Nikolai Ladovskii’s General Plan for the Green City (Зелёный Город), 1930

Transitioning from my last series of posts (on humanity’s relationship to nature) to a topic more immediately relevant to my thesis, this entry will focus on some of the earlier attempts that were made at reconciling man with nature. From the turn of the nineteenth century up until the 1930s, a number of proposals were put forth aiming to eliminate the contradiction between town and country. These were drawn up by city planners hailing from many different countries. They believed that a solution was possible not only at the local level, but rather one that was universally applicable. Theirs was a global vision. And whether they were reformists or revolutionaries, these urbanists believed that human society could be finally reunited with nature through new patterns of settlement — patterns that could be put into effect anywhere, irrespective of national boundaries.

The international and universal character of the modernists’ thinking set them apart from many city planners today, who look for local solutions and strive to have as little impact on existing nature as possible. These contemporary planners are often under the influence of the environmental philosophies of deep ecology and permaculturalism. According to these modes of thought, humanity should seek to leave nature mostly intact and try to integrate as much of the existing environment as possible in order to create “sustainable” living spaces. The creators of these eco-friendly homes advocate a sort of soft resilience, one that blends in with nature as it already is rather than looking to fundamentally reshape it.

In contrast to this way of approaching building, the modernists saw nature as almost infinitely malleable. The wonders of technology could shear off the side of mountains, redirect rivers, and create artificial lakes. Blessed with new materials like steel and ferro-concrete, these planners believed that they build futuristic structures all while transplanting nature into new settings, determined by society. In this way, as part of an overarching plan, natural objects could be placed into geometrically-defined spaces, into strips or concentric rings spreading from the town center. Thus would the contradiction of man and nature be dialectically resolved — the most natural and organic objects arranged according to human and geometric patterns.

And so, looking backward with far greater hindsight than Bellamy, we can see that the problem of man’s alienation of nature was on the mind not only of radicals, but even bourgeois reformers.  The sense of a loss of connection from nature was felt everywhere, but nowhere more than in the factory towns that had sprouted up in the fury of the nineteenth century’s industrial revolution.  Alfred Richard Sennett, a proponent of what came to be known as the garden city concept, recalled that

As we desert the lanes of Nature for the cities of artificiality, we desert quietude, happiness, and integrity for bustle, unrest, and insincerity.  Contrast the modest, unaffected, truth-loving maiden, replete and content, in the charms of Nature’s adorning, with the ‘woman-about-town,’ a creature of guile, artifice, and insincerity.  The one charms and attracts us, rivets our belief in her sterling value, and secures our love; the other, ostentatiously displaying her tinsel seductions and demanding our admiration, fills us with distrust and secures naught but our contempt.  Contrast the smiling countryside, the bright sheaths of golden sunrays lazily suffusing across emerald meadow and bronzed upland; flocculent wisps of just perceptible cloud calmly gliding high above the land, like idly-soaring gulls, to enhance the comfort of the land-toiler as they momentarily temper the ray to merge a tinge of gray with the whiteness of the chalky headland; the wind — if such a feeble, scented breath can so be called — with scarce strength to send a sluggish ripple o’er the golden plush of ripening corn and the erstwhile merry prattle of the babbling brook subdued to the hum of drowsy content — contrast this, I suggest, with the unrest, the clatter and roar of our frowning, grimed, noisy, noisome, never restful, repellent towns.[1]

Late Nineteenth Century Factory Town

I. THE GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT

The “garden city” movement was founded at the turn of the nineteenth century by an Englishman named Ebenezer Howard.  He was seeking to resolve what the young Marx had termed “the old opposition between town and country.”[2] Howard recognized the acute shortage of housing and the deplorable living conditions of even that housing which was available.  At the same time, he saw the extreme provincialism and lack of society that existed in the countryside.  This was the same problematic duality that Engels had identified earlier in his writings on The Housing Question (1871).  In that work, Engels asserted that “the bourgeois solution of the housing question has come to grief — it has come to grief owing to the antithesis of town and country.”  However, he hastened to add: “The housing question can only be solved when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which has been brought to an extreme point by present-day capitalist society.”[3] For Engels, such reform was possible only after a revolutionary transformation had overturned capitalism.  Until then, it would remain unsolvable.

