Plan Voisin 1925• Le corbusier reworked

certain elements of the Ville Contemporaine & applied to a section of paris

• 18 double cruciform 60 – storey skyscrapers, placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space

• three clusters of luxury apartments

“The sky is a remote hope far, far above it. The street is no more than a trench, a deep cleft, a narrow passage. And although we have been accustomed to it for more than a thousand years, our hearts are always oppressed by the constriction of its enclosing walls. ”

Street system

• Heavy traffic would proceed at basement level • lighter traffic at ground level • fast traffic should flow along limited-access arterial roads that supplied rapid

and unobstructed cross city movement • pedestrianized streets, wholly separate from vehicular traffic and placed at a

raised level. • The number of existing streets would be diminished by two-thirds due to the

new arrangements of housing, leisure facilities and workplaces, with same-level crossing points eliminated wherever possible.

So I shall ask my readers to imagine they are walking in this new city, and have begun to acclimatize themselves to its untraditional advantages. You are under the shade of trees, vast lawns spread all round you. The air is clear and pure; there is hardly any noise. What, you cannot see where the buildings are ?

• Critics attacked its focus on the central city, where land values were highest and dislocations most difficult

• the creation of vast empty spaces in place of close-knit streets with their varied civic life

A sheet of glass and three partition-walls make an ideal office : this type of construction holds good when a thousand have to be provided. So from top to bottom the facades of the new city's office-buildings form unbroken expanses of glass. These colossal structures evince no vestige of masonry. All that remains visible is glass ... and proportion. The architect has discarded brick and stone.

The immensely deep foundations of these office-buildings will entail the removal of enormous quantities of spoil….. we shall let what has to be taken out of these excavations accumulate by the side of them, and diversify the packs by planting the mounds with trees and sowing them with grass. Go and look at the little artificial hillock beside the Museum in the Jardin des Plantes, and see what a nucleus of unexpected views it has created.