeroutes of earth, water, and iron, will find their futures foreclosed orfostered bythefourth route, that ofthe air. [Concerning 121]

If civilization is so fostered, Le Corbusier continues, then the map of Europe will berearranged: there will be a linear industrial city extending from the Atlantic coast tothe Urals, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Within this network, industrieswill be transformed; they will house all sorts of specialists and manufacture a rangeof useful goods. They will embrace the radio-concentric cities already established bygeography.

Measures must be taken within the geography of Europe the effect of whichwill be tojoin and to unite, and not to multiply the gun muzzles along frontierswhich are ready for dissolution before the sap which is thrusting from thefuture./ This is the message that France can carry, if need be, to the inter?national conference tables to assist in the emergence ofa harmonious worldfrom the chaos into which afoolhardy inattention has plunged us. Our snaiVsshell has become too small, we are left without any real shelter. It is time toleave it and build another. [Concerning \22\

Conclusion. For thousands of years man lived within a ten- to twelve-mile radius ofhis shelter, but now, Le Corbusier noted, man can read about or view the entire worldin dramatic new atlases of aerial photographs or documental films of infinite detail. Theflow of information has exploded, revealing a variety of forms of nature, cultures, andclimates. Sitting in his armchair man has access to

geography (sites,fiora andfauna, harvest and industrial products);?human races, as tallied by the illustrated document, the documentary film.

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They are revealed to us in detail, their appearance, their customs, what theybuild;?climates from one pole to the other, by way ofthe tropics and the equator,and from sea level to the highest altitudes.

Such an abundance of information means so many inducements to greed,and also so much encouragement of self-centered withdrawal. [Looking 12]The first reaction to any expansion of horizons, as it has been throughout the his?

tory of mankind, is anxiety, or fear of the new. To find some assurance, man retreats toinvestigate the past. "Archaeology [after 1870] was supreme, reigning over all teach-ing. It was an invitation to a refusal to create, to loss ofthe tastefor creating?taste for,joy in the risk of, creating" [Looking 12]. Then specialized schools developed to trainengineers in the new sciences; they experimented, followed their curiosity, made pro-digious leaps forward in the applied sciences. They designed automobiles and airplanesthat realized new speeds; they invented radios that wrapped the earth in countless waves,picked up and relayed by receiving sets. These became the new vehicles that spreadevery kind of thought or slogan around the globe, snowballing to gigantic proportionsas they gathered momentum [Looking 14]. Man was overwhelmed, crushed under allthese new discoveries; as a consequence society was divided into hostile classes, andindividuals were bruised and restricted in their daily endeavors. The human viewpointwas lost, and the rightful place of machines was denied. "If a serious attempt to ponderthe problems of aviation had been made fifty, or even just twenty or thirty years ago,couldn't it have guided a whole swarm of decisions which had, instead, to be takenamidst the perilous improvisation of sentiment or interest or panic?" [Looking 78].In conclusion, Le Corbusier resorted to his famous refrain "the hour is striking":the time is favorable; now we absolutely must look ahead and plan for a world in whichthe aerial route will lie supreme.

WORKS CITEDCerteau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Corboz, Andre. "The Land as Palimpsest." Diogenes (Jan-Mar. 1982): 12-34.Crochet-Damais, Pierre. "L'exploration aerienne" La decouverte aerienne du monde.Ed. Paul Chombart de Lauwe. Paris: Horizons de France, 1948. 57-96.Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars.New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.Lagardelle, Hubert. "De l'homme abstrait a l'homme reel." Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 24-

32.-. "La fin d'une culture." Plans 5 (May 1931): 9-16.Lamour, Philippe. "Notions claires pour une civilization occidentale." Plans 1 (Jan.

1931): 12-23.Latour, Bruno. "Centers of Calculation." Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard UP,

1987. 215-57.Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). Aircraft. London: Studio Publications,1935.-. Des canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis . . . s.v.p. Paris: L'A. A. et Le

Corbusier, 1938).-. The City ofTomorrow. 1929. Trans. Frederick Etchell. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.

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-. The Four Routes. Trans. Dorothy Todd. London: Dennis Dobston, 1947. Trans.of Sur les 4 routes. Paris: Gallimard, 1941.-. "Invite a l'action." Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 51-64. Rpt. in Radiant City 92-97.-. "La ligne generale." Plans 1 (Jan. 1931): 7-9.-. "La ligne generale." Plans 4 (Apr. 1931): 5-6.-. "La ligne generale." Plans 6 (June 1931): 5-8.-. Une maison-un palais. Paris: G. Cres, 1928.-. Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning. 1930. Trans.Edith Schreiber Aujame. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.-. "Premiere etape." Plans 1 (July 1931): 4-8.-. The Radiant City: Elements ofa Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis

ofOur Machine-Age Civilization. Trans. Pamela Knight (pt. 1), Eleanor Levieux(pts. 2, 6), Derek Coltman (pts. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8). New York: Orion, 1967. Trans. of Laville radieuse. Boulogne-sur-Seine: L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, 1935.-. Urbanisme des trois etablissements humains. 1945. Paris: Forces Vives auxEditions de Minuit. 1959.

-. "L'urbanisme et le lyrisme des temps nouveaux." Le Point (Jan. 1939): n.p.-, and Francois de Pierrefeu. The Home ofMan. Trans. Eleanor Levieux. London:Architectural Press, 1948. Trans. of La maison des hommes. Paris: Plon, 1942.

de Martonne, Emmanuel. Geographie aerienne. Paris: Albin Michel: 1948.McLeod, Mary M. "Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to

Vichy." Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1985.Ory, Pascal. The Legend ofthe Skies. Trans. Barry Tulett. Paris: Hoebeke, 1991.

17. done.boyer christine- aviation and the aerial view le corbusier's spatial transformations

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