Streets in the Sky

Le Corbusier must have realised, when he drew the section of the Maison Clarte in Geneva (top), that it sucked. He must have realised that the higher you build an apartment block the principle of light wells as staircases, of holes in stuff, stopped working. Even a casual look at a section through the Maison Clarte proves this; you don't even have to be an expert. The traditional European City and it's city blocks regulated to six stories and based, in plan, around holes in stuff, would have to go.
That is not to say that the plans of the Maison Clarte are not interesting, quite the opposite, they represent a striving towards something that would only fully realise itself in the Unite d'Habitation. To do this, he had to take a radical view of the section, and a normative view of the plan; the inverse of the situation demonstrated at Maison Clarte.
In Clarte, it's the plans you are directed to, and they show, in an embryonic way, how Le Corbusier was trying to nestle 'units' of two story dwelling within normative construction. However to do this, he realised it was no longer the planning that was the problem but the section.
So that's why the section of the Unite d'Habitation (below top) is so fabulous, because it lays down vertical access as just the rising box that is the lift, there is no staircase under a roof light to trudge up. The stairs are just emergency measures and the emphasis shifts from vertical to horizontal; once you are out of the lift you are once more on a street, just one higher up.
This of course enabled the notion of 'streets in the sky'.

Hey Presto!

I have found myself obliged, and it is not an unpleasant task even if it is time consuming, to develop a course in the history of cities. Now Leonardo Benevelo did this in such an exhaustive fashion that one is inclined to move the other way; when faced with material enough for twenty lectures, to attempt it in three; to make enormous generalisations in the name of our common purpose. So I got it down to the European City, the American City and the Developing City.
I'm not sure about the Developing City yet, but The European City owes, it would seem to me, an enormous debt to the city block, which in turn owes itself to the Roman 'insulae', which itself owes much to the courtyard house. As shown above, the American City owes much to, well, the lift core, and originally the chimney!

Technological Utopia

Disney's Tomorrowland assured us the future looked bright. Now it doesn't, it really doesn't. Disney's representation of the future was almost entirely dependent on liberation through technology wielded by corporations, but isn't it curious, every single third wave technological gizmo; the stuff that embraces mobile phones and general internet connectivity, has hardly lead to the easy life it promised; but the complete opposite.
Today I was told I had to use an e-diary at the university, not so much under threat as obligation; that is, of course, a mechanism whereby I have to account for ALL my activities on campus ALL THE TIME. Traditionally professors do not troll around waiting for people to check what they are up to; being respected as professors not drones. In fact, it is absolutely an anathema to think that this is what professors might do; tell the administration what they are doing all day before slogging their way home as if they'd just done a shift shelf stacking.
I'm not a professor of course, my chances of such are negligible to the point of infinitesimal, for despite my knowledge base, outputs, commitment to the subject and so on, I have even refused to engage with university e-mail on a daily basis, and for good reason. I ignored it totally for decades because I distrusted the damn thing, and watched as many of my colleagues gave in, and subsequently did little else than send emails all day to no effect at all.
Meanwhile the mobile phone, in it's latest incarnation, functions less as a global communications device than an idiotic echo chamber of pathetic desire. It has fostered a fascism that has turned my own London neighbourhood in to the province of the desperate poor, the tragically strung out, and the eminent hipster. This is not good, and this is what technology has done; it has raised pond life to governance.
And even worse, despite all the CAD, BIM, and all the rest of it, can you really say the computing 'revolution' has even built a single decent house: can you really say it has made any better architecture? No.
Wake up everybody.