Olaf Zwetsloot

Le Corbusier – Plan Voisin

Le Corbusier is an architect that has inspired me greatly. If I wouldn’t have dedicated Hipcescu Tower to myself, he would have been a likely candidate. Here is one of my favorite quotes from his book Towards a New Architecture (1924).

“We must create a mass-production state of mind:
A state of mind for building mass-production housing.
A state of mind for living in mass-production housing.
A state of mind for conceiving mass-production housing.”

Le Corbusier didn’t just talk the talk, he was ready to walk the walk. And so, in 1925, he presented his Plan Voisin.

It entailed bulldozing most of central Paris north of the Seine, and replacing it with sixty-story cruciform towers, the shape of which derived from radiator elements. In the end, the plan was never carried out.

“We must find and apply new methods, clear methods allowing us to work out useful plans for the home, lending themselves naturally to standardization, industrialization, Taylorization”, he wrote. “The plan must rule. . . . The street must disappear.” Clearly, this is highly efficient thinking.

In this video, we see the master explaining his Plan Voisin.

At one point in the video, Le Corbusier’s envisioned towers are inserted into contemporary Paris. And then you realize just how beautiful it could have been…

Astana, glorious capital of Kazakhstan

Nursultan A. Nazarbayev is the Supremo of Kazakhstan and an esteemed colleague. He was elected president of the glorious Kazakh nation on 1 December 1991. Under the auspice of this great man, who firmly guides his country towards a brighter future, the capital was transferred from Almaty to Astana in 1997, a city constructed from scratch in the midst of Kazakhstan’s windy steppes. Winter temperatures in Astana can drop to -40 Celsius. No place for pussies and all the more so a cradle of panoramic ideological vistas and Great Deeds. During one of my low-profile visits to Astana I was impressed by the beautiful, modern architecture and the powerful melange of capitalism and state-guided enterprise. Astana is not some pitiful provincial backwater. On the contrary, it is a thriving 21st century Metropolis, where my good friend, the world-renowned architect Sir Norman Foster, has planted a marvel of modern engineering, the epic Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center.

Make no mistake, Astana is a place for happy, hard-working people. This video slideshow, adorned with stunning visual effects and a spirited folkloric sound-track, will give you a good impression of Astana, where cleanliness and visionary urban planning go hand in hand.