I don't understand this article. Le Corbusier is the epitome of the opposite: architecture that architects love, but that the people who have to live or work in it hate. The article attempts to shift the blame to managers, but there is hardly a better example of forcing stuff onto people against their will than Le Corbusier and his disciples. That Le Corbusier's Pessac is now viewed as an architectural success says more about the standards of contemporary architecture than about Pessac. Here's a picture advertising the place: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0e/f7/9d/67/... Is that supposed to be a grand achievement of one of the most famous architects?
So what exactly did Le Corbusier get right, according to the article? "The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength." -- this is what fans of Le Corbusier always praise him for, and it always sounds really bad to me. The main strength of the architecture is that you have to radically change it to make it liveable...? That he said “You know, life is always right; it is the architect who is wrong.” when people made radical changes? I guess that's more laudable than trying to fight the change, but also a very low bar.
> So what exactly did Le Corbusier get right, according to the article? "The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength." -- this is what fans of Le Corbusier always praise him for, and it always sounds really bad to me. The main strength of the architecture is that you have to radically change it to make it liveable...?
Some famous architects make/made terribly unusable buildings that were also hard to modify to make usable. Having a famous architect that contemplates that his design may not be correct is amazing progress.
His work tends to be utilitarian and not visually exciting (especially earlier work); but avoiding load bearing walls and having lots of windows was innovative and useful. Although, apparently the occupants found too much light and added shutters.
Designing architecture in such way it can be easily changed when down the line inevitebly the usage changes is a value in itself. A big chunk of architecture IMO suffers from architects thinking they know how living or working is supposed to look like and push that ideology onto others while most often the offices of that architect look suspiciously different..
I work in a building from an era that preceeds Modernism and adapting the building to anything other than was originally 250 years ago envisioned is a nightmare of limitations, reshuffles and regulations, a stairway that goes down into an hallway just to go up on the other side. Accessability nightmare etc.
> Designing architecture in such way it can be easily changed when down the line inevitebly the usage changes is a value in itself
Reminds me of a building influenced/designed by Christopher Alexander. IIRC there was a 2D array of unformly spaced ca 6x6in wooden beams -- to mount walls/dividers etc against as needed.
That's one of the practical things wrong with this style of architecture: it looks bad with even a little bit of staining on the walls, and it stains very quickly because it lacks an overhanging roof that protects the walls.
Most of what I saw of him feels cold and failed. That said the "cite radieuse", when inside, felt cozy, original and well built (from walls, orientation thus lighting, heating). People living there said they were very pleased.
Agreed on the Cite Radieuse, the hallways are what I wish all apartment building halls looked like. Essentially interior streets, two stories high with apartment windows facing onto them, large windows to the exterior, benches or places for people to sit and enjoy the sunlight and meet their neighbors. The highrise as the modern incarnation of a village with all of the communal charm would be a delight. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/84/79/92/84799263a8dfa6fef6bf...
Completely impractical since every developer will choose the standard closed in, windowless and unadorned hallway because it is the cheaper option.
> Completely impractical since every developer will choose the standard closed in, windowless and unadorned hallway because it is the cheaper option.
That's one theory I've heard a few times, it served as a basis for urban renewal in the 60s but dumb down on every level to the point of being rapidly unliveable (cue the movies about housing project blues that came soon after)
Urban renewal was the realization of Le Corbusier's ideology at a large scale. It really was his vision. Focussing on a detail whether corridors have light or not, I think is somewhat of a diversion.
Urban renewal did not fail because it was done cheaply, or dumbed down (which it was). It failed because it was fundamentally the wrong approach to city building.
We're still living with the consequences. Our current built environment is modernist; mediated by technology, planned, bureaucratic.
It's due time Le Corbusier is getting his comeuppance. It took a long long time. The first criticism were in the 70s, but postmodernism could not get beyond pageantry. And when I was in college 20 years ago, modernism was still venerated in the architecture departments, because the architect-as-god remained so appealing (btw Ayn Rand was similarly infatuated, it's an odd quirk of history how both communism and libertarians found common ground in this one domain). It's slowly fading. I think the dyke is going to break, and we'll put Le Corbusier where he belongs. A hugely influential misanthrope, who made categorically bad architecture.
