Airborn ideas

Le Corbusier's urbanistic ambitions, from Ville Contemporaine and Plan Voisin (Paris) to Plan Obus (Algiers) and the Rio plan (Brazil),  have many references, both explicit and implicit (as he had a habit of covering up his sources). Ville Contemporaine (contemporary city, 1922), a city designed for a population of 3 million, was an attempt at combining the garden city idea with the more urban type of the apartment block (where Chicago inspired skyscrapers made up the core of the city), whereas Plan Voisin, exhibited in 1925, made references to the French motor industry (Voisin car manufacturer sponsered the plan). Plan Voisin was followed up by Ville Radieuse (radient city, 1930) - a linear city divided into zones. As to the aesthetic, economic and social aspects of Corbusier's urbanism, the plans are based on an established catalogue of building types which represents the ideal city of big business and of centralised state control. In contrast, his proposals for Rio de Janeiro (1929) and Algiers (1932) were more flexible due to differences in the landscapes, that is to say, the new urbanism planned for flat topography, such as Paris, was too rigid and unsuitable for the steep coasts of Rio and Algiers. Interestingly, Corbusier's plans for South America and North Africa were inspired by his view of the coastline from above (he viewed both cities by airplane) providing him with ideas for a new urban aesthetic and guidelines for master planning. He wrote: 'A flight in a plane is a drama with a message - a philosophy ...  But once he [the flier] is down on the ground again, his aims and intentions will have achieved a new dimension'. Perhaps the most ironic outcome of Corbusier's urbanistic ambitions is that while none of his visionary schemes were realised his radical ideas have been hugely influential in the designing and building of cities worldwide and, in societies that still regard the motor car and tower blocks as signs of progress, till this day.

Ways of ideating

The book Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1926-2017) was published fifty years ago and was based on the BBC television series with the same name. In the book, Berger expounds on the way we view art (paintings, photographs, films, or any other representation that humans can construct), encouraging us to flex our image-reading skills. A key message of the book is 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak ... But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' This state of flux characterises design ideation too. That is to say, the relation between visual and verbal language, between the image and the word, as in the popular phrase "a picture says more than a thousand words". Or, as expressed by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) who wrote: "The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book". Yet visual and verbal languages have been intertwined for centuries, for example, medieval illuminated manuscripts, with their elaborate illustrations. Or, say, the Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, who incorporated text into their artwork.