Howard’s Proposed Dialectical Resolution of the Polarities between Town and Country

Ebenezer Howard, however, was a reformer.  He sought to ameliorate the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production through a series of reforms and bold new measures rather than pursue an all-out revolution.  The result of his labors was his book, Garden Cities of To-morrow, which was released in 1898 to much fanfare and aplomb.  “Town and country must be married,” the book declared, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation.”[5] Charles Purdom, one of the many who would come to promote Howard’s garden city proposal, wrote that “many readers saw the possibilities suggested by the book of an important practical step in the reform of town life.  The evils of the congested town and the declining population of country districts had been pointed out many times before; but there had never been so picturesque, so practical, and so timely a suggestion for dealing with them as Mr. Howard was fortunate enough to make.”[6] His book included a diagram illustrating his proposed synthesis between town and country, represented by three magnets.  In many ways, his answer was slightly facile, conceptually speaking.  It amounted to little more than a “best of both worlds” scenario, all while leaving behind the less desirable aspects of either.  Howard also hoped to resolve the modern antithesis between individual and society using similarly simplistic logic.[7] Despite these conceptual shortcomings, however, it caught the public’s imagination and gathered a following of like-minded architects, planners, and reformers.

Ebenezer Howard’s Original Conception of the Garden City (1902)

The city was designed concentrically, with satellite towns arranged at regular intervals, all of them emanating in a radial fashion from the central city.  These were all to be connected by two rings of transportation: the outermost being a canal that would run through the center of each satellite town; the other being a railroad that would just touch upon their edges.  These outer lines of circulation would also be channeled back toward the central city, such that each town would be easily accessible to one another.  In between these lines of transportation, there would form forested wedges of nature-life.  Housed in these natural surroundings, Howard placed reservoirs, waterfalls, and schools for the blind — as well as farmland, an insane asylum, and a “home for inebriates.”  Fantastic though it might seem (and it did to many), Howard’s vision was an idyllic one, and many were enchanted by the prospect of a rationalized, slumless and smoke-free town surrounded by gardens.

One of the “Spokes” of the Garden City

The enthusiasm surrounding the garden city movement was fueled by the addition of authors and architects like Raymond Unwin, W.R. Lethaby, Charles Purdom, Ewart Gladstone Culpone, and Patrick Geddes.  “[Howard’s] scheme was so obviously rational and desirable,” remembered Unwin, “that in a comparatively short time it attracted the attention of a sufficient number of reformers to create a strong Garden City Association.”[8] Ralph Neville, the chairman of that Association, was particularly optimistic about the positive effects the garden cities might offer the working class.  In a lecture he delivered on October 24^th, 1904, he stated that he was “convinced that the redistribution of the people upon the land would do more to transform the members of the working class than any other conceivable alteration of the conditions under which they live.”[9] It was Neville’s hope, like that of so many other bourgeois reformers belonging to the Garden City Association, that these new measures might soften the class struggle, which had been so turbulent in England during the nineteenth century.  Howard’s notion of a “garden city” — insofar as it promised to overcome the opposition between town and country — seemed to be a step in this direction.  The pollution, overcrowding, and chronic housing shortage suffered by urban working-class populations would be done away with through careful planning and reform.

Plan for the First Garden City, Letchworth

The members of the Garden City Association were eager to test the principles set forth in Howard’s book.  Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker were selected as the main planners for what came to be known as Letchworth, the first garden city.  The Association purchased a plot of land and began building in 1903.  Though the result did not exactly mirror Howard’s original scheme, those who participated in its building seemed generally pleased with the result.  “[T]he Garden City of reality is something much more than any ideal,” wrote Purdom.  “It is now an actual town, with all the defects, the compromises, the adjustments of theory to practice, as well as the happy achievements which belong to work in process of accomplishment.  And it may be said at once that as an actual town, while it falls short of its ideal, it is still better than that ideal because the merest bit of practice is worth endless theory.”[10] Though Howard’s theory had to yield to some of the messiness of empirical reality, Letchworth was seen as a practical success.  The news of this success helped popularize the idea of the garden city even further.

