House, Street, City: Le Corbusier’s Research Towards a New Urban Interior

Le Corbusier’s investigations, conducted between the 1910s and the 1930s, were focused on a reflection on the need for a new relationship between the street and the building, based on his critique of the existing condition of the traditional European city. His research started from texts about the urban environment, in particular the writings of Eugène Hénard. These essays, dating back to 1903-1909, dealt with the necessity of a renewed strategy for the urban street and included his proposals of breaking down the monotony and the problems related to the sequence of buildings and the creation, along the streets, of a series of places such as squares, gardens, and open courtyards: urban rooms between streets and buildings. Learning from those texts, Le Corbusier worked on a series of polemical writings about the rue corridor (the corridor street), collected in the seminal books The City of Tomorrow, Precisions, and The Radiant City. A series of projects explored this topic to the extreme consequences. The Dom-ino building principle, evolved from the single house to the collective housing, was used to design the redent architectural type, detached from the vehicular infrastructure and with its own pedestrian route inside the building (rue intérieurs, interior streets); whereas the curved redent for the Plan Obus in Algiers transformed the street itself into a “building as city and infrastructure,” flowing in the landscape. The essay investigates how Le Corbusier, through these projects and design strategies, transformed the street and its traditional urban components into interior elements of the buildings.