(also really sad, because early in his career, Le Cobusier's single family homes were really quite appealing).
I kinda disagree, a little bit. You can live happily in a big housing project, as long as some basics are there. No noise, not too dense, some green spaces and also a fair owner. Lots of buildings failed because owners stopped caring, so everything rot, and people here didn't help either. Some of my family lived in these and it felt ok enough. Some other projects 500m for them became no-go zones. Quite surprising.
That said I'm not pro big-structures[0], I understand it spoils the area too much. Near my town, an ex no-go zone has been replaced by smaller buildings, that was enough to regrow a peacefulness that left for 30 years. It's walkable, the woods nearby are walkable, almost shocking.
[0] even though, I still love them for some reasons
tbf, I do agree with you. For sake of argument, "big housing project", is just another name for "big apartment building". And I agree that many places do "big apartment building" quite well.
But "big apartment building" only works well in a big thriving city, within its existing fabric. Not as in, let's raze the city, and put a big building in this new empty space. And I think Le Corbusier was explicitly about the latter.
Urban renewal wasn't necessarily the wrong solution in itself.
The 18th and 19th centuries weren't necessarily any better at humane building. In the UK postwar worker housing stock was terrible - outside toilets, little or no insulation, no central heating, and often poorly built.
So blocks were a solution of sorts. But they usually were poorly built and unimaginatively designed, optimised for low cost, but with no practical understanding of community or community spaces.
A typical UK block has some decorative grass around it, but that's it. There's no common space, no common facilities, and no colour or texture.
Later renovations which add at least some of the above are more popular and have fewer social problems.
Thanks for that link. I don't know about his personal thoughts, but just judging from his work, LC's architecture certainly had a fascist tinge, in the sense that through that kind of architecture man submits to authority. A-tower-in-the-park is a very authoritarian top-down way to house people. There was also his exaltation of destruction, to create a clean slate from which a new architectural order can arise, and fascists certainly appreciate violence as a force of change.
Just do deviate a little from LC in particular. But both communism and fascism are the political realizations of modernism, in that they only can function through the mediation of high technology.
In communism, equity is achieved through perfect bureaucracy; the system of production and wealth reallocation being a well-oiled machine, perfectly transparent and predictably manipulated. It is in communism, that humans completely submit to the machine the most.
In fascism, dominion is achieved through incessant violent action. Technology is the necessary lever to maintain dominance over the enemy. It is in fascism that humans submit to their leader, exhilarated by their shared power through technology (Tanks! Bombs! Nuclear Reactors!)
Since no technology is perfectly reliable, or technological dominion is never guaranteed, both are doomed to fail.
There's a commonality between modernism and the realization of an the industrial mass consumer society in the 20th century that transcends the ideological divides of the time. Factories, warehouses, office buildings, tower blocks, shopping malls, highways and suburbs all have the same rationales of mass production economics beating at their heart. A skyscraper is simply a "people warehouse".
In this respect the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand. A criticism of a one-size-fits-all lifestyle equally applies across the fascist/communist spectrum, and the "Californian ideology" that SV represented drove a stake into it by standing up for the individual, albeit in an amoral, Randian sense: cool toys for those who could afford them, digital sharecropping for the rest. The highly provisioned, toy-like offices of Google etc follow from that premise.
> the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand
fwiw - I think the growing criticism of modernism are a good thing. The alternative, a more humanistic attitude to life and liberty (corny I know), and a more organic model of political organization seem preferable.
I also agree that the amoral SV-ethos was wrong, because of the elitism you point out.