Detailed Section of Howard’s “Garden City” Proposal Map

In addition to the creation of Letchworth, the garden city concept also received publicity through an official periodical.  Shortly after the Association was established, some of its members immediately set to work editing a monthly publication, Garden Cities and Town Planning.  They used this as a means to spread Howard’s ideas throughout England, and even abroad.  Ewart Culpone thus outlined in broad strokes an overview of the Association’s progress and its successes over its first fifteen years:

When fifteen years ago the Garden City Association was first formed, it was necessary in the literature that was published from time to time to point out in graphic form and detail the necessity for action along the lines which were advocated by Mr. Ebenezer Howard.  Thirteen years of propaganda have, however, brought home to the minds of the thinking part of the population the fact of the awful wastage that is going on through the ill-housing of the people, and through the haphazard growth of our centres of population.  Month by month the pages of Garden Cities and Town Planning, the organ of the Garden City and Town Planning Movement, has contained information shedding new light on the varied phases of this difficult question, and it may fairly be claimed that the knowledge of garden city principles has spread into every civilised nation under the sun.[11]

Indeed, the spread of Howard’s garden city concept to continental Europe would prove to be an especially important development in the history of those modernist strains of urbanism that came later, as the modernists both took inspiration from and reacted against the garden city movement.  Germany was the country where the movement spread the most noticeably, with the creation of several garden suburbs before the start of the First World War.[12] It branched out into France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Russia as well.[13] Following the Great War, the influence of the garden city movement waned, but its principles remained a point of reference for the numerous avant-garde currents that came afterward.  It remains historically significant for its posing of the question of how to resolve the contradiction of town and country, as well as its search to find the place of nature within the artificial environment created by human society.

Model of Le Corbusier’s Original Plan for the Reconstruction of Paris

II. LE CORBUSIER, LA VILLE CONTEMPORAINE, & LA VILLE RADIEUSE

Le Corbusier’s ideas may have had revolutionary implications for architecture and urban planning, but the man himself was a politically ambivalent and socially reformist.  The question he so famously posed in a chapter of his landmark book, Toward an Architecture, was “Architecture, or Revolution?”[14] What this implied, of course, was that a new architecture must be found so as to avert revolution.  This was a point on which the Czech communist and architectural critic Karel Teige, though initially an admirer of Le Corbusier, took him to task in his work The Minimum Dwelling.  “[Le Corbusier’s] desire to forestall revolution by solving the housing question, besides betraying a fundamentally antirevolutionary position, clearly is totally naive, for the housing question can never be fully solved without revolution,” wrote Teige, echoing Engels.  “Presumably, Le Corbusier thinks that change can be accomplished without revolution and without the abolition of private property. Instead, he answers his own question (‘Architecture, or revolution?’) with the slogan ‘architectural revolution.’”[15] Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s emphasis on the place of nature, sunlight, and clean air in the modern makes him an important figure in the transition toward the revolutionary urbanism of the Russian avant-garde.

A Picturesque Sketch of Le Corbusier’s Le Ville Contemporaine

The problem of humanity’s relationship to nature presented itself as a problem to Le Corbusier as well, just as it had for the members of the garden city movement.  He was quite familiar with the literature of the garden city advocates, and well acquainted with their body of work.  When he wrote his book on Urbanism in 1925, he casually dismissed the garden city ideology: “Garden cities have always been laid out on a basis of the poetical ‘simple life,’ with their little balconies and arches and their tiled roofs and all the other romantic paraphernalia.  It is sad that thatch should not be allowed, but at least we can have artificially weathered tiles.”[16] But Le Corbusier was not altogether immune from the influence of the garden city movement; just a few years later, he would propose a radical “vertical garden city,”  where residents of his Cartesian towers could plant their own gardens on the spacious, sun-lit balconies.  Corbusier was a consistent critic of the romanticism of what he called “the pre-machine age,” but he acknowledged that humanity’s estrangement from nature presented an obstacle that any serious urban planner would have to confront at some point or another.

