After his studies in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Tony Garnier received the Prix of Rome in 1899, and went to Rome to study ancient architecture in Italy. However, he did not spend all the time analyzing Roman architecture and he focus his attention on the study of the modern city. He combined his time between the study of the city of Tusculum and the design of a utopian city, the Cité Industrielle (Industrial City). It would be an answer to the slum neighborhoods created as consequence of the Industrial Revolution. However, his proposal was not a nostalgic and picturesque vision of the city but a response to the opportunities of the industrial age. The Cite Industrielle was first published in 1917.
There are some main aspects that differentiated the Cité Industrielle from other utopian cities of the same period: social issues, site specificities, and realism in the design. The reasons behind these differences were the influences of the utopian schemas of the French Realism and French Regionalism (Wiebenson, 1960, p 17, 19) in Garnier’s work and philosophy.
In 1901, Travail, by Emile Zola, was published which influenced in Garnier’s design of the Industrial City. The novel is an optimistic vision of the relationship between the social progress, newly acquired, and the industrial development of the time. The result would be a “new society of production, work and cooperation” (Montaner, 1987, p 87). In his design, Garnier thought at every aspect of the social life of the modern city: it should have a socialist type of government (the parliament would substitute the church), there would not be police force or jail, unions would be allowed, and education would promote equality to both sexes. The city would be a place of freedom, a place where free discussions would be possible, and a place which would gather the ideal conditions for dignifying labor.
Tony Garnier created an idealistic context for his city based on the ideas of the French Regionalism movement. He included the major elements of the Regionalist theory in the design of his city such as for example: preserving the links with the territory and its geography, introducing local museums and historical monuments, a regional university, and a water power station to produce electricity from the nearby river… (Wiebenson, 1960, p 19).
Even although Garnier’s project is a Utopian Socialist city, he was concerned about giving a realism approach to his design. He gave the city a specific social and geographic context influenced, as mentioned before, by the French Regionalism and by Zola’s socialist ideas. He thought about every aspect of the city such as type of government, public facilities, and traffic hierarchy in order to give more credentials to his design. He also designed with great detail each building showing a great interest in the technical details.
United States neighborhood
The United Stated neighborhood, in Lyon, was an experimental neighborhood designed by Tony Garnier following his designs for the Industrial City. The project construction developed between 1920 and 1931. The neighborhood has 49 buildings projected as social housing with stores in the first floor, as well as streets, gardens and patios. In 1986, Grand Lyon Habitat started a project for the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, which also included the creation of an open-air museum exposing the heritage of the neighborhood and the goals behind its construction. This original museum is composed of 25 mural paintings located in the blind façade of each building. They explain Garnier’s Industrial City: 3 introduce the design of the city, 12 explain in details some of the elements composing the Cité Industrialle, 4 show the buildings that Garnier has built in Lyon, including this neighborhood, and 6 illustrate other Utopian cities. (“Dimension architectural & urbaine”, n.d.).
I selected some paintings that I consider the most representative in order to explain the city and its architecture. The structure of the paintings usually combines in the same wall different techniques of representation which superpose each other: highly detail floor plans, axonometries, renderings and texts.
The first three images show the plan and an axonometric drawing of the city. The design follows a classical vision of the city: hierarchy, symmetry, enclosed in a grid, and limited in size and population as Roman and Greek cities did. The city is surround by a vast rural landscape from where it obtains natural resources used in the industries. In addition, there is a strict zoning; the different functions of the city are separated from each other.
The next image presents the train station. The train was one of the symbols of the Industrial City and Garnier included it in his city to show a city where it was possible a dialogue between a manufacturing and a classical society. However, the city was not adapted to the car, which was taking importance as a mean of transportation at the beginning of the 20th century, and the textile and metallurgical industries still remained the main industries. In this sense, Garnier’s city is closer to the cities of the 19th century rather to those in between the 19th and 20th centuries (Montaner, 1987, p 90).
Garnier designed all kind of public equipments representative of the socialist city, such as hospitals, schools, and meeting rooms. Similar to the design of the city, the architecture of these buildings and of the housing still follows an old academic formalism: symmetry, repetition, hierarchy, order, prismatic forms, and no ornament. The housing prototypes of the United States neighborhood are a good example of it. The first three buildings respect the original design with only three floors, but the necessity of adding density changed the design. Two floors where added beside the opposition of Garnier, who did not want to add elevators.
The final images of this set do not correspond to the mural paintings; but to pictures of the neighborhood. From them, we can observe the separation between pedestrian and car flows and the different materials used to differentiate them. Also, it is evident the organization of the housing buildings conforming a grid and without fences or any element that could show property divisions (Garnier’s Industrial City did not envisage private property), and finally, the prismatic architecture inherited of the modern rationalism.
Nice one bro! Thanks for the info! <3
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