The art of medicine Medicine and the radiant city

摘要

"Modern society is throwing off its rags and preparing to move into a new home: the radiant city." In this way, Le Corbusier—high-modernist architect, urban planner, and philosopher—invited readers in 1933 to envision a new kind of urban life. Such a life would be situated within and enabled by a new, Utopian landscape of Le Corbusier's design, intended to facilitate "the expansion and flowering of men's lives" through the planned arrangement of separate spaces for living, working, and commerce. Strict concepts of geometric order suffused Le Corbusier's vision of the radiant city. Throughout his substantial body of architectural drafts and city plans, which together form an important part of the canon of 20th-century urban design, networks of identical high-rises repeat across grids of elevated, interconnecting super-highways. To Le Corbusier, such schemes of geometric order were far more than purely aesthetic choices. Rather, they represented key elements underlying his vision of a city that, through the very features of its design, could prevent vexing social problems, such as poverty, crime, and pollution, which Le Corbusier believed were fostered and perpetuated by what he saw as the cramped, chaotic layouts of Europe's historic cities.