1986 Bachelor of Architecture
How Culture Determines Form: Fascist New Towns and Le Corbusier at Chandigarh

The period between 1930 and the late 1950s saw the enlargement of many of Europe’s principal cities—Amsterdam, Paris, Lyon, and Berlin—as well as the building of new “green” towns in the United States. In a long since vanished climate of cultural optimism, Le Corbusier was commissioned to build in Algiers and Russia, and Frank Lloyd Wright created Broadacre City.

New constructions were often self-conscious civic exercises, in which public projects in particular strove to convey a community’s identity and embody its social aspirations as much as to fulfill any practical purpose. In this study, I propose to focus on the public buildings of two historically distinct architectures and to investigate the cultural, social, and political forces that inspired them.