I think that modernism was a natural fad which has run its course and people realize that we overshot and forgot counter intuitive details that aren't addressed by comfort or "progress".
chapman court in LA was originally built with that kind of hallway on the 2nd floor of a series of work-loft spaces (studio below, living space above). i got to see it via an LA Conservancy tour a few years back. unfortunately, i couldn't find pictures of the hallway, but here are promo pages for the recent renovation with some other pictures ('creative offices' in the 2nd shows one of the loft interiors):
In the US all units in a new residential building with an elevator must be adaptable for accessibility. If each individual apartment was two floors then each would need accommodation for an elevator or staircase lift.
> Inside, wide corridors ("streets in the sky") run along the central long axis of every third floor of the building. Each apartment lies on two levels, such that the room on one side of a corridor belongs to the apartment that is mostly below the corridor floor, while that on the opposite side belongs to the apartment above. On those floors without corridors, the apartments stretch from one side of the building to the other, and each has a balcony on the western side.
If you search for floorplans of it, it looks like there are also interior corridors but I think every apartment has access to one of those wide corridors. I'm not sure what the point of having both interior and exterior corridors is, I would think it would be better to get rid of the interior corridor and give the extra space to the exterior one.
Edit: Well this is disappointing. After further research, it looks like that corridor is just the main one and the rest of the floor have dark, internal corridors and then enclosed balconies. What a missed opportunity, imagine a whole building full of corridors like the ones in the image, if you're going to build two story apartments then why not do it that way?
It's a very light article with a title that over-promises.
The fact that Pessac was easily modified appears to be accidental, and the article finishes with a passing comment by LC that I wholeheartedly agree with, but doesn't really amount to much.
Feels like something dashed off to somehow prove a point?
I very much like Tim Harford's reporting when it comes to statistics and numbers in life and the news (his More Or Less radio programme/podcast is great) and his older stuff on economics, but his more recent obsession with "cautionary tales" (the title of his other podcast) frequently seems to involve stories that are superficially interesting but frequently fail to convince me that they have a strong point.
The accidental thing seemed implied by the article, that the changes were an act of "resistance", rather than something that was designed for.
My comment was more a criticism of the article than of Le Corbusier, whose work I mostly like (much more so than many contemporary architecture). A better article would have pointed to those 5 points, rather than simply repeating one pithy quote, which seemed to be the entire supporting evidence.
Le Corbusier was also partly responsible for the American ideal of the ultra-zoned, socially-stratisfied, car-centric city. Le Corbusier saw society as a machine, not an organism, and his work reflects this outlook; a comprehensive plan for alienation and the decay of community.
> Le Corbusier was also partly responsible for the American ideal of the ultra-zoned, socially-stratisfied, car-centric city. Le Corbusier saw society as a machine, not an organism, and his work reflects this outlook; a comprehensive plan for alienation and the decay of community.
What a myopic perspective on a man who thought that workers should be treated to a life beyond that of misery on the ant-hill of cramped tenements which grew up around factories in which they worked.
Just because someone's solutions grew ubiquitous and the flaws in this paradigm grew too obvious, does not mean that these flaws were the plan all along.
I want society to be like a machine and less like an organism. Seems like your personal belief system does not align with Le Corbusier.
> American ideal of the ultra-zoned, socially-stratisfied, car-centric city
IMO the best thing about America. Lots of land. Lots of space to build things. I am not a fan of crowded hectic life, $2M houses, having to ration electricity, live in a cardboard box sized apartment in a highly dense but "walkable" city.
> I want society to be like a machine and less like an organism.
Unfortunately, this desire is at odds with the fundamental nature of a group of organisms, but you are welcome to fashion your own personal life/community into a machine if you so choose.
> Seems like your personal belief system does not align with Le Corbusier.
It does not, but that’s okay, we’re discussing the pros and cons of architectural philosophies here! Unfortunately, Le Corbusier put no value on the expressed desires and needs of the communities who had to live in his projects, whose buildings were torn down to make way for Le Corbusier’s machines.
Humans and communities are not machines and cannot be engineered.
> I am not a fan of crowded hectic life, $2M houses, having to ration electricity, live in a cardboard box sized apartment in a highly dense but "walkable" city.
