User:NebuchadnezzarIII/Plan Voisin

The Voisin Plan (French: plan Voisin) was a project intended for the centre of Paris, designed by Le Corbusier between 1922 and 1925.

History
Le Corbusier was a young architect who had only built a little at the time, presented a plan for a city of three million inhabitants meant to be on a flat and empty terrain, cleared of all previous construction to the Salon d'automne in 1922. The traditional street was erased, replaced by several levels of traffic separated by roads linking three sectors: a business centre, a central residential quarter of 24 skyscrapers housing 500,000 inhabitants surrounded by free spaces and a periphery of factories and remote "green belts", a typical urban planning method attributed to the garden city movement.

This plan seduced Gabriel Voisin, an aviation pioneer who created planes and automobiles, who financed a study meant for this project in order to introduce its application to the centre of Paris.

Presented to the exhibition of decorative arts in 1925, and published in L'Esprit Nouveau , it comprised of a business city of 240 hectares starting from Place de la République to Rue du Louvre and Gare de l'Est to Rue de Rivoli on which 18 cruciform-shaped skyscrapers (in order to house between 500,000 and 700,000 people ) would have been built on a regular orthogonal frame and a residential city from Rue des Pyramides to Rond-point des Champs-Élysées-Marcel-Dassault and from Gare Saint-Lazare to rue de Rivoli. A subterranean central station would have been established between these two sectors.

All the previous buildings would have been demolished, with the exception of the churches, and monuments such as Porte Saint-Denis and Porte Saint-Martin.

The space would have been strongly structured by two new arterial roads piercing through the city, one on the east-west axis, and the other on the north-south axis. Their role would not be limited to the organisation of paris and to the local service: they would have crossed the fortifications and the suburbs, they ambitions to connect the capital to the four corners of the country, and to the large French and European cities. The intersection at the crossing of these two avenues is the centre of the plan, in the centre of the city. This question of centrality is at the heart of Le Corbusier's project.

He opposed the idea of the construction of a new administrative city in the periphery (this being La Défense) and proposed to build at the foot of Montmartre, facing Île de la Cité, the new command centre which he judges to be essential to the vitality of the country.

It marks the beginning of a project which the architect would episodically work on until the mid-1940's. From the start of this particular reorganisation of the capital's downtown area, it became a complete overhaul of the territorial organisation of France that he had the ambition to initiate.

According to historian Jean-Louis Cohen, it is about realising a utopian project "by a young architect known for his provocations" and who desired to carry out a "communications operation." Le Corbusier continues to nevertheless work on this project until 1945. Historian Joseph Abram concludes that "this attitude foreshadows, however, the great urban renovations of the post-war period. Those that led to the disappearance of historic fabrics that were dilapidated, but full of meaning for all Parisians."

General References

 * 1) L'Esprit Nouveau N ° 28 digitized on the site of the library of the City of Architecture and Heritage, image N ° 59
 * 2) Bruno D. Cot, « Paris. Les projets fous… auxquels vous avez échappé », cahier central publié dans L'Express, semaine du 29 mars 2013, p. XIV.
 * 3) Bruno D. Cot, « Paris. Les projets fous… auxquels vous avez échappé », cahier central publié dans L'Express, semaine du 29 mars 2013, p. XIV.
 * 4) Bruno D. Cot, « Paris. Les projets fous… auxquels vous avez échappé », cahier central publié dans L'Express, semaine du 29 mars 2013, p. XIV.

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