View of Le Corbusier’s “Cartesian Towers”

Indeed, this underlying alienation was never lost on Corbusier.  In fact, he even felt compelled to offer a sort of creation myth of his own to show where man fit into Nature, while at the same time demonstrating man’s neverending quest for establishing order and thinking rationally.  In his polemic against “organic” and “natural” curvilinear construction advocated by the followers of Camille Sitte, he insisted that the human mind was governed by “geometry” of the straight line and the right angle; in other words, rectilinear patterns.  Toward the beginning of Urbanism, Le Corbusier thus wrote:

Man, created by the universe, is the sum of that universe, as far as he himself is concerned; he proceeds according to its laws and believes he can read them; he has formulated them and made of them a coherent scheme, a rational body of knowledge on which he can act, adapt, and produce.  This knowledge does not put him in opposition to the universe; it puts him in harmony with it; he is therefore right to behave as he does, he could not act otherwise.  What would happen if he were to invent a perfectly rational system in contradiction to the laws of nature, and tried to put his theoretic conceptions into practice in the world around him? He would come to a full stop at the first step.

Nature presents itself to us as a chaos; the vault of the heavens, the shapes of lakes and seas, the outlines of hills.  The actual scene which lies before our eyes, with its kaleidoscopic fragments and its vague distances, is a confusion.  There is nothing there that resembles the objects with which we surround ourselves, and which we have created.  Seen by us without reference to any other thing, the aspects of Nature seem purely accidental.

But the spirit which animates Nature is a spirit of order; we come to know it.  We differentiate between what we see and what we learn or know.  Human toil is regulated by what we know.  We therefore reject appearance and attach ourselves to the substance.[17]

Through this version of events, Le Corbusier differentiates humanity from nature while at the same time putting it in “harmony” with Nature.  In some ways, it mirrors the argument that humanity is doing nothing “unnatural” by creating shapes that are found nowhere in Nature.  Nature built this creature, man, in whose mind the will-to-order is contained.  Though Nature first presents itself as a blooming, buzzing mass of confusion, humanity has, through the power of understanding, the ability to find the underlying causes, the laws by which this apparent chaos operates.

Another view of La Ville Contemporaine

Though Le Corbusier may have “naturalized” this will-to-order which is peculiar to human beings, he nonetheless recognized the artificial character of products of man’s labor.  Humanity builds and builds and finds itself surrounded by the artifice of its own making, and stands at a remove from the Nature from which it originated.  For this reason, Le Corbusier relented in his view of the contemporary city.  Not everything in his city was to follow the strict laws of geometry.  “We must plant trees!” he declared.  He then asked, rhetorically:

Why should not the new spirit in architecture, that fast-approaching town planning on the grand scale which we have talked about so much, satisfy the deepest human desires by once more covering the verdure the urban landscape and setting Nature in the midst of our labor? so that our hearts might find some reassurance in face of the dreadful menace of the great city which imprisons, stifles, and asphyxiates those who are cast into it and who have to work in it; for work is a noble necessity which should bring peace to the mind and lead on to the rapture of creation.[18]

Contrasting his own contemporary city with the “paradox and disorder” of New York City, Le Corbusier claims that in his model “[t]he whole city is a park.  The terraces stretch out over lawns and into groves.  Low buildings of a horizontal kind lead the eye on to the foliage of the trees…Here is the CITY with its crowds living in peace and pure air, where noise is smothered under the foliage of trees.”  Once realized, Corbusier continues to state that thus “[t]he chaos of New York is overcome.  Here, bathed in light, stands the modern city.”[19]

Blueprint for the Bird’s-Eye View of La Ville Contemporaine

Clearly, the garden city movement and Le Corbusier individually thought that fresh air and natural surroundings had to be integrated into the modern city, both for health and for happiness.  But unlike the “ecological urbanists” of today, who merely want to build in such a way that it does not disturb nature’s pre-established harmony (as eco-Leibnizians), the garden city movement and Le Corbusier personally sought to transplant and reshape nature so as to maximize its benefit to society.  This is nowhere expressed more clearly than in a fragment from Le Corbusier’s later work, The Radiant City (1933), in which he discusses his concept of “exact air.”  The maintenance of nature as it presently existed was nowhere on his mind.   Rather, the elements of nature were to be rearranged so as to suit humanity, as he makes clear in the following lines:

But then where is Utopia, where the temperature is 64.4º?…

And why the devil do men insist on living in difficult or dangerous climates? I’ve no idea! But I can observe a worsening situation:

The variety of climates had forged races, cultures, customs, dress, and work methods suited to the obtaining conditions.

