A city of the modern movement built from its manifestos: twenty-four cruciform towers in a park round a central station, housing in slabs à redents, Unités and Zeilenbau rows, industry beyond a green belt, and motorways that never become streets.
Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine for three million inhabitants (1922) put the business centre in twenty-four sixty-storey glass towers, set so far apart that the ground between them is park. Two motorways cross at the central station, which carries a landing field on its roof; the corridor street, lined with buildings, has disappeared. Housing lies to either side, in long slabs raised on pilotis and folded back and forth round open courts (the housing à redents), and later in the free-standing Unité.
The Athens Charter of CIAM generalised the scheme into four functions (dwelling, work, recreation and circulation), each in its own zone. Here the dwellings are north and south of the centre, industry lies east beyond a belt of trees on the railway, and sports fields lie to the west. In the southern quarter two groups of Zeilenbau rows make Gropius’s argument of 1930 visible: all are spaced at the same angle of light, but the high slabs to the east hold more dwellings on the same ground than the low rows to the west, and leave more of it green.
Dimensions follow Le Corbusier’s drawings only approximately; the plan is a reconstruction of the type, not of any one drawing.