The issues with car-centricity go far beyond dense urban areas. The most easily-recognized example is probably the stroad [1], which also discretizes and alienates formerly human-oriented areas. I grew up in rural Maine and have lived in two of America’s largest cities, and I’ve seen our mechanization throughout.
I’ve had a good number of jobs in 20+ years in software. I have had a private office four times.
Once when the business unit was failing and my room only had me in it.
Once when I worked for a small old school family company.
Once when I made principal engineer after years of work in a large-ish company.
And finally now that I’m working from home.
One job I had was really noisy and distracting. Rather than install sound mitigation, I found out the CEO liked it that way. “So it sounded like things were happening.”
It’s going to take a lot to get me back to a cube farm or open office.
I've been working from home for almost a decade, two thirds of my career to date. Prior to that I was in either open bullpen-style offices (everyone in a room facing out) or sharing an office with two or three other people. I will never* sign up for an in-office job again.
* unless, you know, I need to feed my family or whatever
Now it clicks why cube farms are popular: it is an easy way for managers / owners to feel the excitement of the agora but being up in the box seats they don’t have to live or think in it.
To be honest, I don't mind cube farms per se as much as densification.
As long as you have a certain number of square feet and things aren't bolted down, you can still exercise a certain amount of control over your environment. You can rotate your desk to face a different way, put up pictures or a coat rack, what have you.
It's when you start getting squeezed in the minimal legal square footage that all the options start to go away -- you literally can't move your desk without disrupting the entire floor, you can't add a bookshelf and any plants or pictures need to fit on your suspiciously narrow desk.
Sure, cube farms have many of the other problems of noise pollution, minimal privacy, and bad lighting, but as long as you have your own cube, or a cube with few enough people to haggle over rearranging, and a few extra square feet it's still possible to put your stamp on it.
My desk is bolted to the floor along with six other desks. If I get much fatter, I'll pretty much be sat on top of my neighbour. At this point, I would gladly get a cubicle, at least they pay lip service to concentration. The open plan office I'm currently in doesn't even manage that.
Yeah, $employer is currently trying to force that on everyone. I have so much stuff on my desk that I'm currently exempt from that nonsense. It's a great way to waste everyone's time, because apparently everyone's time is a lot cheaper than a bit of extra office space.
Our official "return to the office" date is very soon. Our second work site has been folded into the main site, and the cubicles in the main site have been reduced to half the size (in terms of square feet) they used to be, to more or less double the density.
Implementation of the changes had already started when COVID hit. People who have been to the office recently say things like, don't hit your knees where the PC is mounted.
I was fine with our (pretty standard sized) cubes before COVID. But I'm so glad we have the option to continue working from home now.
About 5 years ago our company shifted from a more traditional private offices to a wide open “european/tech style” office environment to “to improve collaboration”.
I hated it. Too noisy. To much distraction and now the culture of the company seemed to encourage distraction and interruption. I managed to maneuver my way into one of the few private offices just so I could have a door to close. Even then I had to put up a sign that basically said “if the door is closed and the building isn’t on fire, don’t open it.”
In some regards for me the pandemic was a blessing. Fully remote now, company decided to shut down the office in our location and rely on rentable conference space if we need a day together. It’s just my wife, dog, and I in a shared office with each of us respectful of distractions. It’s bliss. It would be nearly impossible for me to return to an office again. I’ll opt to retire first.
“It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. “
It should be, but most companies offer uncomfortable furniture in an open, noisy room with drab carpet and the stench of burnt coffee and burnt popcorn.
“Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. “
Maybe this is true in Silicon Valley, but the rest of the world could easily outfit a corner of a room to a better standard than most corporate offices.
>"It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home"
There are a number of reasons why this argument doesn't make any sense
-commutes are expensive, and time consuming.
-surveillance produces a worse working experience, but is a major goal of office design.
-A desk with a computer on it is 90% of the way towards a fully equipped office.
-Many modern offices are also built with recreation in mind, equipped with ping pong tables and other such nonsense.
