If you don’t know much about Le Corbusier, for instance, Scott’s book [Seeing Like A State] will reveal to you that he was as banally evil in his way as Adolf Eichmann, and for the same reason: to him, humans were just cells on spreadsheets. They need so many square feet in which to sleep, shit, and eat, and so the only principle of architecture should be, what’s the most efficient way to get them their bare minimums? “Machines for living”, he called his apartment buildings, and may God have mercy on his shriveled little soul, he meant it. Image search “Chandigarh, India” to see where this leads — an entire city designed for machinelike “living”, totally devoid of anything human.
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 25, 2024
QotD: Le Corbusier
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