Historical Evaluation of "Housing is a Living Machine"

Housing is not a life machine, and different classes should live together.

China Newsweek on February 24th, 2005 at 09:20.

Nowadays, urban planning needs to put forward the requirements of mixed living space. It is necessary to create living space for families with different incomes in a district and a building, so that their children can go to school together. Only in this way can it help to cultivate social cohesion.

Today's western camp, the United States and France are in the cold war. When something happened in France, Americans felt that they had got a big bargain. The French riots from June 65438+ 10 to June 165438+ 10 were attended by many children of immigrants. The Wall Street Journal of the United States immediately published an article entitled "Why don't our immigrants seize the opportunity to brag about the superiority of the United States and forget the horrible New Orleans?"

It must be clean.

However, a recent article published in The New York Times magazine represents a calmer voice. This paper mainly analyzes the causes of riots from the perspective of architecture and urban design, which can not only help us understand French, but also have great reference significance for China, which is experiencing a high degree of urbanization.

This article is actually a liquidation of the architect La Corbusier, who has a far-reaching influence on modern French cities. La Corbusier, Gropius, Mies Van Derro and Wright are called the top four masters of modern architecture. Koch's "Towards New Architecture" is called the declaration of modern architectural movement. He put forward that "residence is a living machine" and used modern technology to create the most efficient living space, and then designed and planned a huge living apartment, so that his "living machine" could accommodate the population to the maximum extent.

In the specific design, he removed the traditional red tape and used a lot of straight lines. His buildings are often marked by parallel windows running through the whole facade. Such a house, like a machine, can be "built" with prefabricated components, horizontal and vertical. Praisers call it simplicity, and players call it boredom.

Europe, a city that ignores traditional design and has rich historical traditions, naturally cannot be put into use. Therefore, in the suburbs without historical burdens, his influence is even greater. In the suburbs of many cities in France, many high-rise apartment buildings in Corbusier style have been built. Some low-income families moved here one after another.

As a result, the post-war urban development in France embarked on a road almost opposite to that in the United States. After the war, the United States began to encourage the development of suburbs by providing preferential housing loans to veterans under the Veterans Act. The middle class working in the city moved to the garden houses in the suburbs, and most of them stayed in the city. Over time, the metropolis became poor and became the center of crime.

On the contrary, France used the concept of La Corbusier to build a large number of uniform giant apartment buildings in the suburbs, and all the working class and low-income class in the city were stuffed into these reinforced concrete grids. Today's immigrants are more concentrated here, and many huge apartment buildings have become crime centers. The stairs are controlled by drug dealers, and almost no one dares to walk. Some even had to be blown up. No wonder, this commotion in France is actually a commotion in the suburbs.

Why did La Corbusier's idea have such a bad result? One of the main reasons is that La Corbusier regards architecture as a tool to build utopia in his ideology, trying to design the future life of human beings from it, rather than serving the real life of human beings. He drew beautiful parallel lines on the design, and thousands of people will live in the way he imagined. These huge apartment buildings in the suburbs have gradually become the residence of a class. After you move in, it seems that you have been fixed in society all your life, and the possibility of mobility is very small. This architecture does not encourage the integration and communication between different classes, but isolates one class from other classes. As a result, this dehumanized "living machine" has become a "alienated machine" and a hotbed of rebel groups.

Although there are many urban problems in the United States, cities still grow in the traditional context. There are relatively few centralized giant apartments, and it is not easy for resistance forces to gather. What's more, many professional young people in the United States lived in noisy cities when they just graduated. When you get married and have children, move to a quiet and spacious suburb. When the children go to college, they form an "empty nest", and then they sell the big house in the suburbs and move to the apartment in the city. In this process, they often mix with other classes. But Corbusier's tragic design rarely considers these. These houses are all the same size and the same price. People from all walks of life can't live together, which is equivalent to creating class opposition.

Modern urban planning and design can hardly escape the influence of La Corbusier. At present, the degree of urbanization in China is very high, and a large number of giant apartment buildings have mushroomed. The specifications are also quite uniform. From the experience of France, such a development is quite dangerous and easily leads to the isolation of all classes. Therefore, the current urban planning needs to put forward the requirements of mixed living space. It is necessary to create a living space in a district and a building for families with different incomes, so that bosses, workers, intellectuals, waiters, government officials and migrant workers can live together and their children can go to school together. Only in this way can it help to cultivate social cohesion, promote understanding and communication among all walks of life, and let everyone have a loyalty and affection for their place of residence no matter where they are. Otherwise, the separation of different classes will breed social contradictions that are difficult to heal.