-I have come to believe that the primary business rationale for having people "in the office", is that it makes it harder for you to look for other jobs, and that process means that employees get more expensive.
Whilst I was moving out and inbetween places, my "home office" was close to perched on a coffee table, and even that I'd take over a big open plan office (or possibly even my own private office).
Not necessarily, I live in downtown Toronto, ON, and I rent an apartment for my needs. These needs did not include working from home!
I could move and find a better place to allow me to work from home properly, but unless my employer pays for it, or give me a raise to compensate for it, I'll find a better paying job.
I was working out of a studio apartment until this year and I honestly didn't feel like my WFH set up took up any real extra space:
In the beginning I would use the breakfast bar and just put the laptop up after work. Later on I bought an Ikea arm chair and an end table that just stayed in a corner I didn't use. This is all in addition to the partitioned off area for my side projects that had it's own desk and chair.
>but the rest of the world could easily outfit a corner of a room to a better standard than most corporate offices.
I disagree. Most people don't make enough money to have on room they can dedicate to work. In germany where I live rent is so expensive that for a single person a 2 room apartment is the standard. You basically need 3 rooms which means you're paying significantly more rent unless you live in very rural areas.
Beating a corporate office, as far as the actual work space itself and if we're talking tech work, doesn't require much, is the thing. A small table with a monitor and keyboard and a pretty-good chair, tucked in a corner, is already better just by being private. Having an entire dedicated room—even a very small one—is wildly better than most tech offices, and is far beyond what you need to have a better working environment.
Hell, the private bathroom alone makes even the working-from-a-coffee-table version competitive with typical tech offices.
Inbetween solutions also work. A small office with e.g. two or three people that work together can work quite well IMO if the space is big enough and the people get the means to decide how to use it.
Having three devs that work on the same thing in one room can be beneficial if they like each other.
My wfh environment is a desk in a corner of the bedroom, an enclosed area about 150cm x 150cm, with walls on two sides and shelves on the other two, with two little gaps for the light.
It's awesome. It feels so comfy. It's got the lighting I like. My chair could be better, but it's okay. I can hide in there.
Ah, I did not realise it was from Le Corbusier that the brutalist's obsession with flat roofs came from.
There is no greater symbol of the absolute anti human idiocy of the movement than:
A) constructing a flat roof building on the west coast of Scotland (200+ rain days a year)
B) declare it a master piece
There does seem to be a strong cultural thread in architecture that views the profession as more art than design. If I have to live and work in a building, I would much rather it was designed with me in mind than being the architect's expression of personal style.
Edit: to be fair, this criticism could also be levelled at programmers and interface designers.
As someone who is just coming to the end of his architectural education and having worked in the industry for about 7 years now I can say this is largely a problem with academia in arhtecture which sees itself as some kind of pseudo-philosophical subject. Building regulations in most countries that I have worked in, for better or for worse, will not allow for architects to pull off what the modernists or the post modernists did anymore. (This is not to say that there aren't people out there still churning out poorly thought out buildings)
That sounds like architects have been tempered by regulations moreso than having changed ambitions though, am I missing something? My understanding is that the modernist and postmodernist icons were not academics but practicing architects, sometimes both.
Similar ambitions are still there from my anecdotal experience (especially among people in the polar ends of the profession's spectrum ie. the new grads and the veterans) but most architects I meet these days while appriciative of the works of people like Corb and other modernists, completely understand their shortcomings.
But what has really curbed the possibility of anything like those movements to happen again is the neoliberal economics in contrast to the post war socialist policies of the time.
That makes sense, by post war socialism are you thinking the Warsaw pact countries or the more social-democratic elements of Keynesianism? Either way, makes sense given most development is done privately for profit now. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
You are mixing a few things here, flat roofs have nothing to do with brutalism in particular or Le Corbusier - they existed long before both. Maybe you meant modernism in general?
Anyway, for anyone wondering about all these flat roofs in modern architecture I recommend watching this video:
I do also wonder what people consider modern. As I sit in my flat-roofed 1880’s Chicago home. Surrounding block after block of flat-roofed residential buildings housing millions of people, largely constructed between 1872 and 1930.
