The Modern City

The city is now a testament to how cities merge tradition and innovation and how they reflect the lives of the people who live and work so closely together.

The Rue de la Paix (Street of Peace) ironically leads to the Place Vendôme and its massive bronze column (just visible) originally commissioned by Napoleon to celebrate his victory over the Russian and Austrian armies in 1805 at Austerlitz.

Paris grew beyond its ancient and medieval walls until it was a dense tangle of narrow streets. The boulevards we see with their unobstructed views and street lights were carved out of the medieval city in the late 19th century.

The Palais Garnier (Paris Opera house) was a centerpiece of the new Paris reconstructed under Napoleon III. It sits at the intersection of numerous boulevards and expresses the wealth and leisure of Paris’ growing middle class in the 1870s.

Unité d'habitation was based on the idea of a towering apartment building surrounded by parkland. It is made up of spacious apartments with communal areas on the roof (with views of the sea) and at ground level. Unité d'habitation has inspired imitations around the world.

Unité d'habitation was designed to be a vertical garden city, a place to live, shop, and socialize surrounded by an idyllic landscape. Le Corbusier imagined multiple towers and called this the Radiant City—a response to urban disorder, and the need for green space and sunlight.

Le Corbusier raised the mass of the building up onto concrete piers that he called pilotis. This makes building feels lighter, expresses its internal support structure (what holds the building up), and opens a vista to the parkland beyond.

Unité d'habitation was cleverly designed to maximize space. Each apartment spans the depth of the building with balconies on both sides and is two stories tall with a double height living room. Internal corridors are minimized and placed every three stories.

However, from this vantage point, opposite the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the bank designed by Frank Gehry seems to look outward, bearing witness to the Holocaust and postwar Germany’s acknowledgement of the scale of the barbarity it perpetrated so recently.

The convex surfaces playfully contrast with the flat facades that flank the Gehry’s building. The windows seem to ride over swells as if afloat on the ocean, but the windows also look outward like eyes, taking in the somber memorial they face.

Stelae, rectangular blocks of dark gray stone, rise unevenly across a vast space. They are set in a dense grid but slightly askew creating a lack of resolution—a tension between order and disorder.

His playful and brilliantly colored solution divides the block in small buildings drawn from history and from his own past work. He turns away from the monumental and instead creates a whole from the contrast of individual facades similar to neighboring blocks.

Here we can see multiple distinct facades that reference architecture of different historical periods despite the fact that they were designed as a whole. The green buildings have aluminum exteriors and reference the architect’s own earlier work.

Here Rossi added a segment of the interior courtyard facade of the Palazzo Farnese, one of the most significant Renaissance palaces in Rome. In this way, Rosso brings Renaissance Humanist architecture into the scarred city of Berlin.