Concept of a Linear City in Algeria (Plan Obus)

Notes

“The plan reflects Le Corbusier’s experimenting with new forms of modernism inspired by vernacular and local Algerian architecture. Plan Obus is Corbusier’s shift from angular brutal forms towards fluid and poetic forms. Corbusier stated that this plan will reflect Algeria’s post-colonial era and its rise to a international city status. . . .

The Plan Obus consisted of three main elements: a new business district on the Cape of Algiers (at the tip of the Casbah) at a site slated for demolition, a residential area in the heights accessible by a bridge spanning over the Casbah, and, finally, the ultimate expression of his 'road town', an elevated highway arcing between suburban cities and containing fourteen residential levels beneath it. These levels were raw space that Le Corbusier believed would fill in 'little by little' with homes for the working class that would accommodate as many as 180,000 people (…) The plan was a modernist megastructure to be laid directly over the Casbah, with its elevated highway and bridges allowing high-speed travel over the prohibitively narrow and complex streets below. . . .

Clearly disaster loomed in the project’s disregard for Algerian social and religious traditions, the segregation of the workers and the European communities, and of course the abrupt change in the spatial arrangement brought on by its brutal scale” (Ackley, 2006).
 

Sources

Brian Ackley, “Le Corbusier’s Algerian Fantasy: Blocking the Casbah,” Envy, Winter 2006.

Fondation Le Corbusier, 2020.
http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=6259&sysLanguage=fr-fr&itemPos=193&itemSort=fr-fr_sort_string1%20&itemCount=216&sysParentName=&sysParentId=65.

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