I find it hard to take seriously someone who is "suprised" by the existence of flat roofs in traditional North African/Mediterranean/Middle Eastern architecture.
Why? Do you feel humans should be born with a natural instinct for Mediterranean architecture, much as they are for the supremacy of iterative software development?
It's also worth realizing that much of style comes from technology -- an architect makes his name by designing something that couldn't have been built fifty years ago.
Much of 19th century style was built around millwork, because millwork let you use this wide flat boards and linear patterns that were all but impossible to do at scale before.
For the 20th, you had glass, steel and concrete -- because again, there were things you could do with concrete that you just couldn't before.
So it was back to the beginning of time; you give an architect a flying buttress, and he's going to use it.
But the flying buttress solved a need. They wanted to build higher because they wanted to celebrate god in an even more glorious fashion, bringing in more light, more stained glass, more people in front of the altar.
The difference with modernism, which is really a mindset, and so deeply seeped in we barely recognize it anymore, is that technology, in and of itself, is a value. That is why we have the flat roof in Scotland. The value is not keeping the inhabitants dry, or being mindful of long term maintenance issues. Technology, especially high technology, demands its application. That is modernism. It's a curse.
Contrast this very clearly against humanism. Man is measure of all things. Not, as in modernism, that man should adapt to the measure. It's not that technology wasn't valued, but only as a tool, a means to an end. Or a means of understanding, a metaphor. The telescope is an implement of science, not a fetisj. In modernism, the tool is fetishized. The concrete that enabled shaping walls at large scales, now must be everywhere. Why, why would a living space demand that it be harsh, and in odd large shapes? It does not. But because at one point reinforced concrete was high technology, it must. It's a very infantile mindset, like a toddler, who has similar infatuations.
There's a fundamental conflict of interest between workers and managers, and given that managers have all the power, they usually win. Workers want control in the form of autonomy, managers want control in the form of bureaucracy. A good manager, in my mind, devolves as much control as they can down to the workers while maintaining enough bureaucratic control to satisfy those above them.
Of course, that only applies to the traditional hierarchical organisation - there are much more worker-friendly organisational structures organised around autonomy for the individual and democracy for the collective, like the VSM [1] and cooperatives [2]. Of course, we don't see them very often because people usually found companies to control for themselves.
Been interesting coming back to the office. The office I work in is seven floors of open office. Everyone up to and including the CEO has the same desk. A standing desk (6 feet wide, white), dual monitor arms hosting some combination of 24 inch 1080p panels, or 27 1440p panels, file cabinet (white, top made to be sat on), and chair (black, mesh back, fabric bottom). Before the pandemic you found your way around by decorations provided by the workers. "Take a left at the Darth Vader cardboard cut out, if you see the tiki hut you've gone too far".
Since coming back though all those decorations are gone. The place feels even more lifeless then before. Part of this because many people just aren't coming in, and partly because a lot of people have moved to WFH, or another company. I don't think those decorations are ever coming back, and it sure feels a lot worse.
> Le Corbusier’s Pessac is now viewed as an architectural success. The picket fences and the pitched roofs and the garden gnomes are gone, and his original vision is restored. I wonder if Le Corbusier himself would have approved of that. The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength. When he was told about the garden gnomes of Pessac, he replied, “You know, life is always right; it is the architect who is wrong.” Managers should remember that.
It's somewhat run-down, if not poor. But it doesn't strike me as being particularly terrible. It seems to have had quite a bit variety even from the start.
Like others have mentioned, it's not impressive if you look at it like something built in the 70s/80s but they are ~100 years old by now which makes it quite impressive in my opinion.
It’s not only hubris but also dehumanizing. It’s just so detached from how people want to live and in many cases amplified social problems and dysfunction.
With the hindsight of history I find Le Corbusier vastly overrated. It just seems that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and that was certainly true in that era.
