Le Courbusier remains as one of the founding fathers that describe the early modernism of Architecture. He wrote about how an ideal city should look like in the modern era, since the rise in population around metropolises has grown throughout the early 20th century. Le Corbusier thinks that this general plan of the ideal city would benefit from transportation, to the workplaces where people live and preserving the surrounding ecosystem around and inside the city.
Le Corbusier distinguishes the people that live in the city as the people who actually live inside the city, people who live around the suburbs and the people who are blended, meaning that they live in the suburbs of the city but commute to work inside the city. The people that live inside the city should live in more densely packed building to minimize the use of space. Therefore, Le Corbusier proposed to construct the buildings vertically. The cities will also have parks that would allow the citizens to explore into fresh air rather than breathing the stale air from the city.
He proposes that to make the city more dynamic, that would place the heavier traffic such as commercial trucks into underground streets, where the trucks can unload and load goods easily. Lighter traffic would travel on arterial roads from east to west and north to south that transverse around the city and the suburbs to make it as fast as possible. Le Corbusier despises the idea of cross-roads, where he considers them to be the enemy of traffic. He wants to reduce the use of crossroads for not more than two bus stops.
Le Corbusier wants a unified transport hub that would be located in the city center, which would have connection with the trams, subways, buses, trains and even an aerodrome. The transportation hub will be designed in layers, in which the subways and trams will be located underground, the trains and buses will be on the ground level and the aerodrome will be located on the second level of the transportation hub. The hub should not have skyscrapers around in order for airplanes to safely take off and land.
The plans that Le Corbusier envisions as the ideal city are very challenging both in city planning and engineering. This ideal city would be very expensive to build from organizing highways for heavy and light traffic, to building a transportation hub that in theory can unify any type of transport. The aerodrome in particular is almost impossible to construct in one unified hub, since they require much more space than a railway or a bus station.