Alas, the machine age has, as it were, shuffled the cards — the age-old cards of the world.  Since the machine age, the product of progress, has disturbed everything, couldn’t it also give us the means to salvation?

Multiplicity of climates, play of seasons, a break with secular traditions — confusion, disorder, and the martyrdom of man.

I seek the remedy, I seek the constant; I find the human lung.  With adaptability and intelligence, let’s give the lung the constant which is the prerequisite of its functioning: exact air.

Let’s manufacture exact air: filters, driers, humidifiers, disinfectors.  Machines of childish simplicity.

Send exact air into men’s lungs, at home, at the factory, at the office, at the club and the auditorium: ventilators, machines so often used, but so often used badly!

Let’s give man the solar rays which will penetrate the all-glass facades.  But will be too hot in the summer and terribly cold in the winter! Let’s create “neutralizing walls.”  (And “sun control”).[20]

By this time, however, Le Corbusier had moved on from the previous plan he set forth in Urbanism, La Ville Contemporaine.  Responding to a questionnaire solicited by Moscow in 1930, Le Corbusier concocted a new city scheme.  It bore some resemblance to his previous model, and retained his signature “Cartesian Towers,” but the overall shape of the city was much further elongated than it had been in La Ville Contemporaine.  Le Corbusier dubbed this new project La Ville Radieuse, the “radiant city.”  He would unveil this new project as early as 1931, and then two years later an extremely odd eponymous book composed of personal notes, fragments, letters, marginalia, article clippings, and even minutes from meetings.  These were all gathered from material accumulated over the previous three years, but were not arranged into any sort of apparent order, let alone chronological.  Le Corbusier’s style of writing had always been somewhat jagged and abrupt, with moments of great poetry thrown in along the way.  But the contents of his book The Radiant City were even more slapdash and dissociated than in any of his earlier works.  It truly set a new precedent for authorial license in a book purporting to be about architecture.

La Ville Radieuse

But here too Le Corbusier sought to integrate aspects of the countryside into the heart of the city, including trees and large fields for sports and relaxation.  Despite the modernist austerity of his actual structures, there thus remained a bucolic element embedded in Corbusier’s dream city.  This could not, perhaps, be detected in his overall plan of the city, but it almost always appeared in the numerous sketches he made of the parks and boulevards that were to fill his proposed municipality.  Unlike the adherents of the garden city movement, however, there was not a hint of romanticism in Le Corbusier’s new urbanism.  He considered this natural scenery and open park space to be vital to the health and physical culture of his city’s inhabitants.  There would be no traditional English cottages and tiled roofs in La Ville Radieuse; only concrete buildings and towers surrounded the elements of nature he incorporated into the city plan.  Le Corbusier had made a definitive break with the leftovers of what he called the “pre-machine age.”  His political leanings and social preferences might have always been somewhat suspect, but his modernism was unquestionable.

Trees planted in La Ville Radieuse

A view of the city’s parks and flora

Le Corbusier’s influence spread far beyond Germany and extended into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  From 1928-1932, he would spend much of his time working alongside his colleagues and admirers in Moscow, participating in various building projects for the Soviet state.  Though he would later become disillusioned with the Soviet experiment after Stalinism’s decisive turn toward neoclassicism, during these first four years Corbusier was enthusiastic about its prospects.  In 1930, he took part in a project dubbed “the Green City” (Зелёный Город).  As a segue into the final section of our investigation, we might quote (at length) Le Corbusier’s own appraisal of the project in the appendix to his 1930 book Precisions, entitled “The Atmosphere of Moscow”:

The Green Town.

Here is what it means.

In the USSR Sunday has been suppressed, the rest period of the fifth day has been introduced.

This rest period comes by turns; every day of the year, one fifth of the population of the USSR is at rest; tomorrow, it is another fifth, and so on.  Work never stops.

