Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Le Corbusier’s Urban Functionalism

ABSTRACT

In this article, the author focuses on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of urban functionalism, whose “founding father” is recognized as Le Corbusier. The aim is to explain how Lefebvre studied urban functionalism in order to develop an innovative critique of the Fordist modernity that developed in France following the Second World War. For the French sociologist, investigating urban functionalism thus meant investigating, from the spatial point of view, the way in which the capitalist development of the last century was modernized.

KEYWORDS:

• Henri Lefebvre
• Le Corbusier
• Fordism
• urban functionalism
• habitat

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Geographers including Andy Merrifield (2006, 2013) and Don Mitchell (2003) as well as architects like Łukasz Stanek (Stanek 2011; Stanek, Schmid, and Moravánszky 2014) have covered this territory, but always in an unsystematic way, firstly because they are too often conditioned by the boundaries of their own disciplinary debate, and secondly, because they are only partially familiar with the French debate of the fifties, sixties and seventies (Biagi 2019, 21–78).

2 His real name is Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (October 6, 1887–August 27, 1965).

3 First, in the Anglo-Saxon debate, see Neil Maycroft and Mick Smith’s lively discussion of Lefebvre’s conception of Lecorbusian urban planning (Smith 2001, 2002; Maycroft 2002), and the larger work of Stanek (2011). For a historical-critical overview of modern architecture see Frampton (1996). Secondly, to deepen the critique of Fordism see: (1) from the literary point of view, Louis-Ferdinand Céline ([1932] 2006) (the period in which it takes place is the same as that of Le Corbusier’s first reflections); (2) from a sociological point of view, Giuseppe Berta (2019) is very useful; (3) finally, from the political point of view, the famous Americanism and Fordism of Antonio Gramsci ([1934] 1971).

4 It is crucial to highlight Le Corbusier’s participation, from 1925 until 1935, in the anti-political movement The Recovery of France (Le Redressement Français) founded by Marshall Ferdinand Foch and the industrialist Ernest Mercier, tycoons of electricity and petroleum, together with the notorious company Total. Nationalist political ideas close to those of the extreme Right were propagated within this movement, but its intentions were to promote a technocratic industrial modernization of France, with emphasis on the connection between mass production and mass consumption. For the sake of precision, and notwithstanding the debate surrounding Le Corbusier’s fascist sympathies, it is important to highlight the adhesion to a technocratic ideology and the political stress on securing the salvation and prosperity of humanity through mass production and the scientific organization of work and human life.

5 I believe it is necessary to specify an issue regarding the debate on Le Corbusier’s sympathy for fascism. Serious as this question is, I am nevertheless convinced that it is neither paramount to understand his degree of collaboration with the Pétain government, nor to measure his sympathy for the ascendant right wing. That task can be left to historians. To understand the concrete harmfulness of Le Corbusier’s theoretical framework, it suffices to highlight the fact that he joined the modern project of capitalist technology. In other words, it is enough to understand his idea of the city: functionalism is characterized by a mystical and mythical fascination with capitalist industrial technique, and such a programme can be reworked in terms of the authoritarian optics of totalitarism as well as the “democratic” optics of the liberal post-second world war democratic regimes.

6 Among many anecdotes, it may be recalled that in two trips, one before 1920 and another in 1934, Le Corbusier was also mesmerized by the building of the “Lingotto” in Turin by the Agnelli family (Le Corbusier [1923] 2000).

7 For reasons of space, it is not possible here to explore this issue more deeply, but it is necessary to remember that the Fordist industrial organization born in Detroit has influenced (and fascinated) various studies and disciplines, often breaking the ideological-political borders between right and left. For example, the Mexican painter of Trotskyist sympathies Diego Rivera was struck by this kind of organization and “progress,” so much so that he celebrated “Fordism” in his famous Detroit murals, overshadowing Ford’s massive anti-trade union policies (Berta 2019, 49–80). Lenin himself and the Bolsheviks in Russia thought of the Fordist method as the organization par excellence that had to be adopted in order to make Russia like the other countries in Europe. This concept is summarized in Alexandre Kojève’s provocative lecture entitled: “Capitalisme et socialisme. Marx est Dieu, Ford est son prophète” (Capitalism and Socialism: Marx Is God, Ford Is His Prophet) (Kojève [1957] 1980, 135–137; Settis 2016, 15, 150–168). By contrast, a writer with proto-fascist sympathies like Céline ([1932] 2006), in his Journey to the End of the Night, is among the most ferocious critics of Fordism, transmitting through the literary form the concrete alienation of the workers in Ford’s factories (Berta 2019, 87–94).

8 “The house is a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier [1923] 2000, 107; emphasis original). For a further elaboration on Le Corbusier’s categorization of the house as a “machine for living in” see also Le Corbusier ([1946] 1971, 2003, 324–330).

9 In reference to The Athens Charter, we chose to quote the last (Le Corbusier 1998) edition available in the Italian market. This edition includes a rich repertoire of the versions that followed the preparatory documents and that were discussed from 1931 (two years prior to the CIAM IV Congress) until 1943, the year when Le Corbusier decided to anonymously publish a text that could be used as a “Manifest” for modern urban planning. The 1957 edition published by Midnight Press (Les Éditions de Minuit) more appropriately carried the name of the French urban planner. For the English edition of The Athens Charter, see Le Corbusier ([1933] 1973), with an introduction by Jean Giraudoux and with a new foreword by Josep Lluis Sert. For a historical reconstruction of the CIAM Group and the theoretical development that it produced, see E. Mumford (2002).

10 The S.S. Patris II was a Greek passenger steamer launched on October 19th, 1925.

11 Here the author quotes 3 more articles from The Athens Charter. The Athens Charter is the manifesto of urban functionalism and is divided into paragraphs called articles. It is written as if it were a constitutional charter of a state, as if it were a law.

12 See also Le Corbusier ([1925] 2009, 71–81; 2003, 139–144). Here the human needs are standardized in the services that domestic tools allow.

13 It is necessary to remember that De Carlo contributed greatly to the circulation in Italy of the French journal Espaces et Sociétés (Space and Society) founded in 1970 by Lefebvre and Anatole Kopp. In Italy in 1975, a new journal was founded with the name “Space and Society”; initially, this was proposed as a translated Italian edition of the French original. In this regard, see Daidone (2018).

14 We could traduce the “habitat pavillonnaire” with: “the habitat of suburban single family urban zones.” The “habitat pavillonnaire” is suburban and individual housing corresponds to a characteristic landscape of the urban periphery and of the second half of the twentieth century, in which individual dwellings dominate. Although the “golden age” of suburban housing can be situated between the 1960s and today. It is often associated with suburbs and suburban areas (very well-kept and very beautiful suburbs, the opposite of the bad peripheries).

15 The text regarding the survey that can be found in this volume was also inserted in Lefebvre (2001f, 159–182).

16 The fourth and last edition of the volume includes a further study dated 1999, confirming the previous inquiries and demonstrating how the myth of the single-family house is not challenged.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesco Biagi

Francesco Biagi is a researcher in urban sociology at the GESTUAL (Group of Socio-Territorial, Urban and Local Action Studies) integrated in the CIAUD (the Research Centre in Architecture, Urbanism and Design) of the FAUL (Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon). He also writes and devotes himself to urban studies and political theory. He is rediscovering the Henri Lefebvre’s thought in order to understand the current neoliberal urban questions. With this aim he has published the monograph: Henri Lefebvre: Una teoria critica dello spazio (Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Theory of Space) (Jaca Book, Milano, 2019).