Ville Contemporaine

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City for three million inhabitants (1922)

The Ville Contemporaine or Contemporary City was an unrealised project to house three million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922.

The centerpiece of this plan was the group of enormous sixty-storey cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in huge curtain walls of glass. They housed both offices and the flats of the most wealthy inhabitants. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces.

At the very centre was a huge transportation centre, that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections and at the top, an airport. (He had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers).

Le Corbusier segregated the pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways, and glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller multi-storey zigzag blocks set in green space and set far back from the street housed the proletarian workers.