I can appreciate that it was "hey, here's a new material, and new techniques, let's see what we can do", but it all went a bit to far with Brutalism.
To be honest, we're back at that point again over the last couple of decades with office buildings that are largely glass exteriors where the current glut of architects are putting "frilly bits" on the buildings to make them a bit less bland, but at the same time making them look very much "of the moment".
As for current homes, in the UK, at least, the architecture has never been blander. Boring boxes with 2 car spaces and a bit of grass out the back. In terms of the article, I don't see how modern homes can be given much extra character by the owners versus those designed by Corbusier mentioned in the article. If anything modern house architecture is at a worse, lower point than in previous years.
It could be the same trend as in fashion: a huge chunk of the population cares way less about social signaling and extra character, especially when it comes with more maintenance cost and no more functionality.
Interesting article. You're right, I guess, I prefer architecture as (classical) art. My preferred architecture is largely anything Art-Deco or earlier, and most buildings (not necessarily houses) built in the late 80s-90s (oddly, specific, I know). The brutalist stuff in London (the South Bank, the Barbican, QEII centre, and so on), I'd pull down in an instant if I were in charge (which is probably a good reason for me not to be in charge of anything tbh).
Off topic, but the scrolling on that site is completely borked. Please, for the love of all that is good, don't mess with default scrolling behaviour on websites
> The Chiat-Day office redesign has become a notorious cautionary tale, warning what happens when style is put ahead of substance and hot-desking goes too far
I had never heard about this "cautionary tale", so I dug around a bit and found this Wired article [1] plus some pictures of the tiny lockers for the "dog pictures, or whatever" in this other article [2]. I'm not sure I would take it as the final nail in the coffin for the open-office concept, seeing as some of the problems are no longer relevant (such as not enough mobile phones for everyone), but it's an interesting article nonetheless.
I wouldn’t attribute this to the triumph of modern architecture. More a really obvious lesson that even when faced with hideous modern architecture, people with agency will make do.
I spent several years working in a monumental modernist building. The place succeeded in its primary design goals: glorifying the architect and patron. Some of the exteriors & public spaces were not hideous. But the buildings as a place to work were awful and not fit to purpose.
The part about workers reacring really bad to forced rearragements reminds me of a time, when company removed flowers from my desk. Somehow this hurted more than bad micromanager and problematic coworkers.
Edit : Everyone could have flowers and they were given by the company earlier. Just mine dissapeared.
I am a huge fan of Le Corbusier – here's a page about Cité Frugès de Pessac (the text may be in French, but the pictures are not!) [1]. For anyone entertaining thoughts about functionalist architecture only being boxes, I turn your attention to the beautiful Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp [2].
May I ask why? He always struck me as someone a bit disconnected from how humans actually work. Stewart Brand has a show about all the changes people had to make his buildings livable.
>May I ask why? He always struck me as someone a bit disconnected from how humans actually work
While it's popular to dump on Corbusier today, especially with the hindsight of history and what we know about urban planning now (and I mostly agree with it), you have to look through the lens of what he was working with at the time. City centers were areas of blight, not hip places with third wave coffee shops on them. Waterfronts were dilapidated docks, not pleasant beaches with views of the sea.
On the flip side, cars were new, shiny, and free of any of the negative connotation we see in them today (traffic, pollution, noise). Any infrastructure built to support them was fresh and efficient.
It's no surprise that you'd have some people going all in on the latter. In hindsight, it turns out to be unfortunate that viewpoint won so thoroughly in the US.
>For anyone entertaining thoughts about functionalist architecture only being boxes, I turn your attention to the beautiful Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp [2].
I was like "this isn't so bad" but then I got to the photo of all the mis-matched bizarre windows on one side, like someone totally screwed up editing a house in The Sims. Yikes. It looks like the architectural version of painting yourself into a corner and just giving up and letting that part be screwed up, rather than rethinking the whole thing to fix it.
The... steeple, I think it's meant to be? Also kinda looks like a mistake, rather than something done on purpose.
