Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The
pathway of
any
experiment
worth
achieving, is
strewn with
failures.
Success is,
for the most
part, built on
failure.
Ebenezer
Howard
Ebenezer Howard was born in Fore Street, City of London, the son of a
shopkeeper.
Sir Ebenezer Howard (29 January 1850 May 1, 1928) is known for his
publication Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898), the description of a
utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature.
The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement,
that realized several Garden Cities in Great Britain at the beginning of the
20th century.
Garden City most effective planning model in Western urban planning.
Created by Ebenezer Howard in 1898 to solve urban and rural problems.
Source of many key planning ideas during 20th century
Howard believed that all people agreed the overcrowding and deterioration
of cities was one of the troubling issues of their time.
Howards garden city concept combined the town and country in order to
provide the working class an alternative to working on farms or crowded,
unhealthy cities.
Garden City an impressive diagram of THE THREE MAGNETS namely
the town magnet, country magnet with their advantages and disadvantages
and the third magnet with attractive features of both town and country life.
Naturally people preferred the third one namely Garden City.
The Garden City would consist of different zones, street types and green
belts. The core in the centre is about 4km and contains a central park,
surrounded by a commercial, cultural and administrative zone.
Strong community
Ordered development
Environmental quality
This is another diagram made by Sir Ebenezer Howard. It explains that the
garden city(which he proposed) must be built around the central big city.
Small town or garden city will grow around big city and will be connected with
each other as well as big city with rail network and road network
An estate of 6,000 acres was to be bought and held in trust for the people of Garden City.
A town was to be built near the centre of the estate to occupy about 1,000 acres.
In the centre was to be a park in which were
Placed the public buildings, and around the
park a great arcade containing shops, etc.
The population of the town was to be 30,000.
The building plots were to be of an average
size of 10 by 30 feet.
There were to be common gardens and
cooperative kitchens. On the outer ring of the
town there were to be factories, warehouses,
etc., fronting on a circular railway.
The agricultural estate of 5,000acres was to be properly developed for agricultural
purposes as part of the scheme, and the population of this belt was taken at 2,000.
Ebenezer Howard felt that Garden Cities would work, because the plans were based
on understanding human nature.
Individualism is no less excellent, in his mind, as he compares good society to an
orchestra that plays together, but practice separately. Expense, however, always
tends to get in the way of progress.
In 1903 they designed and established the first Garden City in England, named
Letchworth.
Letchworth proved a success, and in 1919 the second Garden City Welwyn was
founded.
.
Le Corbusier
(1887 - 1965)
LE CORBUSIER AN INTRODUCTION
Charles-douard Jeanneret-Gris, aka Le
Corbusier (October 6, 1887 August 27, 1965),
was a French architect, designer, urbanist, writer
and also painter.
He was one of the pioneers of what now is
called Modern architecture or the International
Style.
IDEOLOGIES
The works of Le Corbusier is based on some very strong points which can be
clearly seen from the buildings.
FIVE POINTS: these are the elements which deal with the skeletal frame, the open
plan, the roof terrace, the band of windows and the asymmetrical composition of
facades.
TRUE GEOMETRY: the planning were based on true geometry that is pure form of
cubes, spheres, pyramids etc.
BOLD FACADE: excessive use of concrete on facades with bold notification and
grid work for windows were the must in any building.
PHILOSOPHIES
Corbusier advocated the concept that a great modern city can only function on
the basis of a strict order.
Le Corbusier presented two imposing planning schemes.
In 1922 he outlined the plan for a contemporary city of three million inhabitants
which was based on four principles:
These plans were tentative in conceptual design and did not take into account
the modifications necessary for implementations.
His plans for the cities were the results of detailed analysis of three major
urban factors
Roads
Housing
Open spaces
According to him they have a brain, heart, lungs, limbs and arteries like human
beings.
In Chandigarh, he used the same phenomena for his basic plan.
The capital complex was placed at the top of the town because he likened it to
be intellect of man , which emanates from the brain or the head.
The industrial and the educational; belts
symbolize the limbs.
The city center with commercial buildings, shops and offices represents the
heart.
The spacious parks and green belts which run through the city provide the
lungs.
The network of roads for vehicular traffic and footpaths for pedestrian
constitutes the circulatory system.
TONY GARINER
A discreet man, Tony Garnier dedicated most of his life to his passion for
architecture.
His father, Pierre Garnier, was a silk designer. From a very young age he was
confronted with the harsh living conditions of silk workers. Through his
passion for architecture, he sought to find a solution to the problem of social
housing. Inventing a new way of thinking about housing became one of his
major concerns.
So Most of his time was dedicated to a project for the creation of a new city, a
modern one, called An Industrial City, published for the first time in 1917.
The living quarters show an innovative new type of building block with
free standing houses and 'urban villas' (although using this word in this
respect is an anachronism) on an 'island' between streets. This type of
building block had been taken up in recent urban design in the
Netherlands.
The result is that there are no enclosed streets.
Trees form very much part of the design. Indicating the more important
streets and losely planted within the blocks.
Garnier has a lot of drawings showing public space in living quarters,
indicating that he cared about everyday living conditions. For the civic
centre he only shows the buildings. This suggests that he did not consider
the design of public space around public buildings to be a very important
matter.