When reading “Charter of Athens” I couldn’t help but make several connections to many modernist designs for urban development. Specifically I noticed many similarities to Le Corbusier’s Villa Contemporaine. Last week when I read his article about “A Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants,” the logic that he provided as explanation for his city design seemed flawless and logical. However, when looking at the final renderings it was dark and uniform. The two largest similarities that popped out at me were the descriptions of the traffic problems and the placement of highrise buildings. “High Rise apartments placed at wide distances apart liberate ground for large open spaces.” This is an obvious comparison to Le Corbusier and his large cruciform high rises that are the only skyscrapers in the city.
Another comparison I made was when the charter talked about population density. “The population density is too great in the historic, central districts of cities as well as in some nineteenth century areas of expansion: densities rise to 1000 and even 1500 inhabitants per hectare (approximately 400 to 600 per acre).” Granted the charter was solely referring to the density in historic areas but it carries the same theme that cities should be much more spread out in order to create less congestion both physically and in the air we breathe. This reminded me much of FLW’s Broadacre City because his idea refers to creating a more even spread of population. Distributing the population such that each family would be given one acre of land. Obviously this is a lot more generous than the “Charter of Athens” but it follows the same idea that we need to spread out cities by allotting plots of land for specific purposes, especially for more green areas. And this I cannot agree with more.
A common theme with all of these urban design plans is that they are simply ideas. Rarely does a city choose to do one of these plans and decide to start with a “clean slate.” This is for obvious reasons such as cost, so as a result articles like the “Charter of Athens” and “A Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants” are found essentially ineffective. However, this past week I was thinking back to my trip to NYC last winter. Being that I’m from Upstate NY, one would think I travel to the city often. Yet, in my 21 years this was the first time I explored the city and the other boroughs. I remembered a connection I had when I was driving through the Bronx…it looks a lot like LC’s city plans! The Bronx River Housing project, completed in 1951, was a project designed to house much of the public that were congested in the slums of the Bronx. These cruciform buildings are the only tall buildings in the surrounding area and have ample space in between them. This observation leads me to believe that the ideas in city plans such as Villa Contemporaine, Broadacre City, and the Charter of Athens do not go unused and have had a long lasting effect on city development in the 20th century.
Congress Internationaux d’Architecture moderne (CIAM), La Charte d’Athenes or The Athens Charter, 1933. Trans J.Tyrwhitt. Paris, France: The Library of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 1946.