The inside's OK but I concur with it still being one of the uglier "nice" churches I've ever seen. Overall looks like it'd be better as, I dunno, part of a monastery or something? Maybe Tony Stark's vacation home or something, from the better angles.
Yeah, absolutely, I liked several of the photos quite a bit. They didn't really say "church" to me, mostly—maybe a really cool library?—but part of it's just that most "nice" churches are really pretty, so the competition's stiff. Given some of the reactions in posts, I actually expected it to be a lot worse than it was.
Absent context I'd definitely take the mismatched-windows exterior shot as the result of something like the Internet-famous time that amateur (in Spain, I think?) tried to restore a painting of Jesus.
[EDIT] My point is, if someone told me some other parts of the building were a mistake, much less something like the Sistine Chapel, I'd be like "no way". That particular view of the building? Someone told me it was a mistake, I'd be like "haha, yeah, clearly, hope they fix it so it doesn't keep dragging down the rest of the building"
The exterior of the Notre Dame du Haut is simplistic, not beautiful (although the slope of the roof is nice). The interior design is striking in its layout, but overall both are ugly due to the materials used.
This building looks like a first draft of the final design, and really does not deserve to be used for religious purposes.
The crazy thing is that Le Corbusier spent months on the design of the south wall. It wasn't a rushed project at all; this was late career Le Corbusier at the height of his creative vision.
To me the south wall looks externally like a knock-off computer with a bunch of random ports, but that may just be personal idiosyncrasies.
I assume that these projects took time and effort, but the finished results look to me like a half-baked render, like someone just forgot to finish the job.
I'm not a fan of much of Le Corbusier's works, if any.
Perhaps I am privileged by living in a very low cost of living area, but it was no great difficulty even in the beginning of my tech career to acquire a SFH w/ enough bedrooms that I could dedicate one to being an office. I even have a mini-split AC in my home office so I can keep the temperature at a comfortable working level (cooler) compared to the rest of the house in a cost-efficient manner.
I have no idea who these people are that think a company office intended for hundreds or thousands of people will be a better work environment than private offices per person or dedicated home offices. In my home office, I put significant effort into comfort and ergonomics and it yielded a huge improvement in my quality of life and a cost-savings to my employer due to not needing regular physical therapy for back pain anymore, and solving RSI that would have otherwise required surgery. Yet, if I go into an office to work they buy the cheapest "task chair" they can get and put everyone at tiny minimum spec desks. Even when I had a private office earlier in my career when that was still a thing, the furniture was garbage.
At home, I have a sit/stand desk with electric lift, ergonomic monitor and laptop arms, a nice herman miller ergo chair, an ergonomic mechanical keyboard, and a vertical mouse, with everything properly adjusted by an ergo consultant I hired. I've never seen a company that would be willing to provide a similar setup, even setting aside the privacy and quiet aspect of a dedicated office vs cube/open. At the end of the day, company office space is expensive and management cost optimizes by reducing worker quality of life. I'd much rather they allow permanent remote work and pass the cost savings on to workers by covering the cost of ergonomic equipment. I've now been permanently remote for almost a decade, and I will never go back to the office.
Turn off JS and you're almost there! Ok, it will load the header and footer but apparently also displaying a text-only article without Javascript is asking too much (Reader mode works though)
Of course, blame the people who had to live in the houses and modified them to be livable for not understanding the architect's vision, not the architect for designing houses people hated living in so much they felt they needed modification before living in them.
Having those pictures included in the article would make a mockery of its content and intended points (whatever it was). Would any sane person object to the renovation from that squalid state to a bright and inviting building? Were those "modifications" sound or was poor Corbu overestimating the occupants (his actual error as an architect).
So what exactly did Le Corbusier get right, according to the article? "The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength." -- this is what fans of Le Corbusier always praise him for, and it always sounds really bad to me. The main strength of the architecture is that you have to radically change it to make it liveable...? That he said “You know, life is always right; it is the architect who is wrong.” when people made radical changes? I guess that's more laudable than trying to fight the change, but also a very low bar.