Athens Charter - Background

Background

Although Le Corbusier had exhibited his ideas for the ideal city, the Ville Contemporaine in the 1920s, during the early 1930s, after contact with international planners he began work on the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City). In 1930 he had become an active member of the syndicalist movement and proposed the Ville Radieuse as a blueprint of social reform.

Unlike the radial design of the Ville Contemporaine, the Ville Radieuse was a linear city based upon the abstract shape of the human body with head, spine, arms and legs. The design maintained the idea of high-rise housing blocks, free circulation and abundant green spaces proposed in his earlier work. Le Corbusier exhibited the first representations of his ideas at the third CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930 and published a book of the same title as the city in 1935.

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