Committees of doctors have drawn the curve of the intensity of productivity in work.  The curve goes down sharply at the end of the fourth day.  The economists said: it is useless to be satisfied by a mediocre output during two days.  Conclusion: the rhythm of machine age production is five days; four of work, one of rest.

[…]

It was therefore decided to create Green Towns devoted to the rest period of the fifth day.

[…]

Great enthusiasm followed the decision to create Green Towns.

The Green Town of Moscow, 30 kilometers away, was begun at once: its territory defined, its program established. The first competition of architecture and urbanism has brought the bases for the discussion of the plans of green towns.

Here is the program of the Green Town of Moscow:

The site measures 15 kilometers by 12, its altitude varies from 160 to 240 meters. It is covered by big forests of pines with fields and pastures between them, there are little rivers, which a dam will turn into a lake in the part used for sports.

The ‘Green Town’ of Moscow will be developed like an enormous hotel where the inhabitants of Moscow will come to rest every fifth day in turn, in accordance with precise schedules. The architectural problem is thus to create a rest unit for a man or a household, to group these units in a building, and to distribute these buildings ingeniously on the site. Here we shall have the country, nature, and nothing of the urban character of a big city. Nevertheless, as public services must function normally, the problem is to create from scratch a completely new architectural and urban organism.

The first year, they will build lodgings for 20,000 to 25,000 visitors per day, which represents 25,000 x 5 = 125,000 persons coming to rest, if one counts a rotation of once every fifth day; or 25,000 x 5 x 2 = 250,000 if the rate is only every ten days; finally 375,000 if it is every fifteen days.

In three and a half years, at the end of the five-year plan of the USSR (this gigantic program that now galvanizes the country), 100,000 will be lodged, or 500,000 in a period of five days; one million in ten days; one million and a half in a period of fifteen. Enough to ‘relax’ all of the population of Moscow.

In addition to the rest period of the fifth day, the Green Towns will be inhabited two weeks or a month at a time by officials or workers who will take their annual vacations there.

Finally the ill, not those with diseases requiring hospital care but those needing rest, will find sanatoria in the Green Towns.

Transportation must be developed; the existing railway station, Bratova-China, will become the main station (the line is already electrified). Still to be created: an expressway, radial roads, and a ring road; in addition, a farm and service network (for the food factory).

This spring the first two big hotels of 500 dwellings and four small ones of 100 will be built. Spread out on the site, ten tourist centers (hostels).

More than 3,000 peasants at present are dispersed in isbas in villages on the site of the Green Town. The isbas will be torn down and the villages destroyed; the 3,000 peasants will he regrouped in one place called an ‘agro-city’ (a term honoring the current campaign for the industrial organization of agriculture all over the USSR).

One part of the Green Town will be organized in a big collective farm where 3,000 peasants will be housed around model installations equipped with machines made in the new industrial cities.  The model farm will provide the food for the Green Town.

The rest of site will be developed in vacation hotels whose form is still to be determined. The food center With a kitchen factory is connected by automobile service to the hotel restaurants. A sports city with an artificial lake, different playing fields and a central stadium for big matches. A question to be solved is whether to develop sports facilities all over the site, also at the very feet of the hotel, physical culture being one of the decisive motives for the Green Town.

The hotel program, extends from camping to caravansarais whose form is still to be designed and whose purpose is to give everyone a feeling of the greatest liberty at the same time as the benefit of common rooms and an organized hotel service.

Facilities are planned for the hospitalization of children, of adolescents, and of adults.

Very small children (preschool) will be with their parents; the others, up to 14 or 15, can come to take their rest period of the fifth day with their parents, but preferably will come in groups with their classmates, to draw all of the invigoration possible from their stay in the midst of fields and forests under the control of competent instructors.

The young will camp or be free in their lodgings: it is considered that at a certain age independence is needed.

Finally, adults, men and women, will dispose together or separately of these dwelling unit, whose shape and size are yet to be found and which raise a highly immediate architectural problem.

Such is, roughly, the texture of the Green Town on which preliminary work has begun in Moscow.[21]

Mikhail Barshch & Moisei Ginzburg’s General Plan for the Green City (1930)

III. THE GREEN CITY